'Jumpers for Goalposts'

The final play in my series at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre was Tom Wells’s Jumpers for Goalposts, a U.S. première.  I caught the official opening performance in Studio’s Metheny Theatre, the matinee on Sunday, 17 May; the play started previews on 13 May and is scheduled to close on 21 June.  This was not only a play I didn’t know, but a playwright whose name I’d never heard before as well.  It was a delightful introduction to the work of an artist from whom I think we will hear more in the near future because he has an interesting and striking approach to theater and an eye and ear for human behavior which he portrays with a rare sensitivity.

Wells is a Britisher, born in East Yorkshire in 1985.  The son of a farmer, Wells won admission to Oxford University and graduated with a degree in English.  He returned to Yorkshire to study playwriting at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds; the company would début his first play, Me, As a Penguin, in 2009.  Though he’d wanted to be a writer, Wells wasn’t considering playwriting—but the WYP program was free, so, the young dramatist now says, “It was a happy accident that I got there and loved it.”  

Like Jumpers for Goalposts and many of his other plays, Penguin is set in the fishing town of Hull, a port city of a quarter million inhabitants where Wells grew up.  (“It’s about what happens when you’re outside your comfort zone,” said Wells in an interview five years ago.  “Obviously there’s a penguin involved . . . .”)  The WYP production toured Britain and ended up on the stage of London’s Arcola Theatre in 2010.  His next work, The Kitchen Sink, premièred at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2011, and was a break-out hit, garnering Wells the 2011 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright and the 2012 George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright.  Jumpers for Goalposts premièred at the Watford Palace Theatre in London in 2013, a co-production of the Watford, London’s Paines Plough Theatre Company, and the Hull Truck Theatre, then toured Britain in 2013 (stopping in Hull) and ended with a well-received run at the Bush in 2014.  Other plays by Tom Wells include Notes for First Time Astronauts (2009), About a Goth (2009), Spacewang (2011), and Cosmic (2013).  (Wells has also written for TV and radio.)  From what I have been able to discern, none of his work has been staged in the U.S. until now—but I predict that Studio’s Jumpers won’t be Wells’s last stateside outing.  He’s far too interesting to expire on a stage in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.  (As I write these words, no reviews of the U.S. preem of Jumpers have been published.  I guess we’ll see if I’m right about his critical reception in a day or two.)

All of Wells’s scripts include at least one gay character.  (Jumpers has four—out of five.)  His plays, however, aren’t “gay” plays the way that descriptor usually signifies.  He’s gay and uses his experience of growing up and living as a gay man in Northern England as the material out of which he crafts his plays.  The plot and the dialogue reference gay events and topics—Jumpers’ story is about a gay pub soccer league, for instance—but what the play’s about is friendship, reaching out, looking for love, trust, and helping each other out.  It just happens that the people working all this out are mostly gay; but the issues are universal.  As David Muse, Studio’s artistic director, explains, Wells “writes a straightforward story with characters who happen to be gay, presenting their lives as varied, mainstream, and normal.  And he waits for a world where that act doesn’t feel so surprising.”  In other words, what Wells is doing is writing about ideas important to him (and, I believe, most of the rest of us) in a medium with which he’s intimately familiar.  Like any good, serious writer.  (Tennessee Williams wrote plays on important themes set in the American South; Neil Simon wrote his plays populated by Jews from New York; Marsha Norman and Wendy Wasserstein wrote about women; David Henry Hwang’s plays are mostly about Chinese-Americans.  ‘Write what you know,’ right?)

Muse says that Wells’s effort “to turn the assumptions of the ‘gay play’ on its head” is the second of the writer’s “two quietly subversive” intentions.  “The first,” writes Muse, is “upending the notion . . . that drama is conflict.”  The Studio head observes that Wells “is driven to write honestly about his experience of life, which seems to him to involve conflicted people trying to do right by each other far more frequently than people in direct conflict.”  ( I guess you could argue that the dramatist’s “conflict” is internal instead of external.)  Comparing Wells’s dramaturgy to that of Studio favorite Annie Baker, Muse concludes that the playwright “has a gift for making art out of the everyday.” 

Since I haven’t seen or read any of Wells’s other plays (some of his texts are published in British editions that are available at U.S. libraries and through Barnes & Noble or Amazon), I have to take Muse’s word that all of Wells’s work exhibits these characteristics.  I can attest to the fact that Jumpers does, and though some may find the writer’s dramaturgy sentimental or soft-hearted, I found the play charming and touching.  The characters are all likeable, even endearing, though hardly high-achievers, and I wanted them to succeed—if not at soccer, at least in their other, small (or, perhaps, not-so-small), personal desires.  (In tandem with Wells’s writing, of course, this effect is tremendously aided by the quality of the performances and the astuteness of Matt Torney’s direction.  I’ll get to these successes shortly.)

