Interview with Harvey Fierstein

With his breakthrough role of Arnold Beckoff in his self-penned Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein established a stage persona that was proudly gay and definitely Jewish. Since then, his Broadway roles have seen him stretching a bit in one direction or another. In Hairspray, he played a character who was presumably Jewish, but heterosexual – though that character happened to be a woman. And in Fiddler on the Roof, he played Tevye, who's most certainly Jewish, but certainly not gay. (He has five daughters!)

Now, he has written (or rewritten) for himself the role of an Irish, gay uncle in the new musical A Catered Affair, which boasts direction by John Doyle, a book by Fierstein, and a score by the super-talented John Bucchino. The narrative crux of the musical, and the 1956 film on which it was based, is whether or not a lower-middle-class Bronx family will make the sacrifices necessary to give their affianced daughter an elaborate wedding, even though the girl has made it clear that she doesn't want one.

But in the movie, the equivalent character to Fierstein's — played by Barry Fitzgerald — is an old drunk rather than a homosexual.

Set to open at the Walter Kerr Theatre on April 17, A Catered Affair also stars Faith Prince and Tom Wopat as Aggie and Tom Hurley, Leslie Kritzer as their daughter and Matt Cavenaugh as her intended.

In its pre-Broadway run at the Old Globe in San Diego, the production was very well reviewed by the critics — with the notable exception of Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times, who panned the show in general and criticized Fierstein for playing Uncle Winston as a contemporary gay man.

This led to Fierstein going after McNulty on his blog and in emails to friends and colleagues. But our Harvey was in a great mood when I spoke with him at an A Catered Affair press event that was recently held at Kleinfeld, the famous bridal shop in Manhattan.

Fierstein and the cast of A Catered Affair

AfterElton: Harvey, this interview is for AfterElton.com. So I'd like to focus on the gay aspect of the show, even though I realize that's not primarily what it's about.
Harvey Fierstein: Well, in a funny way, it is. I've been looking at it from today's perspective. Why do gay men want gay marriage? What you see in this show is a character who's kind of closeted. He has a boyfriend, but he doesn't live with him. His boyfriend actually accuses him of living on his sister's couch to avoid personal entanglements.

There was something we got away with saying in the '50s, and even in the '60s, when we talked about being gay: “Heterosexuals have relationships, but gay men have great sex.” Well, that was never really true. Gay men have always had relationships; we just never had permission to. But, living as part of a family, why wouldn't you want what the rest of your family has?

AE: The film version of A Catered Affair is a bit problematic, yet there's something very special about it.
HF: I've always loved it, though I never thought it was a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination. I don't believe in adapting something that's already great and just putting it on the stage. What's the point? Go rent the movie! But I loved the characters, and I saw the opportunity to do something else with them.

There's a turning point in the show: We have a song called “Coney Island,” where I say to my sister Aggie, “Remember when we were kids and I took you to Coney Island and made you get on the roller coaster? From the moment we got on, you covered your eyes. At the end of the ride, you looked so sad, because you paid your money, you took the ride, but you missed the view. So, come on. We're halfway through another ride. Open your eyes!”

AE: How explicit is the show about your character Winston's sexuality?
HF: Well, we say that he's going off to “keep house” with his boyfriend. That's how we put it in 1953 terms. For a gay man to do that in those days was absolutely frightening. But it's no less frightening for Aggie that her daughter is moving out and she now has to see if she can have a real relationship with her husband of 25 years. So many of us do the same thing; we sort of avoid our own lives.

AE: Tell me about your adaptation of the film.
HF: The Barry Fitzgerald character is a bachelor uncle who's really there for comic relief. He gets married just to get out of the house. I thought, “There's no reason for us to do that story.” But he has some great lines in the movie. At one point, he's talking with the woman he goes off with at the end, and he says, “I lived with my mother till she died, then I moved in with my sister Mary. She was a striking girl – around 200 pounds. Died laughing with a beer in her hand, when I was telling her my story of the missionary and the cannibals.”

I love that, but I couldn't find a place for it in the show. To me, the point is that this man has always lived with someone.

AE: The Hurley family is supposedly Irish. Neither Bette Davis nor Ernest Borgnine come across as Irish in the movie, but it doesn't seem to matter much.
HF: A Catered Affair started as a teleplay, with Thelma Ritter in the lead role. Paddy Chayefsky's son told me that his father wanted to write a teleplay for each of the ethnic groups in his neighborhood, so he wrote Marty for the Italians, A Catered Affair for the Irish, and then he wrote a German one and a Jewish one. It's the Bronx in 1953, and the Hurleys are Irish, but this story could be about a black family or a Jewish family or a Puerto Rican family.