Harold Pinter | Party Time and The Lover / 2026

speaking of love and politics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter (playwright) “Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, Two One Act Plays: Party Time and The Lover / 2026

 

It’s always a joy to be able to attend longer or short plays by British author Harold Pinter, one the most notable writers of drama of the 20th century, winner of the prestigious America Award in 1995 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. The other day I had the opportunity to see two short plays seldom produced in the US, directed by Jack Heller at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles.

      The first thing that struck one, in this case, was a magnificent set by Joel Daavid, which helped to made the small open stage of the Odyssey seem like a vast proscenium production. The first of the two plays, “Party Time,” began in media res with the actors already engaged in quiet conversation at the formal London suburban celebration, the various singles and mostly couples moving around the room as they engage in drinks and talk.

                                                  Michelle McGregor and Brenda James. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

     The entering audience members, at least on my evening, seemed engaged in their own party-like conversations (the group behind me were constituted of what appeared to be a female theater-going clutch) until the signal of lights and announcement to turn off the phones, hinting at almost a kind of warring party-going, the situation perhaps creating an even more political context as the two sets of party-goers appeared each to demand equal attention.

      The 1991 play is actually one of Pinter’s most political works and one of his last plays in a career that became increasingly political as time went on. This particular short play was sparked by a visit Pinter and playwright Arthur Miller made to Turkey in 1985 sponsored, in part, by the Helsinki Watch to check out rumors about that country’s writers being tortured under its military regime. Attending a reception at the American Embassy, Pinter asked Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé, an arch-conservative Ronald Reagan political appointee, for his assessment of the situation. Strausz-Hupé pooh-poohed his concerns, explaining to the playwright that he couldn’t possibly comprehend the complexity of the real situation. “There can be lot of opinions about anything,” remarked Strausz-Hupé. “Not if you’ve got an electric wire hooked to your testicles,” Pinter provocatively responded.

Michelle Ghatan, Paul Marius, Larry Eisenberg, and Mouchette Van Helsdingen. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

     In the party of the play, hosted by the wealthy elderly man Gavin (Larry Eisenberg), several of the invitees evidently belong to a wealthy health club, reacting in various ways to its exclusiveness and amenities. Terry (Paul Marius), obviously a man who has begun his life as a poor Cockney and worked his way up, is impressed by the warm towels, which reminds his host of the barber’s towels of old days, something Terry cannot even imagine or comprehend. Terry’s wife Dusty (Michelle Ghatan) seems to be the only one truly troubled by what appears to be a kind of revolution going on outside the mansion in which they are partying, asking time and again, against her husband’s attempts to shut her up, what has become of her brother Jimmy.

    But she refuses to be quieted, resulting in what appears to be promised violence even her murder from Terry upon their eventual return home. Meanwhile the elegant older Melissa (Mouchette Van Helsdingen) is outraged that her automobile was actually been pulled over and inspected on her way to the party. She totally stops the social chatter briefly to argue that nearly all the clubs she previously belonged to consisted of people who are now dead and had no moral principle as a base for their organizations. Finally in the Club, to which she also belongs, the organization, she argues, is built upon moral values, to which Terry crudely responds, that the Health Club allows no bad behavior, and “if they do [behave badly] we kick them in the balls and chuck them down the stairs with no trouble at all.” All of the guests attempt to get Gavin to apply for membership.

     Douglas (Christopher Louis Parker), as close to a Maga conservative as Pinter’s characters get, suggests that “they”—evidently those attempting to put down whatever revolution his kind are responding to—want only order, and as soon as it returns, everything will go back to normal. Obviously, he is speaking of “his” vision of order and the values of these empty-headed men and women. His wife Liz (Michelle McGregor) equally supports the causes of the despicable man she has married obviously for the power he pretends and the wealth he has acquired over the years. And finally, Fred (Isaac W. Jay) and Charlotte (Brenda James) smirk at one another, possibly in hopes of restoring the flame they once shared in a secret love affair.

      Brenda James, Michelle McGregor, Christopher Louis Parker, and Isaac W. Jay. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

 

    Almost all of them, while drinking heavily, declare the dreadful affair they are attending as being one of the most memorable evenings they have shared for a long while.