The 100-minute, intermissionless Jumpers for Goalposts, as I’ve already hinted, is set in the locker room of a public playing field in Hull where the five teammates of Barely Athletic, the pub soccer (they call it football, of course—silly Brits) team which makes up the cast, change after the five-a-side league games.  This is hardly World Cup soccer; it’s one step above pick-up or sand-lot games, and Barely Athletic easily measures up to its (intentionally) sarcastic name.  (A word about the title here: in street soccer, the popular equivalent I gather of stickball in New York City, the field is whatever empty space the players can find and the equipment is whatever they can improvise.  Often the goal is marked off with bits of clothing, such as jumpers, the common British word for sweaters or sweatshirts.  “Jumpers for goalposts” is a colloquial name for this kind of soccer game and is the title of a series of video games and at least one book on the sport, published in 2011, that has nothing to do with the play.)  Barely Athletic have the ignominious rep of losing all their games, so when 30-ish Viv is kicked off the Lesbian Rovers for being bossy, she appoints herself player-coach of Barely Athletic, a team made up principally of patrons of the pub she owns.  There’s 20-something Danny, her assistant coach who is trying to become a youth-soccer coach; Beardy Geoff, a stocky (and, I guess obviously, bearded) Falstaffian street busker, in his later 20’s; Viv’s widowed brother-in-law, Joe, turning 40 and the team’s token straight guy; and the new boy, 19-year-old Luke, an almost painfully shy library worker who still lives at home and dutifully returns after each game for dinner with the folks even as his new teammates gather at the pub. 

The five each have slightly different motives for wanting to be on the team.  Only Viv (Kimberly Gilbert) actually sees it as a sports outlet: she wants to beat the lesbians and hopes Barely Athletic will be her means—though she gets her coaching ideas from a Soccer Coaching for Dummies manual.  The others want to be part of the team for social purposes, the comradery and friendship: Danny (Zdenko Martin) has a crush on young Luke and wants Barely Athletic to be proof of his skill for the sports center’s manager.  Joe (Michael Glenn) is still grieving the loss of his wife and the team is a way to keep from sitting at home alone in despair.  Geoff (Jonathan Judge-Russo), unattached, isn’t beyond some serious flirting with members of the opposition; he’s also Danny’s best friend and confidant—for Danny has a secret which only Geoff knows.  Luke (Liam Forde), who has no friends of his own and confides the insignificant details of his ordinary life to his diary, was attracted to Danny the first time the older boy came into the library to hang a recruitment poster.  That’s just a nutshell summary, of course.  Wells’s characters and situation have a few quirks and curlicues I won’t disclose that prevent Jumpers from being simplistic or predictable.  Even the ending, which is a little pat and neat, isn’t inevitable—though the nature of the play suggests that it’ll be happy-ish or at least bitter-sweet.  Just as there are speed bumps along the way to the final scene, however, we can predict there’ll be more to come after the play’s over. 

Each scene of Jumpers begins as the lights come up on the thrust stage of the 200-seat Metheny with an unseen radio announcer (the voice of James Alexander Gordon, Scottish radio broadcaster famous for reading the soccer scores on BBC Radio) reeling off the scores of the matches played that Sunday.  (The sound design is by Kenny Neal.)  The five players file into the changing room and banter as they change out of their soccer uniforms and back into street clothes.  This is how we meet them; the backstories and exposition is excellently handled by Wells—even Danny’s secret comes out naturally.  Viv launches into her performance notes—but remarkably without recriminations or scolding.  Losing, in Wells’s world, is okay, as long as you try your hardest and take your best shot—even if it’s at the other team’s goal!   (Viv does try to get Beardy to lose his childish knit hat, his “good-luck” charm—not that it’s really working!—but he resists, revealing that he wears it to hide the scar on his forehead from a recent gay-bashing he suffered.)  As the play unfolds, and we learn more bits about each player, they actually manage to win one game (against Tranny United—Get it?  Like Manchester United—a team that played in leopard-print skirts and high heels on a muddy field!) and tie another.  The rest, Barely Athletic loses, so Viv doesn’t beat the lesbian team this season—but there’s always next year! 

