Slim Role

“Torch Song Trilogy,” Harvey Fierstein’s funny/poignant play about an unabashedly gay man trying to maintain a lasting relationship and adopt a gay teen-age boy, is casting and due to start shooting next month for New Line Cinema. Writer-star Fierstein, director Paul Bogart and producer Howard Gottfried (“Network”) have decided to keep it a 1970s period piece to free it from the specter of AIDS. But you will see a big change when it hits the screen: To play his first leading man film role, the sizable Fierstein will have shed about 50 pounds.

“I saw him two weeks ago,” Gottfried told us, “and he’d lost 30 pounds from the last time I saw him. He’s on quite a regimen.”

As for the AIDS impact on the script: “One of the obvious benefits (of the ‘70s time frame) is the AIDS situation. As concerned as all of us are, this is not a play about AIDS. It’s about love and respect and relationships and a man’s right to be accepted as who he is.”

Gottfried said agents are not balking at sending young actors to read for the part of the boy (which launched Matthew Broderick’s career in 1982): “The bottom line is, it’s a damn good role, and there are not that many for teen-age actors.”