Torch Song

A Note from Bill

Torch Song waited decades for its Philadelphia premiere, and I had been waiting my whole life to direct this play.

Harvey Fierstein’s landmark play had never received a professional production in the city, and I felt a great responsibility to Philadelphia’s multigenerational LGBTQIA+ community to bring this play from the late 1970s to a diverse contemporary audience with all its humor, tenderness, anger, joy, and humanity intact.

This play is central to who I am.

Yes, it explores gay identity in America, unflinchingly. But it is really a play about love and family: who gets to define them, what forms they may take, and how we make room for the complexity of one another’s lives. At its center is a demand to be seen fully and loved without qualification, and an equally powerful demand that we learn to listen, across generations, across difference, and across the places where love and hurt coexist.

I strive to be a bridge director: someone who builds bridges into communities and makes theatre where audiences can recognize our shared humanity, in lives like their own and in lives very different from theirs. In Philadelphia, I watched humanity happen. Audience members of different generations and backgrounds connected with one another over what they had seen and experienced: at community gatherings, in book clubs, at post-show talkbacks, and in the lobby. There were tidal waves of laughter and many tears, but most of all there was deep empathy, compassion, and love.

I believe Torch Song belongs among the essential works of American dramatic literature.

Queer history is American history. Torch Song is a gay play and a queer play, and that specificity is the source of its power. But its reach is far greater. It is an American play about the families we inherit, the families we create, the identities we fight to claim, and the courage it takes to insist that our lives be lived honestly and fully.

Bringing it to Philadelphia for the first time was one of the great privileges of my work as a director, and I am eternally grateful to Producing Artistic Director Jennifer Childs and 1812 Productions for the invitation.

Afterward, a young trans audience member in their early 20s sent me a note I will always cherish:

“Thank you for bringing this production to Philadelphia. I was not aware of that piece of my queer history, or of how the battles those people fought in the 1970s and early 1980s laid the foundation for me to be who I am today.”