Word: torches
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...flame came fluttering out of the darkness, into an early morning light. Americans in bathrobes would sometimes stand by the sides of the two-lane roads, and as a runner carried the Olympic torch toward them, they would signal thumbs up and break the country silence with a soft, startling cheer. Their faces would glow with a complex light--a patriotism both palpable and chastened, a kind of reawakened warmth, something fetched from a long way back...
...Americans, the moment was powerfully emblematic. Why were they cheering? What were they cheering? When television news played scenes of the torch's progress across the landscape, something in the soul of the audience cheered as well. A kind of emotional reflex. Something both sentimental and profound welled up. What did people see in the scene...
They saw an American carrying a torch, running across America. But also, it may be, they saw an American running out of a long Spenglerian gloom: heading west for California, toward the light. Running away from recession, Americans might almost subconsciously have imagined, away from Jimmy Carter's "malaise," away from gas shortages and hostage crises and a sense of American impotence and failure and limitation and passivity, away from dishonored Presidents and a lost war. Away from what had become an American inferiority complex. Away from descendant history. Running away from the past, into the future. Or away from...
WHEN THE PRODUCER of the Broadway production of Torch Song Trilogy accepted the 1983 Tony Award for Best Play, he thanked his male co-producer and lover for making it all possible. That in a few words epitomizes what the play successfully strives to do--not merely bring homosexuality "out of the closet," but place it in a broader social context, speaking of the problems of love, life and relationships as they affect everyone. Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy is an extremely well written, well plotted and, judging by this production, well performed exploration of what one person...
There was a time in the not so distant past when a play dealing directly with homosexuality was box office poison. Today, Torch Song Trilogy continues in its third year on Broadway, while La Cage aux Folles (for which Fierstein wrote the book) plays to standing room audiences down the street. And so what is Fierstein trying to say in these works? It is not a political statement about homosexuality, nor it is an apology. The idea he expresses so eloquently is one of self-respect, of realizing one's worth and striving for what one desires and deserves...