The single set, a bare-bones changing room with a shower off-stage up left, designed with spot-on look by Studio’s house designer, Debra Booth, is the world of this play.  The five characters may have outside lives—the pub, their jobs, their homes—but this is where the people we get to know live.  The cast dwells here as if they’d been coming to this place for years, amid the left-overs of other teams, the dirt they track in from the field (which Danny sweeps up as the rest of the team filter out), the first-aid box on the wall, the folding chars stacked against a wall.  Shared with other players in other leagues, this is still their universe when we see them, and Michael Giannitti’s lighting brings the whole place to drab, harsh—but familiar—life as the players file in after the match.  The same’s true of Kathleen Geldard’s sports-kit costumes.  These folks live in them, for all their lack of athletic prowess, they’re as comfortable in the gear as they are in their own skins.  (Halfway through the play, Viv brings in new jerseys personalized for each team member: “Coach Viv,” “Assistant Coach Danny,” and even “Token Straight Joe.”  They’re all comfortable with who they are to one another.  This is not a fish-out-of-water play: these people are perfectly content with who and where they are.)

Torney’s staging is natural and straightforward, nothing fancy or showy; some of the actors even sit with their backs to us on occasion.  He’s created with his actors a sense that these five are comfortable with one another and with their surroundings—this is everyday life for them.  The movement, though minimal in the confined quarters of the locker room, is plenty for keeping the play from seeming static—horseplay, an occasional bit of practice (they try to make a goalie of Joe), changing, sweeping up, and so on.  The life on stage seems neither practiced nor gratuitous.  The play’s emotional life, too, is naturally modulated—no histrionic highs or depression lows.  As Studio dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel puts it, “The conflicts and triumphs are modest but potent—exactly life-sized,” and Torney’s company conveys this on stage superbly.

With the help of dialect coach Gary Logan, Torney’s cast masters the Yorkshire accent consistently and (to my ear) accurately enough to be convincing.  (My companions did mention that they sometimes had trouble understanding the dialect, and I did, too, but that didn’t detract from the point of the play, which doesn’t depend on foreknowledge of the Yorkshire idiom or British soccer culture.  The things that do matter come through loud and clear, trust me.)  Torney’s major directorial achievement, though, is to have melded the five actors, who don’t seem to have ever worked together or at Studio or for Torney before, into a perfect ensemble.  For 100 minutes, I had no trouble believing that these folks are buds.  Individual stage characters are the creations of the actor, guided, certainly, by the director—but a real acting ensemble is the accomplishment of the director.  It starts with the casting, but it’s not easy to manage.  Jumpers doesn’t work on stage if the five actors aren’t a team—just like Barely Athletic are supposed to be on the soccer field (. . . er, football pitch).

Creating the ensemble may have been Torney’s job, but those individual character portrayals are well seen-to as well.  (This is an actors’ play—the cast and their work must carry the production.)  I’m not familiar with any of this cast’s work, even the D.C.-area vets in the company, but they all give exemplary performances.  No one falls back on stereotypes or clichés—not that Wells’s writing leads in that direction anyway—and no one shies away from committing to the characters’ more unappealing traits.  Gilbert’s Viv, for instance, is bossy, but she’s no bitch dyke with a brush cut.  In fact, Gilbert plays her as almost maternal—a little brusque around the edges, but if Barely Athletic were the Lost Boys, Gilbert’s Viv would be Wendy.  If Wendy were a lesbian, that is. 

Though young Luke is the obvious shy guy in the bunch, Martin plays Danny with almost equal diffidence.  While Luke’s timidity comes from lack of worldly experience, Martin’s Danny is just a gentle person.  His awkwardness when he reveals his secret to Luke makes palpable Danny’s reluctance to tell his new friend what we can also see he knows he must.  Martin’s disappointment at the way Luke takes the news is almost too intense to watch (even though we can guess that a reversal must be coming).  If Martin could pass for a healthy young athlete, though, Forde is the classic geek—tall, gangly, skinny, beanpole-straight.  He could be a goalpost!  He absolutely looks like the kind of awkward kid who’d have trouble constantly trying to push on a “pull” door.  But Forde makes Luke so endearing, so in need of peer companionship, that his welcome into the group is self-justifying.  Of course, Forde’s portrayal of the long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs makes Luke’s quiet return to the locker room after a breach all the more powerful. 

If Viv is the mom in this ad hoc surrogate family, and Luke and Danny the little brothers, Judge-Russo’s Beardy is the older brother; though not always wise or even reliable—no Wally Cleaver or David Nelson, this big bro—his Beardy’s innately protective and present.  Judge-Russo’s a bear of a guy, roly-poly with a big, round face, but he’s a teddy, not a grizzly.  His Beardy is just as needy as any of the others, and as vulnerable, but he keeps putting himself out there, even when it’s not so advisable.  Beardy’s a busker, a street entertainer, but Judge-Russo (who has some operas on his résumé) doesn’t present him as someone who sings or plays his (hot pink) guitar like a pro—yet his aim throughout the play is to select and perform a song in the audition for a Pride celebration coming up.  (In the last scene, Beardy decides on a pop cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel that’s become a soccer anthem in the U.K.  Now there’s Wells’s message for this play.)

