How we made ... Harvey Fierstein and Antony Sher on Torch Song Trilogy

writer and star of the show drag queen nobody could resist unprecedented

Harvey Fierstein, playwright

soon as I started writing, others left me wanting to act in their shows - maybe they thought I'll write again. So I wrote the first part in Torch Song Trilogy for me, and the next two to continue the characters' lives. The first job is a simple test to fall in love for the first time. The second consists of two couples, one gay, one straight, is a declaration that homosexual and heterosexual relations are exactly the same. The third game features characters that have not evolved because I wanted to but because the outside world crashed in.

They were not written for a heterosexual audience: they relate to people struggling with their sexuality, and heterosexuality is struggling with. And yet, it is critical and gay culture that rejected gay theater, while the heterosexual public accepted. It took me years to find someone to produce them. At first, I could not give tickets away, nobody wanted to sit through a play gay four hours. We were about to close, and then came two criticisms: Mel Gussow Rex Reed Daily News and the New York Times. Both are published raves and suddenly we were a success. We went from the fringe off-Broadway, where tickets were sold as fast as we could print. I accepted an offer to go to Broadway, but only because I do not think I could be on Broadway and was ready to go. I prepared my next move, and I wrote La Cage aux Folles. But the show did not last another four years.

• decided to test absent in London to see what the director, Robert Ackerman, had happened. Production was very close to the original, except that New York and West End actors are very different. An English actor has no problem cutting the intestines of someone with a sword, but it has many problems crying to his mother. Antony Sher was beautiful in the show, but one of the notes that I gave was on the scene of the confrontation on the third part. The mother told her son: "If I knew it would be strange not to have bothered to give birth." Not the most horrible thing? But Tony and Miriam Karlin held hands. I said " You're kidding should take knives at loggerheads? ". When I took the role, it was horrible, do not mix with the rest of society - he was exaggerating. I had done for so many years. I did not want to do anything else.

Antony Sher, actor

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