     But meanwhile noises, small explosions, shouts, and the sounds of sizable crowds continue at regular intervals from the world outside until the room suddenly goes black as Dusty’s lost brother Jimmy (John Coady) breaks his way through a window, bloodied from the street battles and wearing a T-shirt declaring his rebellious intentions. In his short monologue he gives voice to the suppression of the general population, revealing the lies and pretense of all the party-goers, an act that can only remind us of the seeming powerlessness of the general population today against the current illegal activities of the government. The rich may be momentary frightened, but they will maintain their power at all cost, if for no other reason of the existence of the Club’s hot towels and vague moral values that underlie all their pleasures.

      The second play, “The Lover” from 1962, is akin to the several sexual farces Pinter wrote during that period, including “The Collection” of the same year, the 1964 masterpiece The Homecoming, and his later 1978 work, Betrayal.

 Ron Bottitta and Susan Priver. Photo by Jacques Lorch.

 

      In all those works the central couples do indeed cheat and betray one another, mostly with vast if sometimes bizarre consequences. In this piece centered upon a suburban London husband and wife, Richard and Sarah (Ron Bottitta and Susan Priver), after 20 years of marriage seem to have found, however, full satisfaction in their lives by keeping a lover, in Sarah’s case, and by Richard’s having mindless sex occasionally with a whore. Richard comes home late from his busy days at the office to find a quite satisfied wife, while he, although forced to daily study his various charts and diagrams, seems to be perfectly comfortable with Sarah’s extracurricular activities.

     That is, until one day the bongo-playing lothario who twice or three times a week visits Sarah determines he is finally dissatisfied with their relationship, finding her simply too bony, and wants out; on the very same day, her husband returns tired of her extramarital affairs and forbidding her to see her lover any longer in the domain for which he pays.

     The slightly over the hill Sarah is suddenly faced with a disaster of sorts, her leisured life being threatened by the sudden demand that she play the role of a “real” wife, serving up dinner and attending to her somewhat boring husband who incidentally finds her lovely and plump.

      But by this time the playwright has made it quite apparent that this couple loves to play games almost as much as Martha and George do in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that, in reality, Richard is also Sarah’s visiting lover, she his whore. Now he, having locked her up in his castle, creates a very exciting prospect of an evening for his surprised wife, who must recognize herself as the whore to her husband’s romantic passions.      

     I should add that the lighting design by Gavan Wyrick and along with the lovely costumes by Shon Leblanc and the sound design by Chris Moscatiello provide these works with a great deal of their power.

     If there are any complaints about this wonderful gathering of two lesser known Pinter works it is simply the result of there being a reason why these plays are seldom performed. Neither of them is up to the mysterious, menacing forces and the linguistic genius of Pinter’s greatest works. In the playwright’s most successful works both on stage and in film, one can never be sure where the sexual desire may take his characters, often veering off as they do into heterosexual confusion and homosexual love or entering situations where language takes the narrative, as it awkwardly lurches forward, into new territory where it sometimes seems unsafe even to speak.

     In this case, the sexual games are all a bit too predictable and not that terribly exciting in their surprises; and these would-be dictators can hardly say anything of originality and real cleverness to the society at large. But then, even the weakest of Pinter is better than so much of theater that you simply have to wonder at his gifts. I’d suggest anyone who truly loves theater should rush off to the Odyssey to see these pieces before they end their run on April 26.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2026

Reprinted from Theater, Opera, and Performance (March 2026).

Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell (based on Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House) | Mabou Mines DollHouse / 2006

you great big beautiful doll

by Douglas Messerli

 

Conceived by Lee Breuer, adapted by Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Mabou Mines DollHouse / Freund Playhouse, University of California Los Angeles, November 28-December 10, 2006 / the performance I witnessed was on Sunday, December 3, 2006

 

While it is popular among contemporary directors to “deconstruct” classic dramatic texts, Lee Breuer refreshingly “reconstructs” Ibsen’s great drama. A Doll’s House is, in fact, one of the Norwegian playwright’s most contrived and preachy works; when performed today, 127 years after its original premiere, it is often a painful ordeal for actors and audience alike. But rather than eviscerating Ibsen’s dramatic achievement, Breuer simply revisits the text, investing its metaphors and Victorian structures with startling new meaning.

