Le Chat Noir opens its 2007-08 season this weekend with a sequel to one of its inaugural success stories.

The theater will present Torch Song Trilogy: Fugue in a Nursery, the second in a three-play cycle tracing the personal triumphs and tragedies of Arnold Beckoff, a torch song-singing drag queen.

The second play finds Arnold and his new love, Alan, spending a weekend with Arnold's former flame, Ed, and his wife, Laurel. Although the play addresses issues of sexuality, Ashley Poteet, who plays Laurel, said it's really about the universal desire to make and maintain human connections, romantic or otherwise.

"That's one of the things I loved about the first show," she said. "It wasn't necessarily about homosexual relationships, but relationships in general. This is about places we have all been, and it really is easy, so easy, to recognize yourself - at some point in your life - in these characters."

The fugue in the title refers to a musical form; a fugue is a polyphonic composition in which disparate elements, each with its own specific theme, play off one another to produce a cohesive whole. Harvey Fierstein, who wrote Torch Song, used the structure of a fugue as his model when he wrote the second play.

"It is written in a musical manner, written literally as a fugue," said Richard Justice, who plays Arnold. "So you really do have to keep that rhythm and tempo in mind. We've had many discussions about that, about what section of the fugue something particular happens in and how, accordingly, it should be played."

Like the first Torch Song, Fugue combines elements of comedy, drama and tragedy. Doug Joiner, who plays Ed, said finding the right tone, the right balance between verbal wit and heartfelt emotion is an acting challenge.

"If you lean too far to one side, it has a tendency to condemn the other," he said.

Mr. Joiner said combining those elements of comedy and drama works because that's the way life works. He said that the reason Fugue succeeds is it addresses the most primal of man's needs - how to attain the things he desires.

"These characters, they are living those questions," he said. "Living the question of that desire and what, exactly, that might mean."

Reach Steven Uhles at (706) 823-3626 or steven.uhles@augustachronicle.com.