|
"That's from Megan Terry's play The Pioneer
that she wrote for me. I played a Long Island mother teaching
her daughter how to get a man. That's Harvey Tavel and me as
Maria Callas and Kirsten Flagstad singing 'I'll Build a
Stairway to Paradise' -- one of the great moments of
Off-Off-Broadway. That's a review from a Swedish newspaper of
my play Flatbush Tosca. I'm still waiting to have it
translated, but it must have been good or he wouldn't have
sent it to me. This is from Ronald Tavel's Kitchenette.
They made me glue on a mustache so I'd stop putting on as much
makeup as the girls had on. This makeup was first designed for
the Actors Studio when I was brought there to lecture. Do you
know I'm the only person ever to be banned from the Actors
Studio? Well, it was a little tasteless to do Susan Strasberg
imitations for Lee Strasberg...."
Harvey Fierstein is showing me his scrap book and
providing a running commentary on his career as one of the
offest of Off-Off-Broadway personalities. He has written plays
with titles like Freaky Pussy, a T-Room Musical and Cannibal
Woman Tartare (formerly subtitled "She Eats It
Raw"), and he has acted in over 60 roles in the last six
years, a good many of them in drag. Until a time conflict
forced him to withdraw, he was scheduled to play Anita Bryant
in the recent new York premiere of Ronald Tavel's The Ovens
of Anita O.J. Despite all this -- or perhaps because of it
-- the 25-year-old actor/playwright is actually a very sweet
Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I met him a couple of years ago when
he was starring in the Boston production of Robert Patrick's The
Haunted Host and again later when he was appearing in an
ill-fated revival of Tom Eyen's The dirtiest Show in Town.
Now we're sitting, on a chilly Saturday, in the deserted
bleachers at the world-famous La Mama theatre, where Harvey is
appearing in his latest play The International Stud.
While he chain-smokes Benson and Hedges 100s and munches a
lunch (breakfast?) of potato chips and Pepsi Light, I try to
extract coherent biography. It's not easy. The onslaught of
entertaining anecdotes and one-liners tends to scramble
chronology, and some of his stories sound suspiciously
embellished. For instance, explaining the origin of his voice
(a unique, obviously damaged Tallulah-esque rasp), he once
told me, "I was in a play called Xircus, The Private
Life of Jesus Christ and had to do a five-page monologue
over a recording of Kate Smith singing 'God Bless America'
played at top volume over eight-foot speakers. The director
refused to turn down the volume -- and I wanted every word
heard!"
But I manage to sift out some salient facts. Harvey fell in
love with the theatre at age 12 while at an art high school,
came out at 13 and started hanging around the 82 Club (an East
Village bar), got in a dress at 14. He began to buy Backstage
and Show Business, auditioned for Andy Warhol's Pork
at La Mama, "got cast and became a Warhol girl. I
did a few videotapes for him -- since I was 250 pounds of
gorgeousness, obviously I did a lot of Ethel Merman
imitations. Then they were going to start on this movie called
Heat, and Paul Morrissey told me there was a great role
as a dyke for me. So I locked myself in the house and went on
a fruit diet and lost 80 pounds in two months so I'd be
gorgeous for the film. I showed up at the Factory, and they
looked and me and said -- quite sweetly -- 'The only thing you
had going for you was that you were a big, fat freak.' They
replaced me with Pat Ast."
He was devastated, but not for long. He plunged into a long
whirlwind of activity, working with many of the mainstays of
the Theatre of the Ridiculous in productions either picked or
written specifically for him: H.M. Koutoukas's Christopher
at Sheridan Square, Donald Brooks's all-male Trojan
Women, John Vaccaro's Persia (A Desert Cheapie),
Jackie Curtis's Amerika Cleopatra, Ron Tavel's How
Jackie Kennedy Became Queen of Greece, his own In
Search of the Cobra Jewels. Were all of these women's
roles? "Some of them. A lot of them I played as women --
how the audience took it, I never asked." Why this
interest in women's roles? "Have you seen men's
roles? They are so boring. They're all
I-wanna-get-laid, I-wanna-shoot-up, I- wanna-this, I
wanna-that. The women get the 'Poor Pearl' roles. Women get
the last bow and the nicer clothes and the softer moments. A
lot of women's roles are underwritten so there's more to play
with; you have to bring your own strength to them, while men's
roles are often so overwritten you can't put anything in
them."
There's something I'm trying to get him to talk about, maybe
what drag means to him. "I have no definition for what it
means to me, because it's as special as being onstage."
He pauses thoughtfully. "I don't know, there's a quality
in a way that an audience reacts to me when I do what I do
best that only comes when I'm playing something interesting.
And if I have to completely change myself physically into a
40-year-old woman or 20-year-old woman, whatever -- already
it's interesting. Then you start on the character. The
reason why women don't like women's roles is that they're
usually cast because they look the part, and there goes half
the interest. I wish the great actresses would -- like Joanne
Woodward, I'd love to play her wife and her play my husband,
or Geraldine Fitzgerald. If they would let us be free -- I
mean, the stage is magic anyway, and the audience will accept
anything you give them if it's good!"