     The entering audience is greeted with what appears to be a “collapsed” play, the performance completed, the sets, some of them already crated, littering the backstage, ready to be shipped off into history. Obviously, Breuer is reminding us that what we will soon see is a “drama,” a theatrical representation of life; but the implications go far deeper: for suddenly as the lights dim, pianist Ning Yu entering and bowing to the audience, deep red velvet-like curtains—the kind one might see in European opera houses or theaters of the 19th and early 20th century—fall into place to the sides and back of the stage. As the play is about to begin a similar curtain falls into place between the audience and the performance space, giving the sense that something is about to begin all over again. The previously “collapsed” play, the old Ibsen warhorse, is about to be revived—rebuilt from the ground up. Breuer makes it clear that we are about to witness a new work, Mabou Mines DollHouse.

     With the front curtain’s rise Nora rushes forward like a manic doll herself and, along with stagehands, raises the collapsed set—a dollhouse gift for her children’s Christmas, complete with doors, windows, chairs, couches, desks, and a hanging chandelier—an imitation Victorian living room, built to the size of Emmy and Ivar Helmer, Nora’s beloved daughter and son. Maude Mitchell’s Nora resembles a frenzied wind-up doll more than a Victorian mother, a machine reacting to events and others around her. The text simply reiterates what we have already discerned, Nora is less a human being than a toy, her husband Thorvald responding to her return home with a litany of his pet names for her: lark, squirrel, skylark, spendthrift, featherhead, and sweet tooth, nearly all prefaced with the diminutive “little.” As the doorbell rings, Nora scurries about to tidy up the room (in both Ibsen and the Mabou Mines version), readjusting the clock, which results in the appearance of the clock’s cuckoo, which reiterates both her silly and foolish condition and the fact that, like the bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, this lean, tall, blonde is as completely out of place in her miniaturized world as she is out of time; if, like Dilsey, the black servant of William Faulkner’s Compton family, she automatically readjusts the clock, Nora’s also readjusts herself over and over again to life in a tiny world where any moment one fears she may break the toy chairs and couches simply by sitting upon them.

      The visit of her old school friend, Kristine Linde, reiterates the abnormality of Nora’s life, for, at first, Helmer’s still beautiful wife hardly recognizes her friend, who, having to support herself and her family for the last few years, seems less like Nora’s contemporary than an older, maiden aunt. Even Kristine describes her friend as a “child.”

     Kristine has come to ask Nora to intercede with her husband on her behalf for a job—a position which temporarily delights Nora by giving her a sense of purpose, and, accordingly, she admits to her friend that she previously “saved” her husband’s life years before by borrowing money so they might travel for his health to Italy. This revelation is, in fact, the crux of the play, representing as it does in Nora’s mind her one selfless and responsible act—perhaps the only act which she has been able to accomplish as an adult. Simultaneously, however, it has enslaved her to another man, one of Helmer’s underlings at his bank, the evil Krogstad, whom Helmer, having now risen to the position of bank manager, is about to fire. 

       All this information—tedious if necessary background plot in Ibsen’s “well-made play”— is a delight to behold in the Mabou Mines reconstruction, as Mitchell emotionally flits from a naughty, secretive schoolgirl to a pampered and willful wife to a woman proud of her accomplishment and sacrifice.

      Much of Helmer’s early encounter with Nora occurs—even in the original Ibsen drama—between rooms, as he calls from his office out to his wife. Breuer and Mitchell have simply delayed their face-to-face encounter so that when Helmer finally enters his appearance is an ironic inevitability: the males in this cast are performed by little people, men no taller than 4 and one half feet. Suddenly we perceive that the dollhouse in which Nora and Kristine awkwardly sit and converse is the perfect size for Nora’s children (the son played by a primordial female dwarf, Hannah Kirtzeck), and for Helmer and his male peers, Dr. Rank and Nils Krogstad. If this may at first appear as a kind of simplified gimmick, a ridiculous literalization of Ibsen’s tropes, by play’s end it has forced its audience to rethink Ibsen’s world, bringing The Doll’s House into the 21st century. The shock of Nora’s slamming door for late 19th century audiences is recreated for us, as we face, in the Mabou Mines version, a world in which Nora is dislocated and from which she is dissociated, forced to behave in a contorted doll-like manner—behavior brilliantly displayed in Maude Mitchell’s concatenation of sound (from baby talk babble to sexually explicit groans and moans to Garboesque quips in mock Scandinavian brogue) and movement (with all the bends, twists, turns and long-legged splits of a Raggedy Ann).