That leaves Joe—not a father figure despite being older than his mates, but more like the concerned uncle (he is Mom’s brother-in-law after all).  Glenn’s portrayal is a sad sack, as much in need of the team’s support as they might be in need of his.  His (lack of) facial expressions remind me some of Buster Keaton, “The Great Stone Face.”  Indeed, Glenn infuses Joe with some of Keaton’s warmth and sympathy.  Even though Joe’s the only straight member of the team and despite his total lack of athletic ability—less even perhaps than any of the rest (the scene in which Danny and Beardy try to teach Joe to be a goalie is priceless)—Glenn makes him an integral part of the group, a member in as good standing as Danny or Beardy, as welcome as newcomer Luke and leadership-usurper Viv.    

We don’t know what will become of Luke and Danny’s nascent relationship.  We never learn if Danny gets his job at the sports center.  We don’t know if Beardy even makes the audition, much less secures a spot on the program or gets the career boost he hopes for.  We’ll never hear if Barely Athletic ever beats the Lesbian Rovers (Viv turns over head-coaching to Danny at the end of Jumpers) or even wins another game.  But we can be sure that, as long as these five are together, they won’t ever walk alone.  And that’s what Tom Wells wants us to know.  I know some people who’ll see that as sappy.  That’s okay.  I’m a sap.

Now it’s time to see if any of the published critics agree with me or not and if, as I predicted, Tom Wells and Jumpers for Goalposts get their own career boosts on this side of the Atlantic.  So, starting with the Washington Post, Nelson Pressley, describing the play as “sweet and feather-light,” writes that “there’s a bashfulness to this tender play that makes you want to put your arm around it.”  “Wells’s script is decidedly offbeat,” Pressley continues: “You may be hard-pressed to name a recent play as ginger as this.”  The Postman sums up, “For a locker-room play, it’s astoundingly decent,” but he warns that all the characters’ lives are “gravely complicated” and the play “deepens” as it unfolds and that “the touching performances and graceful writing add up.”  (I cheated a bit: the Post published its notice on the morning before I wrote this part of the report.  I already knew that Pressley generally agrees with me.) 

In Metro Weekly, Washington’s LGBT magazine, Doug Rule also calls the play “touching” and “tender” (a trend, I think we’ll find) and “is as winsome as they come.”  Rule praises the quality of the cast Torney assembled to impart Wells’s “quietly powerful and eventually surprising tale.”  The Metro man, however, notes that Jumpers “tackles some big issues and aspects of modern-day life . . . in a remarkably realistic, restrained way.”  A “tart-but-tender romantic comedy” is how Chris Klimek characterizes Jumpers in Washington City Paper, but he quibbles that the play “would be even stronger if it ended 10 minutes earlier,” ultimately forgiving Wells because the acting is so good in the late scene he thinks we don’t need.

On DC Theatre Scene, Steven McKnight, noting that “Wells has the rare ability to find humor in ordinary people and here he mines the comedy in the real-life difficulties of his characters with wit and affection,” reports that Jumpers for Goalposts demonstrates “heartwarming humor and charm.”  McKnight does find that some of Jumpers’ “more serious turns feel a little forced or obvious” and that the plot “is wrapped up a bit too neatly,” but he adds that Torney’s direction “manages to minimize these difficulties.”  April Forrer dubs Studio’s staging of Jumpers for Goalposts “a hands-down terrific production of a charming script” on MD Theatre Guide, declaring, “Each character is completely lovable and layered in distinct ways, so getting to know each one is a joy.”  In the end, Forrer proclaims, “This play is a gem.”  Jumpers is “a sweet, side-splittingly funny, and subversive romantic comedy,” writes John Stoltenberg of DCMetroTheaterArts, in a production “that will knock your sweat socks off.”  Wells, says Stoltenberg, has “a wholly original angle of vision that, besides being laugh-out-loud hilarious, is heartwarming and liberating,” and dubs Jumpers “an incandescent comedy.” 

