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Harvey (Forbes) Fierstein |
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John Glines, the Off-Off-Broadway producer of Harvey Fierstein's landmark play Torch Song Trilogy (1981), summed up Fierstein's importance to the development of American drama in the last decades of the twentieth century: "What Harvey proved was that you could use a gay context and a gay experience and speak in universal truths," Glines told New York Times interviewer Leslie Bennetts in 1983. A few others, particularly Mart Crowley, author of the groundbreaking play The Boys in the Band, had anticipated Fierstein in this regard, but no prior gay-themed play equaled the commercial and critical success of Torch Song Trilogy. Following the success of Torch Song Trilogy, theaters in the United States were flooded with dramas, comedies, and musicals in which the gay experience--from the personal dilemmas of coming out of the closet to the tragedies of AIDS--is set centrally into the fabric of human existence. Fierstein, who told James Grant in 1994 that he "can't really read or write.
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