     Breuer also mines the whole range of Ibsen’s structural devices, revealing the evil machinations of characters such as Krogstad to be related to the popular melodramatic gestures of late 19th and early 20th century plays, and the stuffy, comic posturing of Ibsen’s provincial folk as sharing something with Feydeau’s farce. The creator/director underscores Nora’s sexual titillation of Helmer’s friend, Rank (upon showing him her silk stockings Nora continues: “Aren't they lovely? It is so dark here now, but to-morrow—. No, no, no! you must only look at the feet. Oh, well, you may have leave to look at the legs too.”), resulting in his startling declaration of his love that in this production—along with Krogstad’s threat to reveal her forgery of her father’s signature on the contract for the loan—sends the flailing doll-wife nearly over the edge, strobe lights recreating her sense of a manic speeding up of time and place. Given the sudden dilemmas with which Nora is faced, it is almost as if she has been forced to jump from her protected Victorian household into the stark and often frightening realities of domestic life with which we are all faced today.

     Similarly, Thorvald’s Act III confession that he “objectifies” his wife—he describes himself speaking little to her and sending stolen glances in her direction so that he might pretend that they are “secretly” in love, that she is his “secretly promised bride”—is revealed in the Mabou Mines production for what it truly is: a voyeuristic and fetishistic act that culminates in a near rape—unimaginable in Ibsen’s day—that seems to lie just below the surface of Helmer’s confession in the original that his “blood in on fire” and his reminder that he is her husband with a husband’s rights.

  Indeed, Breuer and Mitchell draw on the whole bag of dramatic styles—tragic, histrionic, melodramatic, comic, farcical, and absurdist (a demonstration akin to the various dramatic genres named by Hamlet’s resident pedant, Polonius)—to point up the implications of Ibsen’s dialogue. 

    I have always thought Ibsen’s plays to be close to spoken operas, something which apparently also struck the creators of Mabou Mines DollHouse, as the drama morphs into a representation of an opera house (stunningly designed by Narelle Sissons), each box seat filled with male and female puppets, paralleling the now larger-than-life Nora playing the miller’s beautiful daughter to Helmer’s Rumpelstiltskin as she sings an operatic aria of her desire for a miracle that never occurred. Pulling away her clothes to reveal her breasts and mons pubis, this Nora, in her declaration that she longer believes that wonderful things might happen, whips off her wig of golden locks to reveal a shaved head before she slams the door to the box in which she has been entrapped. If the play began in the 19th century, it ends in the possibility that in the future men may live in an empty world where women powerfully avenge the wrongs they have been forced to suffer.

                              

Los Angeles, December 4, 2006

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 7 (January 2007).

William Finn and James Lapine | Falsetto's [TV broadcast of Lincoln Center Production] / 2017

love redefined

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Finn (music), James Lapine (libretto), James Lapine (stage director), Matthew Diamond (film director) Falsettos / 2017 [TV broadcast of Lincoln Center Production]

 

William Finn and James Lapine’s musical Falsettos, made up of Finn’s two earlier musicals, March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), was one of the earliest of Broadway works to speak up about two issues never before so openly discussed on the Broadway stage: the breakup of a conventional straight relationship when the male falls in love with another man and the earliest specters of AIDS. If, in fact, Finn had already perceived the issues in the first work that he brings up in the second installation, it might represent the very earliest of works, either on stage or cinema about AIDS. However, we have no evidence of that. And by 1990, the production in which the disease takes over Finn’s narrative, AIDS had been the focus of several brave and brilliant works of cinema, Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs (1985), Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies (1985), John Erman’s TV film An Early Frost (1985), Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), Jerry Tartaglia’s A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988), David Weissman’s Song of an Angel (1988), and in the year before Falsettoland, Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1989).  