TheaterMania’s Barbara Mackay affirms that Wells has written such a “sensitive, intelligent” play that it manages “to reveal intense heartache and joy “ in Studio’s “excellent American premiere.”  The playwright “writes with a light touch,” says Mackay, “drawing his characters with a great deal of humor and an equal amount of serious emotion, without making them sound maudlin.”  While on Broadway World, Heather Nadolny describes Jumpers as “heartfelt, well balanced and does not try too hard,” and finds that in a theater where plays are overwritten and underdeveloped, “this one is a winner.”  Each of the familiar characters, Nadolny says, “connects with audience” and Wells’s “heartstring-tugging moments are balanced with hilarious jokes, quips and physical comedy.”  The Studio production, Nadolny reports, provides “romance, wit and empa[t]hy” and she emphatically advises, “See it, and enjoy.”

'Torch Song Trilogy'

I happened to be visiting my mother in Bethesda in September when she and a friend had tickets for the Studio Theatre revival of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, so I joined them for the Saturday matinee performance on 21 September in the Studio’s home space in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.  (Logan Circle, in downtown D.C., is a recently gentrified and revived neighborhood that sort of resembles, in tone and function but not architecture, New York City’s SoHo—full of art galleries, restaurants, bars, boutiques and antique shops, and theaters.  The Studio Theatre, one of Washington’s oldest rep companies, moved into a multi-theater building there some years ago from another location.)  I hadn’t seen the New York stagings of Torch Song, either at La MaMa E.T.C. or on Broadway.

At La MaMa, the three plays in the trilogy, The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!, were presented separately in 1978 and ’79, then Fierstein put them together under the title Torch Song Trilogy for an uptown Manhattan production by John Glines at the Richard Alan Center in October 1981.  The combined show didn’t do well at the box office and was about to close early when a couple of late reviews appeared, praising the plays (one of which was Mel Gussow’s New York Times notice), and the production took off, moving first to the Actors Theatre in Greenwich Village in January 1982 (with Fierstein, Matthew Broderick as foster son David, and Estelle Getty as Arnold’s mother) and then transferring to Broadway’s Little Theatre (now the Helen Hayes) in June, where it ran for 1,222 performances (with Fisher Stevens replacing Broderick) and won two Tony Awards, including Best Play and a Best Actor nod for Fierstein himself.  Torch Song made Fierstein a star (he went on to play, among other notable roles, Edna Turnblad in the stage-musical adaptation of Hairspray, for which he won his fourth Tony in 2003) and has had a stage life around the country ever since then.  The current Washington production, which began performances on 4 September in the Studio’s Mead Theatre and runs through 29 December, is directed by Michael Kahn, the artistic director of the Capital’s Shakespeare Theatre Company.

Torch Song Trilogy is based on Fierstein’s own autobiography.  According to the Studio Theatre’s subscriber newsletter, Studio Sightlines, the underemployed actor went through “a whirlwind romance that soon started to unravel” in 1977.  Not unlike many theater people, he saw the theatrical possibilities even as he went through the pain of the break-up: “Even during the last four-hour phone call, I’d keep thinking, ‘Hmmm, that’s good—better write that down.’”  Depressed, the writer says a therapist friend told him he’d either “kill himself or write a play about it.”  So, he wrote one.

Originally, Fierstein says, he had no plans to write a trilogy.  He approached La MaMa's Ellen Stewart (about whom I’ve written on ROT in “The Pushcart Theater: Ellen Stewart (1919-2011)” on 4 April 2011) and arranged a slot for the first one-act of the eventual series.  Then a friend suggested pitching a trilogy and Stewart bought the idea and the three short plays each premièred at La MaMa over a two-year period.  The playwright combined the plays into a single script called Torch Song Trilogy which was presented uptown in 1981 before the moves to Off-Broadway and then Broadway.  It was one of the first (if not the first) works with openly gay themes to play on the Great White Way, at least half a decade before gay characters and stories entered the mainstream of American culture.  (Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, a seminal gay play, débuted in New York in 1968, but it was Off-Broadway, then still a more welcoming venue for challenging work.  Though individual gay characters had appeared on Broadway, early Broadway fare did touch on homosexuality but they mostly either hinted at the subject, like William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, 1957-59, or they tiptoed around it delicately as in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, 1934-36, and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, 1953-55.)  “What Harvey proves,“ says producer John Glines, “Is that you can use a gay context and a gay experience and speak in universal truths.”