What kind of reaction has he gotten from feminists?
"Well, Freaky Pussy got a lot of negative response
because of the title and because of the ad, which was a vagina
with me in the middle of it. In general, they feel that when a
man plays a woman he's parodying them, but when I play a woman
I play the role as straight and as heartfelt as I try to play
men. And I would never put down women in my plays. I put down
heterosexuals, but out of defense. Things are changing,
though, and the women are less uptight. And of course if plays
change, then there will be no need for me to play the woman's
role."
We go off on a tangent about gay theatre ("Experimental
theatres like La Mama, American Place, the Public, Circle Rep
do much too little gay theatre, though there are faggots all
over those places") and playwrights (Maria Irene Fornes,
whose latest work is the highly acclaimed Fefu and Her
Friends, is Harvey's favorite: "Her language is like
that real thin crystal that, when you pour a drink, you're
afraid the glass will crush from the weight of the
liquor").
I remember a remark Harvey had made about a certain gay
playwright's newest script being anti-gay and ask him to
elaborate on that. "When I see a play by a writer I know
is gay and it has a gay character, the first thing I want to
know is: is that character seen as the norm, or at least
through a gay perspective? If it's not, I immediately turn
off. The second thing I want to know is, since the gay
character is always somehow tragic (which is fine), is his
tragedy the fact that he's gay? If that's true, I don't want
to know it -- that gets me angry, too. The last thing is if
there are two gay characters onstage and they're tearing each
other to shreds with bitchy remarks or whatever, I don't want
to hear it. Because that's a heterosexual view of a
homosexual."
Fortunately, The International Stud stands up to
Harvey's strict criteria. A radical departure from the campy
travesties of old (Freaky Pussy, for instance, is a
parody of Streetcar Named Desire set in a subway
toilet), Stud centers on the relationship between
Arnold, a drag performer who's tough-talking "Virginia
Hamm" dressed up but otherwise a regular Joe; and Ed, a
schoolteacher with Marlboro Man looks for whom bisexuality is
another way of staying in the closet. The play's five scenes
(three of which are monologues) are connected by the
appearance of chanteuse "Helen Morgan," who sings
the kind of torch songs that have filled Arnold's head since
childhood with promises of romantic love and whimsical kisses.
The play really does traffic in extreme sentimentality; there
is at times a he-said-he-loved-me-how-come-he-don't
desperation that is embarrassingly naive. But it is redeemed
-- or at least it was in its showcase production at La Mama --
by Harvey's performance, which was stripped to such raw
vulnerability that it made the play an intensely private,
painful, even courageous act of sharing. He captured the
bewilderment of discovering that knowing all the cliches about
love's pain doesn't make you immune from them. "In my
life I have slept with more men than are named or numbered in
the Bible," says Arnold without bitterness. "But in
all those bedrooms, bathrooms, backrooms and balconies not
once has someone said, 'Arnold, I love you,' that I could
believe. And I ask myself, 'Do you really care?' and the only
honest answer I can give myself is, yes, I care. I care. I
care a great deal. But not enough...."
There is much to admire about The International Stud:
the well-observed, sympathetic portrait of bisexual Ed;
Arnold's refreshing lack of pathos or self-pity as the updated
Lady Bright ("There are easier things in this life than
being a drag queen," he chirps, "but try as I may I
just can't walk in flats!"); the incisive, though
cheerfully ambivalent commentary on the quick-sex backroom
bars; and the witty writing, at its best both epigrammatic
("An ugly person who goes after a pretty person gets
nothing but trouble, but a pretty person who goes after an
ugly person gets at least cab fare") and disarmingly
accurate. "I like that one sneaked kiss in the elevator
on the way to a man's apartment. I like the apologies he makes
for the mess the place is in. I dig the dainty tour and arty
conversation while he's dimming the lights and pouring the
drinks. I like never finishing those drinks."
After seeing the show, I wait backstage while Harvey greets
friends and fans, and then we go out together -- where else
but to the Stud, the West Village bar for which the play is
named? I like the show much more than I let on to Harvey;
instead, we talk about technical details and so on. Discussing
the play, he uses the names of the real people it was written
about. He tells me about the two other plays that will
eventually make, with Stud, a trilogy, both also based
on love affairs in his past. "I don't know if this is
exhibitionism or what, but I figure if it happens to me, it
happens to most people.
"All right, wait a minute," says Harvey, stopping
about a block from the bar. "The glasses come off
here." Looking in a restaurant window, he combs his hair
with his fingers, the worldly artiste becoming now the shy gay
man heading for the bar. Awkward pause. "Well," he
quips, "I didn't want to be recognized on the
street!"
The Advocate, June 14, 1978
|
