Harvey Fierstein life and biography

Harvey Forbes Fierstein, born June 6, 1954 in Brooklyn, New York, United States is an American writer and dramatist.

The actor and drag queen Harvey Fierstein began writing plays at age 20 so as to create roles for himself. His first attempt concerned his efforts to clean Harry Koutoukas's apartment, a horrifying task he undertook so that the playwright would write a script for him. Instead, Fierstein wrote about the housecleaning experience in the musical In Search of the Cobra Jewels, complete with a chorus of cockroaches, in which both writers appeared as themselves. Because Fierstein wanted to play a whore, he wrote Freaky Pussy, whose seven cross-dressing hookers live in a subway men's room. Then, longing to sing Tosca, he wrote Flatbush Tosca. His next play, Cannibals, anticipated a plot element in La Cage aux Folles, as two kids run off and bring shame on their tribe because they want to be straight.

Fierstein created his Tony award-winning role Arnold Beckoff (i.e., "beckon" versus "back off") in the first of the Torch Song Trilogy plays, The International Stud. With this work the plump pixie, wit, political activist, and outspoken critic of a heterosexist society finally began attracting the attention of audiences beyond the confines of the experimental off-off-Broadway La Mama. In dialogue at once droll, direct, and distressing ("A thing of beauty is a joy till sunrise"), Arnold compulsively carries the torch for bisexual Ed, but his winning the stud degrades him nearly as much as does the initial pursuit and the eventual loss. Yet he accompanies each act of dependence, each self-destructive kvetch with which he pushes Ed away from him, with a laconic quip that lets us know that Arnold understands what he is doing. Like the torch singer who capitalizes on her pain with "music to be miserable by," Arnold often allows his vulnerability to careen crazily into masochistic self-pity.

Fierstein suited his form to his content by employing presentational styles in the first two plays. Thus, Arnold's egocentricity finds expression when he gazes into a mirror during the opening of The International Stud, which also isolates Arnold and Ed in a series of self-absorbed monologues. Although this is a two-character play (plus torch singer), they appear together only in the last scene, after Fierstein has created the effect of a backroom orgy by employing Arnold alone. Fugue in a Nursery picks up Arnold and ex-lover Ed a year after the end of their affair as Arnold and his new flame, Alan, visit Ed and the "other woman" Laurel at Ed's summer home. Only slightly matured out of pure narcissism, the four, in contrapuntal scenes played upon a giant bed, engage in frequently rearranged pairings with occasionally intersecting dialogue. They are sophisticated enough to suit the fugal accompaniment (by string quartet) and plot construction but sufficiently infantile for Arnold's bedroom to be termed "the nursery."

If Fugue's duologues seem to be an experimental version of Noël Coward or William Wycherley, the representational domestic drama Widows and Children First! begins with more conventional sitcom plotting and balances the deflation of sentiment with effective sentimentality. Five years after Fugue, we find Arnold, in a period of widowhood following Alan's death, bludgeoned with baseball bats by homophobes. Ed has left Laurel; and Arnold mothers his "hopelessly homo" foster son, 15-year-old David; while visiting Mrs. Beckoff who rebukes her own homosexual son, Arnold; giving us, therefore, two mothers, two widows, two sons, and two referees for fights--yet only four characters. Although Arnold and Ed have matured to some degree, Ed still does not know what he wants, and Arnold still displays a penchant for acting in ways not in his own best interest. In a moving microcosm of human paradox, Mrs. Beckoff disapproves of David when she, in a hilarious scene, mistakes him for Arnold's lover, but she grows still more shocked when she learns that the tie is filial. Arnold demands respect from his mother without necessarily giving it in return. David waxes wise about how to help Arnold, yet he does not apply much insight to himself. Arnold objects to his mother's distress at homosexuality, yet he loves an equally fearful man.

Fierstein's rich thematic panoply--including loneliness, loss, self-esteem, homophobia, and honesty ("What's the matter? Catch your tongue in the closet door?")--numbers among its concerns frequent allegiance to the sort of family values to which right-wing zealots love to claim sole proprietorship. Arnold cannot be impersonal about sex, longing instead for romance, commitment, monogamy, and children to mother. Such conventional values imbue most of Fierstein's work ever since his groundbreaking trilogy and contribute to his popularity among heterosexual as well as gay audiences.

Spookhouse embodies contradictory attitudes toward the possibility of raising decent kids. The conscientious but destructively naive gay social worker believes in the social system and the future. As in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, the obnoxious mother's grit provides the only glue holding together her neurotic, and in this case lower-class, family, but she knows that the system has failed her kids and wants her sociopathic son imprisoned. Set in a disintegrating Coney Island amusement park ride and the home above it, Spookhouse serves as metaphor for the horrors in lives we cannot control. ("Life's scary enough without paying for added attractions.") These haunt us even in our safe places, as in our homes, and pop out at us when we are unable to cope with them. This black comic melodrama, replete with rape, incest, murder, and arson, taps into our anxieties, particularly our pessimism about parenting and urban bureaucracy, which victimizes both its clients and its employees.

The dysfunctional but straight Janiks in Spookhouse contrast with the stable gay family in La Cage aux Folles, a musical that provides a refreshing perspective refuting homophobic stereotypes. Married in all but law, Albin and Georges exceed their devotion to each other only in their love for son Jean-Michele, who poorly repays Albin's mothering by banishing him from the family flat when the boy's fiancée and her right-wing parents visit to inspect their future in-laws. Unlike Jean Poiret in the original French farce, Fierstein poignantly focuses on Jean-Michele's insensitivity and ingratitude and celebrates the commitment between the two middle-aged men, a nightclub owner and his androgynous drag queen star. In addition to dramatizing loving domestic relationships, Fierstein again stresses the importance of being oneself ("I Am What I Am") and respecting oneself and others, particularly parents.