    The very year after Falsettoland, you might say everything broke loose with the production of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

    My now husband Howard and I were “saved” by the fortuitous fact that we had been in a primarily monogamous relationship since way back in 1970, although even that carefully placed word “primarily” always made me highly apprehensive. But since by the early 1980s we had already been established as a couple in the highly accepting academic, art, and literary worlds, and were not visiting the nightly gay bars as I had been just a year before we met, we were, basically “inoculated” from the AIDS horror, with only a few friends and acquaintances, Roger Horwitz (d. 1986) and his lover Paul Monette (d. 1995), my Sun & Moon shipper Michael (whose doctor called him at my office to cruelly report over the telephone that had AIDS) and his lover Piero, a small sampling of what other gay men and women experienced through the long suffering and deaths of several dozens of friends.

    But even in our igloo of straight-world acceptance we well knew what was going on, that as the character in this version Finn’s work Dr. Charlotte (Tracie Thoms) describes in her terrifying prescient song “Something Bad Is Happening.” We knew, were afraid, and wanted to somehow help to ease the pain without, given that time in our lives in our mid 30s and early 40s, we remained outsiders to our own community. Works like Finn’s Falsettoland brought the news to those few who cared, which perhaps at the time—although in hindsight I feel a great deal of guilt and anger for not doing more—was all we were able to offer.

     Recently, I grew terribly furious at a lovely dinner party with dear friends, all straight, one of whom in the days of COVID, proclaimed that he has always imagined that he would never have to suffer the horrible days as his parents had with World War II and the horrific right-wing aftermath of Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s. But now with COVID, he realized he had not been spared the mass destruction of human lives. I almost shouted at him for his blindness, but realized it would mean little to him as a straight man to remind that, as a matter of fact, as high as 44.1 million people had died of AIDS, so many of them gay or in countries where even when there were medicines available to help curtail the disease such treatments were unavailable. To date there a little more than 7 million deaths by COVID. Such comparisons are meaningless, obviously, since both have been international scourges which have killed masses of loving, beautiful human beings who might have contributed further to our world culture. But the fact that my friend, also Jewish—and Finn’s play is also very much a work focused on the Jewish-American experience—seemed to utterly have forgotten that he had himself been part of that world that AIDS devastated made to want to scream!

     The power of Finn’s remarkable work is that it brings everything together: a happily married family suddenly broken apart by the father’s discovery of his gay attraction to a man; the desolation of a family, leaving a wife almost in a nervous breakdown and a young son so confused that he’s terrified even of his own identity; let alone the second act introduction of a happy lesbian couple and the discovery that the man’s lover has AIDS, the play ending with his death—all embedded within a specifically Jewish cultural and religious context. If we were to step back for a moment to observe what has just been presented we might be amazed that this production was even mounted in a Broadway theater, let alone was able to sustain audiences for 487 performances in 1992-1993. That it went on to have several productions in Australia, and was revived by in a Lincoln Center production again on Broadway in 2016 for a limited run of 114 performances starring now such legendary theater icons such as Christian Borle (as Marvin, the gay father) and Andrew Rannells (as his gay lover Whizzer) is even more astounding. And the fact that Lincoln Center was able to film its produce it on PBS is almost mid-boggling. Clearly audiences of the day were able to accept and assimilate a conglomerate of issues that might surely challenge today’s highly politized and far less tolerate audiences. The very idea of a Jewish musical about a married man who discovers he’s gay and still wants both lover and family, and who all come together finally when the lover is sick and dies of AIDS seems today like a fluke of reality; today we hardly have a PBS left to produce it and Lincoln Center audiences have arguably come to prefer revivals of Oscar and Hammerstein and maybe, once in a while, a Stephen Sondheim fable. Finn’s popular opera—all lines being sung or spoken in rhyme—was pulled out of the daily headlines, in this version, even more startingly, presented with no realist sets, but just with interconnecting cubes that get repurposed to represent rooms, furniture, and communal spaces.

    I am clearly a member of the audience this work was created for: I cried throughout, laughed on cue, and found the often simplistic rhymes and tunes somewhat clever and emotionally profound. This is clearly not a musical opera you go home humming, and I challenge any viewer to actually quote me more than a couple of lyrics, yet we follow along as it presents the plot in a manner than only opera goers can appreciate.