 

Fierstein began his professional career as a female impersonator in East Village cabarets when he was still in high school; Ethel Merman was a favorite character in his routines (which may have been a foundation for his gig as Edna Turnblad).  He soon expanded his repertoire and gained a reputation in the downtown scene of New York’s nightclubs and boîtes.  He studied painting and art education at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, his home borough, after graduating, but continued to audition.  Andy Warhol cast the “zaftig, gravelly voiced” would-be performer in Pork at La MaMa in 1971 (when he was still 16), and then Fierstein began his own playwriting efforts to create appropriate roles for himself.  When Ellen Stewart presented the first part of Torch Song, Fierstein’s career path changed substantially.  He continued to perform (as his role in Hairspray attests), but he’s best known these days as a playwright and librettist with such credits as the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983-87, his third Tony), followed by Legs Diamond (1988-89), A Catered Affair (2008), Newsies (opened 2012 and still going), and Kinky Boots (opened in April and still running).  He also wrote another trilogy of one-acts, Safe Sex (1987), and adapted Torch Song for the big screen in 1988 (in which he also appeared with Anne Bancroft as Arnold’s mother and Matthew Broderick this time as Alan).  Fierstein is also a well-recognized activist for gay causes and issues.

Torch Song, set in the early and late 1970s, centers on Arnold Beckoff (the Fierstein role) who sings torch songs in New York City drag clubs.  Each act of the 3½-hour trilogy focuses on a different aspect of Arnold’s life: The International Stud, the one-act with which the writer started following his busted affair, is about his meeting Ed, a bisexual teacher who hasn’t come to terms with his sexuality; Fugue in a Nursery follows a year later when Arnold meets Alan with whom he settles into an idyllic relationship as the partners plan to adopt a son until a violent act of homophobia intervenes; and Widows and Children First! finds Arnold five years later raising a gay foster son, David, and contending with his visiting mother’s judgments and narrow-mindedness.  As Fierstein acknowledges, due to his own family history “family was everything” for him, and Torch Song is really all about family—having one, finding one, building one, keeping one, mending one.  Yes, it’s about gay people, their images (including self-images), and issues (the plays were all written before the AIDS crisis was recognized, as the first-act mimed, but still graphic, backroom sex scene in the bar attests), but all the plays are fundamentally about family—biological or self-defined—and familial love and acceptance.  Like many subjects with which we’ve become (over)familiar from decades of literary treatment, when a new slant is taken, they become new again and we get to (re)consider them with new eyes.  So when Fierstein examines his family—husbands, son, mother—from the viewpoint of a gay man in a gay milieu, we get to look at those old bromides anew, and we learn all over again what’s important, especially what hurts and wounds (and, yes, Torch Song is a comedy).  At the same time, of course, the playwright makes clear, without preaching (well, there is one speech . . .), that gay people have the same needs as everyone else when it comes to love, respect, and honesty within relationships.  (We know that now, of course, in 2013—it’s been demonstrated often in the past 35 years—but back in 1978, ’79, and ’81, it wasn’t so well recognized.  Boys in the Band dealt with clichés, not what lay beneath them.) 

Because of that time lag, Torch Song is dated.  (Oddly, because the plays were all written before the advent of the AIDS crisis, they’re less dated than they might have been.)  As Peter Marks notes in his Washington Post review, “[T]he B.R. world (Before RuPaul) that Fierstein introduced us to no longer looks so unfamiliar” as it did at the start of the last quarter of the 20th century.  Nonetheless, as Marks goes on to observe, “[T]he feelings the play evokes, about being the other and yet longing for the conventional consolations of family and self-respect, remain affectingly on point.”  Aside from that, Torch Song Trilogy is a part of theater history and since I missed it the first time(s) around in New York, I’m glad I got to see it here now so I can put it into perspective in that respect as well. 

As a play, the three one-acts, even if Fierstein didn’t intend them to be conjoined, work surprisingly well as a single play.  I hadn’t realized, from what I knew of the play from hearsay gathered over the years, that the characters and situations carry over; I thought each playlet was more discrete than they actually are.  It’s really only one character that threads the fabric of the play, aside from Arnold himself; Ed appears in all three acts, but Alan dies between acts two and three and the repercussions of that aren’t seen until act three and are part of the text of the last part.  The country house that’s the setting for Fugue is mentioned in International Stud and referred to again in Widows and Children, and even the possibility of David, the about-to-be-adopted foster kid in act three, is hinted at in act two.  I don’t know how much reworking Fierstein did to make Torch Song out of the one-acts in 1981, but Mel Gussow, in his review of the Off-Broadway début of the combined plays, calls it “a carefully abridged version” of the original one-acts, and however he accomplished it, the playwright wove the three separate playlets into a more-than-acceptable (if long—the original Torch Song ran over four hours, apparently) three-act comedy-drama.  (In fact, as they now stand, you couldn’t produce the acts separately as one-acts.  I don’t know if the old versions of the scripts are still available for staging, but you’d need to find them to make individual presentations work.)

