Celebrate Pride with Torch Song at Iowa Stage
- Colin Hogan
- Jun 1
- 2 min read
By opening night of Iowa Stage’s production of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, Pride Month will be in full swing. The first Pride celebration took place in 1970 with marches commemorating the first anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, when members of the LGBTQ community resisted a police raid on the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village.
Although homophile activist organizations had been agitating for LGBTQ rights for decades, these early marches shifted the values and priorities of the community. In addition to equal rights, the Gay Liberation Movement advocated for LGBTQ people to reject the shame produced by social disapproval and cultivate a pride in self instead.
In many ways, Torch Song is a period piece that dramatizes this era of Pride. The main character, Arnold, is a drag queen–perhaps the community’s most unabashed figure of self-cultivation. What Arnold wants most, however, is to find love–not for when he’s in drag but “for the rest of the time,” for the “other part” of him “that’s not so well protected.”
His story is not a performance but rather an honest expression of his desire for love and belonging.
He finds this love first in Ed, a buttoned-up bisexual who leaves Arnold as he struggles with his identity, and later in Alan, with whom Arnold plans to build a family. The plot follows Arnold as he attempts to forge a happy life by seeking and supplying love to those around him.
For sure, the forces of shame persist in the form of self-doubt, physical violence,
and emotional abuse, but they show why pride is such a powerful and necessary response.
Indeed, pride manifests in Torch Song not as a feeling to be celebrated once a year but as a routine practice, a strength that Arnold and all queer people must regularly conjure in order to keep going in a world that is often hostile to their existence.
One last note on the version: Theatre fans might wonder what happened to the “trilogy” part of the title. This play was originally 3 separate one-act plays that premiered separately in 1978 and 1979 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Company in downtown Manhattan. They were then combined into the Torch Song Trilogy, a 4-hour experience that appeared on Broadway in 1982.
The version Iowa Stage is mounting at the Stoner Theatre is a 2017 revision (first directed by Moisés Kaufman) that synthesized the trilogy into a standard two-act play that runs roughly two and a half hours. That will give you plenty of time to join the Pride festivities across the river after the show!
Happy Pride, and please join Iowa Stage for Torch Song at the Stoner Theater in the Civic Center, June 6-15! Get your tickets here!
Colin Hogan is an English professor at Des Moines Area Community College and the resident dramaturg of the college’s Ankeny Theatre. He spends most of his time reading, writing, and taking his dog on adventures.
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