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Harvey Fierstein was an unemployed actor in New York City when he met Paul at a gay bar in the late 1970s. They had a tryst, but then Paul became involved with the woman he would eventually marry.

Fierstein was bereft over the rejection and, as he relates in his 2022 memoir “I Was Better Last Night,” went to see a psychologist. She told him: “Writers hang out in dive bars hoping for heartbreak to give them something to write about. Sounds like you hit the jackpot. Get busy.”

So he sat down and wrote “The International Stud,” a semi-autobiographical play about Arnold Beckoff, a Jewish drag queen looking for love. It was a hit, and Fierstein would go on to write and star in two more plays revolving around Arnold and Ed, a character inspired by Paul. “Torch Song Trilogy” premiered on Broadway in 1982 and won the Tony for best play, while Fierstein won for best actor in a play. (A torch song is a ballad about unrequited or lost love.)

Fierstein’s two-act adaptation titled “Torch Song” opens May 9 at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley and runs through June 2. Local Jewish actors will play the roles of Arnold, his mother and Laurel, Ed’s wife.

“‘Torch Song’ is a Jewish classic. It is a queer classic. It’s part of the theater canon,” Dean Linnard, who plays Arnold, told J. in a recent Zoom interview. “It’s a landmark, historical piece, and I’m so, so grateful that we’re doing it.”

Linnard, who grew up in Berkeley and splits his time between there and New York, studied the trilogy while in college at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He called Fierstein “prophetic” for writing plays in the 1970s about a gay man who wants to have the same opportunities as heterosexual people to live authentically, marry and start a family.

“Arnold wants to be able to own his queerness, own his Judaism, own his drag career, own every part of himself and not have to compartmentalize or pivot between those identities,” he said. “The show tracks his journey towards being able to own that, which is incredible from a play from the late ’70s.”

At the time, gay theater was defined by “plays where the gay character was either closeted or bitter or suicidal, and usually all three,” Stuart Emmrich wrote in the New York Times in 2017. “Torch Song Trilogy” broke the mold by being “a play in which the gay character was smart, funny and fully alive.”

The script is sprinkled with Yiddish and Jewish humor, especially in the scenes between Arnold and his disapproving mother, who travels up from Miami for a visit.

“The way that the mother and son connect, they start using more Yiddish phrases when they’re together because that’s the way that they communicate and spar,” Linnard said. “The love that the mother and son share feels like a very Jewish, fierce, passionate, protective, animated love. There’s nothing passive about the family.”

Nancy Carlin portrays Ma, as Arnold’s mother is referred to in the script. “You think she’s this typical Jewish mother, and she certainly has a lot of those qualities and talks in a lot of those ways, but she’s also complex,” Carlin, a veteran Bay Area actor who lives in Berkeley, told J. “I think a lot of the play is about Arnold wanting respect for who he is, and the crux of that comes down to his relationship with his mother.”

Linnard, 34, and Carlin, 64, had seen each other act in local shows, but this is their first time working together. Linnard said he got a kick out of how much Carlin resembles his real-life mother, Judith, a former nursery school teacher at Berkeley’s Congregation Beth El. “They’re the same height, they have the same hair, they have very similar glasses,” he said, adding, “We’re having such a wonderful time together.”

Both actors read “I Was Better Last Night” after being cast in the show. “He’s had quite a career,” Carlin said of Fierstein, who wrote the book for the musicals “La Cage aux Folles,” “Kinky Boots” and “Newsies.” On Broadway, he has played the mother character in “Hairspray” and Tevye in the 2004 revival of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

“Torch Song” has three distinct sections, reflecting the theatrical styles of the original plays. “It begins with some great monologues, then enters into this fugue, and then it goes into a more naturalistic sitcom thing,” Carlin said. There is pathos, too, including references to a violent hate crime.

The show presents audiences with “a wide variety of experiences and identities,” Linnard said. “I hope audiences recognize themselves and their lives in these characters. Harvey’s message in the end is you have to meet the people in your life with openness and understanding and respect. And that’s sometimes the hardest thing to do.”

“Torch Song”

May 9-June 2 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. $39.50-65.50.