In her two-bedroom apartment, in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, Jackie Fierstein is sitting down to breakfast--a buttered onion roll, a boiled egg, and o.j.--when the phone rings. In no time, Jackie is talking about her sons: Harvey, the Tony Award-winning playwright (Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles), and Ronald, a lawyer who is spending more and more of his time investing Harvey's money.  

You saw the show? Did you like it? Very good. How were the seats? Good. Did it get a standing ovation? Yeah. 

Can you believe our little boy did that?

No, Harvey wasn't there. He's involved with the third show now. It's going to open in February. And another group is going to open La Cage in Los Angeles. So he's very busy -- they're auditioning people. I really don't see too much of him.

I don't know. I don't know. You'll have to ask Ronald. Even Harvey doesn't know. He says to Ronald, "Can I have an accounting?" Ronald says, "Harvey, what do you want? What is your heart's desire?" So he says, "I don't know. Sometimes, I go into a store, and I think, 'Can I buy this? Can I buy that?'" So Ronald says, "Harvey, the sky is the limit. Go in and buy what you wish." So he's so cute--he went to the Fulton Street Mall, and he bought himself a pair of shoes. I said, "I don 't believe it. You mean, I'm not going to see you in those stupid sneakers anymore?" 

Sure, sure, when do you want to come? I don't care. You're not in my way. 

Yeah, his picture is on the new Life magazine. But if you've got People magazine, he's one of the twenty-five--the twenty-five most intriguing people. And, yeah, that's him, in Vogue, with the high hat. I want you to know that he had a picture in Hustler. Harvey said, "It's not such a nice magazine." I could have killed him. I said, "I had to spend five dollars for that stupid magazine." I couldn't even show it to my friends, because of what's on the back. So now I have to get it mounted.

Listen, I have a gentleman here. He's trying to interview me. Yeah. No, don't be silly. I don't talk to you that often.

Okay, darling, be well.

It is, I learn by spending time with Jackie, a conversation she is called on to repeat at least a dozen times a day.

Five years ago, the repartee would have been very different. Harvey was just another starving playwright then--"and I mean starving," says Jackie. Recently widowed, she would look for excuses to stop by his basement apartment, in another part of Brooklyn. When she brought him food, she'd insist, "Your mother still doesn't know how to shop for one; you'll have to take some." And when she wasn't at his place, she'd worry.

Occasionally, Jackie would take the subway to Manhattan to see one of Harvey's plays. None of them seemed destined for Broadway. The International Stud followed a drag queen on a visit to a "backroom" bar, where he engaged in simulated intercourse with a virile stranger. Fugue in a Nursery explored the relationships between the same drag queen (named Arnold Beckoff), Arnold's lover, and the lover's wife.

"The first time I went, I just sat there," says Jackie. "A lot of these things I had never seen before. And there were questions in my mind; it's natural. But since my husband was already dead, I didn't have anyone I could ask. He was a very wise man and I was always the kind of person who, if we went somewhere and someone told a joke, my husband would have to explain it to me later.

"And I couldn't ask any of my friends," Jackie goes on, "because they were just as naive as I was. So mostly I waited patiently in the theater until somebody discussed it, and then I listened. It was quite an education for me." If Harvey was uncomfortable about her being there, Jackie remembers, "he didn't say anything to me, and I didn't say anything to him."

Harvey's third play, Widows and Children First (which, with the other two, makes up his Trilogy), dealt in part with a somewhat more familiar subject: the relationship between a gay person (still the drag queen Arnold Beckoff) and his mother, a Jewish dynamo who arrives from Florida to try to straighten out his life:

MA: Arnold, do what you want. You want to live like this? Gay gezzintah hait. I don't care anymore. You're not going to make me sick like you did your father.

ARNOLD: I made my father sick?

MA: No; he was thrilled to have a fairy for a son! You took a lifetime of dreams and threw them back in his face.

ARNOLD: What lifetime of dreams? He knew I was gay for fourteen years.

MA: What? You think you walk into a room and say, "Hi Dad, I'm queer," and that's that? You think that's what we brought you into the world for? Believe me, if I'd known I wouldn't have bothered. God should tear out my tongue, I should talk to my child this way. Arnold, you're my son, you're a good person, a sensitive person with a heart, kennohorrah, like your father and I try to love you for that and forget this. But you won't let me. You've got to throw me on the ground and rub my face in it. You haven't spoken a sentence since I got here without the word "gay" in it.

ARNOLD: Because that' s what I am.

MA: If that were all you could leave it in there [Points to bedroom] where it belongs; in private. No, you're obsessed by it. You're not happy unless everyone is talking about it. I don't know why you don't just wear a big sign and get it over with.

Harvey's plays are largely autobiographical, and it's natural to wonder how much of Mrs. Beckoff is Jackie, how much of the dialogue between Arnold and Mrs. Beckoff was first uttered in Sheepshead Bay.

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