“I had confidence that I would never have had if he hadn’t done that for me,” Wong said. My interaction with him was life-changing because without hesitation, he said, ‘You must absolutely go.’” Harvey came out, and I said, ‘I just have to ask you – I know this is really weird – would I have a chance going to this audition?’ I’m a person of color, and I came full of doubt as to whether or not there were opportunities for me. “The announcement for the audition for that part came out on a Thursday, and I went to the stage door immediately after reading about it in the papers. It’s embedded in my DNA as a young gay man and as a young actor coming to New York.” He arrived in the city just after it opened on Broadway and vividly remembers connecting with the role of David, Arnold’s adoptive son. And I wanted them to see the warriors who got us all this advancement, so they would know how to fight.”įor Tony Award winner BD Wong, the original “Torch Song Trilogy” was “the reason why I’m here tonight. I felt very strongly that young gay people who are being born into a world with gay marriage, with a drug to prevent HIV, with gay people on TV, that they would have a false sense of security. And with the world we live in, this Trumpian, despicable world, our rights are being taken away.

And he believes it’s come at exactly the right moment: “Gay bashings, families not accepting their children, people having difficulty coming out – it’s all still very present in our lives. “It was an aspiration, that I would grow up to be the one who revived ‘Torch Song’ on Broadway for the first time,” he told Variety. Jackson had already been immersed in theater, but “Torch Song” pushed him to pursue producing as a career. “After the show was over, she took me to dinner and said, ‘You know, if you ever came home and said you were gay, I would never react like the mother in that play.’ She just made me feel safe. And my mother used theater as a keyhole to show me what could be possible for me.” Arnold’s confrontation with his mother at the end of the play proved just as important to Jackson’s own life. “I sat down in the theater, and the character Arnold was the first gay person I had ever met. “I had not told anybody I was gay,” he explained. Harvey Fierstein’s “ Torch Song Trilogy” first arrived on Broadway on the same stage more than three decades ago – and changed the lives of a generation of actors, directors, and theater-makers in the process.Īs producer Richie Jackson recounted on the red carpet, he was just 17 years old when his mother told him about the “extraordinary play” she’d seen in the city and that she was taking him to see it too. Thursday night’s performance of “Torch Song” at the Hayes Theater was both a premiere and a homecoming.

Harvey fierstein torch song trilogy