The Original Companion
By now, Torch Song Trilogy occupies a settled place in American theater, its themes so familiar that they can feel foreordained. But we should remember that the play began very differently. In its earliest out-of-town tryouts, the central relationship was not between two men but between a lifelong bachelor and his cat. The arrangement was symbolic, as it had to be. This was the late nineteen-seventies, close in time and geography to Stonewall, when meaning still traveled best by indirection.
The cat was neither comic relief nor decoration. It was a fact of the apartment, a constant. When the cat stayed away, the absence registered. When it returned, the relief felt disproportionate. In one scene, the man and the cat were shown sharing a bed, an ordinary domestic image that produced, for some of the more sheltered members of the straight audience, a brief and unexpected chill of transgression. “Until that scene, it was about attachment without exposure,” one member of the original company later recalled. “We thought you could show it without naming it.”
During previews, relegating to fantasy the myth of the nine lives, the cat died. The creative team was suddenly forced into a moment of brave decision and unknown risk. The role was re-cast as a younger man, and much of the text remained unchanged. Lines held. Scenes aligned. The structure held. A line had been crossed, and no one was arrested. American gay theater was born.
The earlier version, however, continued to circulate elsewhere. In Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, and later in North Korea, only the cat version was permitted to be staged. The productions emphasized routine, solitude, care. “A man and his cat is a domestic story,” a former Chilean cultural official once explained. “We discourage interpretation.” The explanation was sufficient.
In April 2026, the Feedback Players at the Brooklyn Academy of Music will present a new staged reading of the original script, restoring the cat to its place. The event is being described as archival, though those involved suggest it remains functional. “The emotional weather is the same,” the director said. “Only the object changes.” The reading makes clear that even the most established narratives were once provisional, waiting for the moment when caution could be set aside.