Fierstein’s writing is biting and witty, even 35 years later.  His characters’ snappish remarks and come-back one-liners still crackle and hit their marks.  Sometimes, they sound as if they’re about to be a cliché, then the playwright takes a left-hand jog and surprises me.  I suppose the whole notion of a wisecracking gay man is a stereotype by now—even The Boys in the Band used that trait as a matrix for its humor—but given Arnold’s life and personality, it fits.  (By the way, the fact that Fierstein wrote Arnold for himself—to be accurate, of course, Arnold is Fierstein—doesn’t in the least make it difficult for another actor to play the part.  In fact, Brandon Uranowitz, who’s the un-Harvey Fierstein in pretty much all respects, was dubbed “an Arnold Beckoff for all (theater) seasons” by Peter Marks.  Other area reviewers completely agreed and several already pronounced him a Hayes Award nominee.) 

The Studio’s Mead Theatre is a relatively small space, with a steeply raked house of semicircular rows of seats embracing a tiny thrust stage.  Director Kahn staged the play, with its several locales, with mostly suggested settings, designed by James Noone, depending frequently on a few carefully selected pieces of furniture.  In a scene in the middle of International Stud, after Arnold and Ed had been together for a few weeks and Ed has begun to be distant and Arnold calls him, the two apartments are represented simply by a pair of chairs with a small table and a telephone.  In Fugue, Ed and Laurel’s country house is embodied in a huge, raked bed that serves simultaneously as the hosts’ bed and Arnold and Alan’s as well—and later is also the kitchen where Arnold and Laurel wash dishes and talk (at the foot) and the barn where Alan and Ed screw (at the head).  In fact, only Widows and Children, which has a single set throughout, is a fragmentary realistic apartment where Arnold and David live.  It all works fine, though the three acts each have a slightly different staging style to match the design style.  Act one is somewhat surrealistic, with some scenes revealed on an elevated platform above the stage as a singer, Lady Blues (Ashleigh King, with a gorgeous, torchy voice), accompanied on the piano by George Fulginiti-Shakar, moves about the stage and the auditorium between scenes.  (The music for the production was composed and directed by Eric Shimelonis, who also designed the sound.)  In act two, with the giant bed from which the actors never depart (though they cover themselves with the sheets whenever they’re “off”), the performance takes on an expressionistic tone in which I was never quite sure where anyone was or who could hear and see whom.  (Lights help define the space in both acts one and two, designed by Peter West.)  Finally, as the set suggests, act three is essentially a realistic play (one reviewer calls it “sit-com-y”) with a kitchen up right—in a Jewish play, food and its preparation can’t be out of mind altogether—and a busy bathroom off right.  It sounds like the production should come out a mishmash, but it all blends in because each style suits the act aptly.  It wasn’t until afterwards that I realized what Kahn and Noone had done.  (One local review-writer observes: “This entire show has the uncanny effect of being not only authentic to the period but also a spot-on emulation of theatrical production values from the time.”  I didn’t really see that myself.)

Frank Labovitz’s ’70s costumes are period-perfect (and, yes, I remember the ’70s pretty well).  He made sure to put Arnold into fittingly flouncy and flashy duds, especially for his drag act in International Stud (which, by the way, is the name of the club where Arnold performs and where he picks up Ed the first time).  Ed, as befits his closeted persona, is dressed “straight” in jeans and a work shirt—and later in other perfectly middle-class establishment attire.  I don’t know if it’s an acting choice or a habit of Uranowitz, but his Arnold continually shifts, rewraps, or adjusts his clothing as if he were always just uncomfortable in his disguise.  (He also fusses with his mop of kinky hair as a character quirk.)  It sure looked like the actor and Noone were in cahoots so that Arnold has clothes with which he can indulge his tic.

Since I’ve introduced the performances at this point, let me go on with that.  I wondered, when the show started with Arnold’s long monologue at his backstage dressing table at the drag club, before I got used to Uranowitz, a skinny actor with “ridiculously thick hair” who flounces a lot, how Fierstein, a chunkier, gruffer-voiced guy, would have done Arnold—since I don't think he swishes quite so blatantly.   Imagine, if you can, a tall, fem Arnold Horshack, including the speech pattern!  (Now there’s a period reference!)  Nonetheless, it works perfectly well and Uranowitz’s performance conveys all of Arnold’s insecurities and dreams as well as his fierceness and compassion compellingly (though I’d probably resists saying he owns the role—that’s just a little absolute).  Todd Lawson’s Ed and Alex Mills’s Alan are both entirely convincing as Arnold’s two divergent loves.  Lawson has more of an arc to work on, sensitively going from the confused bisexual (leaning toward gay) in act one to the recovered hetero of act two to the man in act three who has finally realized where is preferences lie and is ready now to live up to them.  Mills, though his Alan is sweet and smarter than he at first sounds, has less to play but pulls off the wise-before-his-time boy-man with conviction and sympathy.  As Arnold’s mother, Gordana Rashovich brought to mind a bitchier Linda Richman, the SNL character Mike Myers used to play (“like buttah”—remember?).  The Brooklyn-Jewish accents, for both Uranowitz and Rashovich, swerve awfully close to cliché, but on the other hand, there are people who really talk like that (and not a few of them live in Fierstein’s native borough).  I mean, Fran Drescher (who’s from nearby Queens) isn’t pretending!