   Finn gets away with it, in part, through a series of strange displacements. The father, Marvin, is after all, still in love with his ex-wife Trina (Stephanie J. Block) and clearly still desperate to maintain the relationship he has established with his young son Jason (the absolutely charming, if confused and angry, Anthony Rosenthal) wants it all as he sings in “A Tight-Knit Family,” trying to integrate his lover Whizzer into the lives of his ex-wife and son. Jason, however, now feels closer to Whizzer than his own father. And Trina is encouraged by Marvin to see his very own psychiatrist Mendel (Brandon Uranowitz) who almost immediately, even while advising her that “Love Is Blind,” himself falls in love with his patient.

  Before he even can imagine seeing a shrink, the boy is also encouraged and finally convinced through a pressured Whizzer to also see Mendel, who suddenly becomes the link between the family that Marvin has been seeking to be.

    Mendel represents the family’s complete dissolution by proposing to Trina, and in so doing replacing Marvin as the linchpin for both his former wife and son.

    In 2011, years before the Lincoln Center revival, I saw this work in a homegrown local production at Third Street Theater in Los Angeles. And I’ll pick up my description of that viewing for the rest of the “plot:”

 

   “Meanwhile, tension is building between Marvin and Whizzer, as the former attempts to put Whizzer in the position of homemaker. At the same time, Trina is increasingly feeling alienated by the situation, growing fearful that she is becoming less and less prominent in her family’s life (“I’m Breaking Down"). A visit from the psychiatrist for dinner and therapy results in further involvement between Mendel and Trina, and before long he has made a marriage proposal to Trina.

    Trina has mixed feelings which she expresses in 'Trina’s Song,' but she realizes that Mendel’s love is sincere, and, in need of support, she realizes she could do worse. The men, all realizing their failures, together sing 'The March of the Falsettos,' admitting that their roles as 'masculine' examples represent a great deal of bluff.

     Trina and Mendel announce their marriage plans, and Marvin reacts with anger, violently slapping his ex-wife, both painfully singing 'I Never Wanted to Love You,' a sentiment Whizzer repeats to Marvin, and Marvin relays even to his innocent son.

     By the end of the first part, Marvin has broken with Whizzer and created a gap between him and Trina. Attempting to salvage his connections with his son, he sings 'Father to Son,' reassuring Jason that he will love always love him, however he turns out.

     If the first part has been almost brittle with the dilemmas Finn presents us with, the second part is even more distressing. It is now 1981, two years later. The cast has now grown by two others, lesbian neighbors of Marvin, Dr. Charlotte, an internist, and Cordelia, a kosher caterer. These two women offer support and love to the lonely Marvin, but create new problems of their own.

    Although Marvin has grown wiser ('About Time' being a song about growing up and getting over his selfish behavior), and has managed to retain a close relationship with Jason, the issue of his son’s Bar Mitzvah creates new tensions between Trina and him, she attempting to plan a large event, while Mendel (and Jason) encourage a simpler party. Caught in the middle, Jason is furious with both parents, which Mendel assures him is absolutely natural ('Everyone Hates His Parents').

    Both parents, Cordelia and Dr. Charlotte attend a baseball game in which Jason is playing, and in ‘The Ball Game,’ all make fun of themselves for watching Jewish boys 'who can’t play baseball,' and getting caught up in the event. To everyone’s surprise, Whizzer shows up—invited by Jason—which creates new tensions and reveals to Marvin just how much he has missed him.

     In the midst of these adult dilemmas, Jason somehow manages to hit the ball, but is so nonplussed that he forgets to run!

    Another ‘falsetto’ piece relates their new traumas. And soon after Marvin and Whizzer return to their relationship. The war between Trina and Marvin, however, continues, until suddenly, in a racquetball game, Whizzer collapses, and is taken to the hospital. Dr. Charlotte has already warned us through song that “Something Bad Is Happening,” young men increasingly becoming ill and dying. And we soon discover that Whizzer has AIDS.

    In the trauma of the new situation, both parents offer Jason the option of “Canceling the Bar Mitzvah,” while all four of the gay figures, Marvin, Whizzer, Charlotte and Cordelia musically muse on how their love can last, 'Unlikely Lovers.'

