Feel free to accuse Hubris Productions of false advertising. It’s production of Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein’s Tony Award-winning 1982 play, is only two-thirds there.
Director Andrew Hobgood has opted to excise the opening act, The International Stud, from Fierstein’s three-act drama (making it now a Torch Song Two-Parter). The decision speeds things along, since the full play runs about four-hours. A lot of the rich detail behind the relationship between Arnold, a Jewish drag-queen, and bisexual schoolteacher Ed, is lost by the cut. Yet those expecting a whiplash from being dropped in the middle of things can quickly catch up to the characters and situations (Hobgood’s is correct about this in his defensive director’s notes in the program, as is his decision to use the big bed for the four couples from the original staging). Hobgood also skews younger with his casting, reasoning that the cast is closer in age to when Fierstein started writing the show’s oneact plays in the late 1970s rather than when he starred in the 1988 movie.
As Arnold, Ryan Jarosch can’t seem to escape Fierstein’s raspy shadow and make the character fully his own. Of course being stripped of his act one exposition leaves Jarosch’s New Yorker accent and defiant effeminancy to stick out like a sore caricature among the rest of the cast. Ben Osbun’s characterization as Arnold’s bisexual lover, Ed, also seems to suffer from the missing act. Osbun does what is necessary, but we miss Ed’s turmoil between his desires and what he thinks society expects of him. As Laurel, the woman who keeps ending up in relationships with bisexual men, Mary Hollis Inboden emotionally straddled the mix of sympathy and contempt you feel for her confused character.
Susan Adler is quite comfortable in loving and complaining mode as Mrs. Beckhoff, Arnold’s quick-to-condemn mother (a role originated by late Golden Girls actress Estelle Getty). Yet Adler could use more fire in her emotional and shouted showdowns with Arnold in the final act. Quinn White makes for a rambunctious gay teenager David (if a bit old for the part), while Evan Linder does a respectable job as Arnold’s younger model lover, Alan. By producing a lopped-off Torch Song Trilogy, Hubris opens itself up to criticism that it’s a theater company lacking the ambition to fully tackle a landmark of gay American drama. Yet there is some consolation since what is left of Hubris’ Torch Song remains relevant to today. Dealing with issues like gay families, bisexuality, hate crimes and gay youth may make Torch Song a bit preachy, but its message of gay acceptance and love still needs to be heard by wide swaths of society.
Torch Song
Trilogy.
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of hubris
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