Although this tender comedy ran on Broadway for four and a half years, Fierstein's second foray onto the musical stage proved less successful, probably because he merely attempted to salvage the work of an inexperienced librettist. When Fierstein inherited clothing designer Charles Suppon's book for the 1940s gangster musical Legs Diamond, scored by the Australian Peter Allen, he revised characters and dialogue but retained the structure. The less said about this disastrous vanity production for the composer-star the better. The one-act, pre-AIDS comedy Forget Him, on the other hand, deserves an audience. The Fierstein stand-in, Michael, has paid a finder's fee for the perfect lover--handsome, rich, smart, athletic, and attentive. Yet he demands his money back because Eugene's blindness and deafness--or Michael's own insecurities--leave him troubled that someone even better, the title's "him," will come along.

With the Safe Sex trilogy Fierstein turned to the effect of AIDS on gay men's lives, representing the impact in part by means of presentational set metaphors (like Fugue's bed and the spooks in Spookhouse). In Manny and Jake he dramatizes disease-carrying Manny's ex-lovers--many now corpses--with dummies. In the title play he visualizes for us how the men's relationship has been thrown off-balance by placing them on a seesaw, although a later New York revival put them in bed, which made the seductiveness and terrors more real.

Indeed, fear informs all three plays. Manny, who used to live for sex, paralyzes himself with worry over infecting more men, even while praying for the renewal of the romantic possibilities he regards as now blighted by his HIV status. He implicitly rejects the option of safer sex and simply laments his loss. His parallel in the title play, Ghee (played by Fierstein), also permits fears to inhibit him. HIV-negative, the terrified Ghee avoids sex by means of verbal attacks, retreats, and reprises that actually mask a greater problem--fear of intimacy. The teeter-totter metaphor expresses a relationship out of balance from scares about AIDS, fears of letting a lover get close and of the potential loss of both lover and life. Despite the pain at their core, Manny and Jake offers a lyrical elegy to sexual joy, while Safe Sex satirically mocks both Ghee's anxieties and his macho lover's unwashed ardor.

In his final treatment of fear, loss, and--dare we?--trust, On Tidy Endings, Fierstein employs a fully representational style and setting, repeating in this trilogy the same progression from presentational to realistic he first used in Torch Song. The Fierstein character, Arthur, mourns his lover's death from AIDS while confronting Colin's ex-wife with legal papers for their shares of the inheritance. Part of the legacy turns out to be the disease, which ironically has spared Arthur but stricken the woman. She has worked hard to win Arthur's trust not only for her sake but also for that of her son, who needs to overcome his own grief, rage, and homophobia so as to continue to benefit from Arthur's maternal care. Like Torch Song Trilogy, On Tidy Endings prompts laughter and tears at a son and at alternately bickering and affectionate widows.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Nationality: American. Born: Brooklyn, New York, 6 June 1954. Education: Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, B.F.A. 1973. Career: Founding actor in Gallery Players Community Theater, Brooklyn, 1965; drag performer and actor from 1970: professional debut at Club 82 and La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, New York, 1971; roles in more than 60 plays and in several films. Awards: Rockefeller grant; Ford grant; Creative Artists Public Services grant; Obie award, 1982; Tony award, 1983 (for writing and acting), 1984; Oppenheimer award, 1983; Drama Desk award, 1983 (for writing and acting); Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner award, 1983; Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award, 1984; Ace award, 1988.

WORKS
* Plays

* In Search of the Cobra Jewels (produced New York, 1972 ). New York, Author, 1972 .
* Freaky Pussy (produced New York, 1973 ).
* Flatbush Tosca (produced New York, 1975 ). New York, Author, 1975 .
* Torch Song Trilogy (produced New York, 1981 ; London, 1985 ). New York, Gay Presses of New York, 1981 ; London, Methuen, 1984 .
* The International Stud (produced New York, 1978 ).
* Fugue in a Nursery (produced New York, 1979 ).
* Widows and Children First! (produced New York, 1979 ).
* Spookhouse (produced New York, 1982 ; London, 1987 ). Published in Plays International (London), July 1987 .
* La Cage aux Folles, music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, adaptation of the play by Jean Poiret (produced Boston and New York, 1983 ; London, 1986 ).
* Manny and Jake (produced New York, 1987 ).
* Safe Sex (includes Manny and Jake, Safe Sex, On Tidy Endings ; produced New York, 1987 ; London, 1991 ). New York, Atheneum, 1987 .
* Forget Him (produced New York, 1988 ).
* Legs Diamond, with Charles Suppon, music and lyrics by Peter Allen (produced New York, 1988 ).
* Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1988 .

* Screenplay

* Torch Song Trilogy, 1989 .

* Television Play

* Tidy Endings, 1988 .

* Video

* The International Stud, 1988 .

* Recording

* This Is Not Going to Be Pretty, with Lenny Babbish, Plump Records, 1995 .

* Theatrical Activities
* Actor

Plays-Pork,by Andy Warhol, 1971; Xircus: The Private Life of Jesus Christ; The Trojan Women; Vinyl Visits an FM Station; International Stud; Fugue in a Nursery; Widows and Children First; Torch Song Trilogy; Safe Sex Trilogy; The Haunted Host.Films-Garbo Talks,1984; Torch Song Trilogy,1988; The Harvest,1992; Mrs. Doubtfire,1993; narrator for The Times of Harvey Milk. Television-Tidy Endings,1988; In the Shadow of Love,1991; appearances in Cheersand The Simpsons,1992.

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