     As Whizzer’s condition worsens, Marvin turns to God, singing—a bit like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof—'Miracle of Judaism.' Suddenly all break into Whizzer’s hospital room, Jason having decided that the Bar Mitzvah should be celebrated there, with Cordelia catering the event. For a few happy moments, ‘The Bar Mitzvah,’ lifts everyone’s spirits, but suddenly Whizzer can no longer continue in their company, and is wheeled from the celebrations.

    Left alone, Marvin sings his major love song of the work, ‘What Would I Do If You Had Not Been My Friend?’ a piece which might melt away all the icebergs in Greenland, as we hear the news that Whizzer has died.

    Marvin and his friends surround him to bid the audience farewell without another round of ‘Falsettoland.’”

 

    What is easily gleaned in this story is that despite the fact that Marvin sees himself as expressing ideals, he actually is a of smart bully who has attempted to place his personal values above all others, demanding that his ex-wife, son, and lover all place their roles orbiting around him. When he finally is sent in a shove out of his pre-ordained rotation, he spins off into space out of his control finally without either family and lover, demanding, finally, that he beg for re-entry to all of their lives.

     Through his marvelous comeuppance, his newfound relationships with his lesbian neighbors, and his gradual comprehension that love is something you cannot control but that controls you, we grow to sympathize with the nominative “father,” actually is simply a confused man who finally must admit that he cannot control anything. Eventually he is even further punished by realizing just when love returns in the form of Whizzer and his son’s growing maturity the man whom he finally realizes is the center of his life all can be just easily whisked away through death.

     At the end of the work, Marvin has friends, and some affection, but he no longer has anyone at the center of his love, not even Jason who seems to have preferred the company of Whizzer. One missing piece of the cube whose form is finally restored by work’s end might be seen to represent the now dead Whizzer, but I suggest it actually emblematizes Marvin’s position, a loner punished alas for having attempted to fly to the sun, in his insatiable desires wanting to all, but left with nothing to connect to and no place any longer in the make-up of the universe.

    It is this tragic comeuppance that saves this “pop op” from being nothing other than a sentimental melodrama. Even Finn’s lyrics, almost always ending in simple rhymes, takes us unawares with its several line enjambments, where the expected rhyme appears awkwardly in the next or even third line, or sometimes slant rhymes placed next to one another, with shifts of the rhythms and repetitions where you might not expect them. Take for example the group aria, each singing to the other about how their love as not truly intended and is now being withdrawn:

 

I never wanted to love you

I only wanted to love and not be blamed

Let me go, you should know

I'm not ashamed

To have loved you

I loved you more than I meant to

In my profession, one's love stays unexpressed

Here we stand, take my hand

God, I'm distressed

How I love you

 

I hate the world!

 

He hates everything!

 

I love my dad!

 

He loves his father

 

I love the things I've never had

 

Love our family

 

Lord, hear our call!

 

Help us all

 

Help us all

 

Help us all

 

Help us all

 

Help us all!

 

     Or consider the first two stanzas of one of the work’s best songs, “What Would I Do If You Had Not Been My Friend?”

What would I do

If I had not met you?

Who would I blame my life on?

Once I was told

That all men get what they deserve

Who the hell then threw this curve?

There are no answers, but

Who would I be

If you had not been my friend?

 

You're the only one

One out of a thousand others

Only one my child would allow

When I'm having fun

You're the one I wanna talk to

Where have you been?

Where are you now?

 

    Through the rhymes are simple: “blamed/ashamed.” “do/you,” “deserve/curve” their placement is not always what one might expect, end rhymes alternating in end line conjunctions and split infinitives that explode the regularity (the orbit) with a sort of transition of position, a break down of normality that saves Finn’s lyrics from being sticky and sentimental. Like the story, a tale of many loves, Finn and Lapine keep demonstrating the break-down of love, the individual, the family, and the society itself. In this version of the death of the American Dream, expectations are unfulfilled, familial narratives necessarily readjusted, love redefined. The voice pretending to be an expression of angelic innocence, cracks with the shifts and alterations of life into shouting matches, mean games, and questions without answers. But for all that, life demands you laugh and move on.

     It is odd that in a work that might easily have been as cynical as Sondheim’s looks at love in Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, and Follies, this constantly reconfigured Jewish family somehow remains hopeful, marching along even if they have to stop momentarily simply to catch their breaths.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2, 2026).