Sarah Grace Wilson has the most thankless role in Torch Song.  Not only is her Laurel the lone woman (aside from one Jewish mother, a wholly different category) in the play’s gay male universe, but her Laurel has broken up Arnold’s first romance, then she subtly manipulates Ed, Arnold, and even Alan throughout act two, and later tries to blackmail Ed into returning to her by falsely saying she’s pregnant.  Wilson manages to pull all this off without coming out a villain or even a gorgon, and we know that Laurel has her own needs that probably compel her behavior because Wilson doesn’t play her as ego-driven.  Of all the roles, however, only David comes off as less than convincing.  It’s not entirely Michael Lee Brown’s fault because the part is written too old: even given David’s short life of deprivation and neglect, he’s far too self-aware and introspective for a 15-year-old street kid, which Brown portrays without even a hint of bravado or the sense that he’s wearing his big brother’s clothes.  But Brown not only looks too old for the part, he carries himself like a 20-something.  (I taught a lot of both age groups—believe me, there’s a noticeable difference.)  Widows and Children is a tad contrived anyway—this is the act in which “that” speech occurs, when Arnold lets him mother have it by reciting all the play’s messages and lessons—and Brown and David only compound that problem.  David even serves as a deus ex machina when he tells Arnold to straighten his relationships with his mother and Ed out or he’s apt to split.  (It’s one of the aspects of Torch Song that marks it as the work of a tyro playwright.)

The press here was almost wholly positive, even when some reviewers had qualms going into such a potentially dated portrait of a milieu.  Marks in the Post, in addition to his effusiveness over Uranowitz’s performance, writes of “the emotional zing” of Kahn’s production of this “profound” play.  In Washington’s City Paper, Trey Graham, calling Torch Song “a rough beast of a play,” vacillates from “[b]rittle and silly one moment, hopelessly stagey in another, urgent and acid and fierce in the next.”  In the end, though, Graham feels the play fulfills its title’s promise, ending as “a narrative lament, a ballad of pain distilled, a chronicle of struggle that heals and strengthens.”  Congratulating the Studio for presenting the play, Graham also thanks Kahn “for digging thoroughly into the play to find what’s still raw and nervy and lacerating about it.”  In Washington Life Magazine, Chuck Conconi calls the “poignantly painful and wickedly humorous” Torch Song a “powerful production, smartly staged” at the Studio in Kahn’s “smart and effective” interpretation. 

On line, on Examiner.com, Kyle Osborne declares that Torch Song “looks the audience in the eye, grabs it by its collective lapels and engages them for a three act journey that mixes the joys and pains of romantic and familial relationships.”  And Elliot Lanes starts off,  “If a particular production can gage [sic] how a whole theatre season is going to be, then Torch Song Trilogy at Studio Theatre tells us that it is going to be a fantastic year of theatre here in DC” on MD Theatre Guide.  He calls Kahn’s production, “the perfect balance of comedy and pathos without going for the schmaltz,” labeling it “a must go to show” which “is still as important as it was when it first premiered” and “even more timely and urgent than ever.”  “Torch Song Trilogy . . . has been given an immensely entertaining and compassionate new production,” writes John Stoltenberg on DC Metro Theater Arts.  He adds that Kahn’s production, which “pack[s] . . . a powerful wallop,” “uncovers the emotional soul of a play that was presciently there all along.” 

Torch Song Trilogy is indubitably a snapshot of a specific time in our social history, but, as most of the reviewers admonish, it still has worthwhile things to say to us, and Michael Kahn’s mounting of the historic play at the Studio Theatre leaves no doubt on that score.  From a purely theatrical perspective, the performances and production are top-notch,  The Studio is one of D.C.’s theaters where I seldom see a bad production even when I don’t care for the script (Venus in Fur is an example, reported on ROT on 11 July 2011)—and it does usually select an interesting season.  As I said earlier, I’m glad I saw Torch Song for its theater-history significance, but I also got to see a good show, all other considerations aside.