Seeing the play again, in a carefully abridged version in a vastly superior staging by Peter Pope, I found myself enjoying Arnold's wit - he has the pithy humor of a Fran Lebowitz - at the same time that I was moved by his dilemma. At the time, I felt it was a sincere but sentimentalized view of a transvestite in extremis. We first met Arnold in ''The International Stud,'' produced Off Broadway in 1978. Fierstein, who, with his throaty Tallulah voice and manner, stars in his own touching triptych. The evening is a double tour de force for Mr. Fierstein's work, three plays that give us a progressively dramatic and illuminating portrait of a man who laughs, and makes us laugh, to keep from collapsing. Those alterations - Arnold is a homosexual and a professional ''drag queen'' - are the substance but not the sum of Mr. At the end of a long, infinitely rewarding evening in the company of Arnold and his family and friends, he confesses with a sigh that he has always wanted exactly the life that his mother has had - ''with certain minor alterations.'' Arnold Beckoff, the lonely but far-from-forlorn hero of Harvey Fierstein's ''Torch Song Trilogy,'' is a diehard romantic who takes his heart, soul and fatalism from the 1920's ballads that give the work its title and its tone.
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