In ‘Falsettos,’ an Affecting Echo of AIDS Anxiety

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/theater/falsettos-memory.html

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I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me, a sensation I had not experienced in decades — maybe even since I was a kid playing soccer (terribly).

It happened as I watched the beautifully realized Broadway revival of the 1992 musical “Falsettos,” by William Finn and James Lapine. In the middle of the second act, two of the central characters, the gay men Marvin, played by Christian Borle, and Whizzer, played by Andrew Rannells, have reunited after breaking up at the end of the first.

Their reunion was inaugurated when Whizzer joins Marvin, along with Marvin’s ex-wife, Trina, and her new husband, Mendel, at Marvin and Trina’s son’s baseball game. In one of the musical’s funniest songs — and “Falsettos” brims with them — the chorus runs: “We’re watching Jewish boys who cannot play baseball play baseball.”

The song captures the overriding tone of the show, to this point: tart and antically funny, even as it explores the complicated, sometimes antagonistic yet loving relationships among the principals. But just a few scenes later — while we’re watching Marvin and Whizzer, Jewish men who can play racquetball play racquetball — Whizzer suddenly begins to fight for air, and eventually collapses. “I can’t go on anymore,” he manages to say.

It was then that I lost my breath, too. Suddenly I remembered what was coming: The musical is set in 1979 and the early 1980s, when a mysterious illness, whose origins were still unknown, began to claim lives by the dozens, then the hundreds and thousands, mainly gay men. I had actually seen “Falsettos” more than two decades ago, in Los Angeles shortly after it played Broadway. In the intervening years, I had forgotten the details of its plot, but in that instant I knew that this buoyant musical comedy was taking an inexorable turn toward heartbreak. There would be no happy ever after for Marvin and Whizzer.

The scene, acted with beautiful simplicity by Mr. Rannells and Mr. Borle, whose Marvin rushes to Whizzer’s aid, affected me as no other in the theater this year — as did the concluding, devastating scenes of the show — because it was like being thrust in a time capsule and brought back to the terrible years when the AIDS epidemic was at full force. I was living in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, in my 20s, and, as a gay man with many gay friends, existed in what can only be called a constant state of mortal anxiety: anxiety for my health but also that of so many people I knew, and many more that I didn’t.

It took me further back, too: to the moment in high school when I sat on the floor of the family room, reading a small article in The San Francisco Chronicle — in retrospect I’m sure it was by the Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts, who went on to write “And the Band Played On,” a definitive history of the early years of the epidemic — about that strange, unidentified illness. (Shilts himself died of AIDS, in 1994, at 42.)

Although I was not then “out,” I certainly knew I was gay, and as I absorbed the article (I can still see one of our Siamese cats sprawled out on the carpet in the sun beside me), I knew that in that moment the world had shifted around me. From then on, until who knew when, I would feel a shadow over my shoulder. The life ahead was suddenly not a simple question mark or a blank slate but a flashing alarm signal. (It didn’t help — or, in retrospect, perhaps it did — that I was already a world-class hypochondriac.)

I was among the lucky. By the time I reached college, much was known about AIDS and its transmission. I lost only one good friend to the disease — one too many of course, and, cruelly, one of the kindest people I have ever known — but many acquaintances.

Watching Marvin, Whizzer and their extended family, including Marvin’s neighbors, a lesbian couple, one of whom is a doctor who has begun treating men with this unnamed new disease, grapple with Whizzer’s illness, was on one level unbearably sad. But measuring and mirroring the sadness in life is among the theater’s — and art’s — purposes. Giving audiences a chance to relive, or for younger audiences, experience for the first time, the anguish and uncertainty of the years when AIDS ravaged the gay community, is as necessary as bearing witness to the world’s current ills (as, for instance, Lynn Nottage’s powerful play “Sweat,” which moves to Broadway this spring, does).

Moreover, when we watch sad or tragic events unfold onstage, we are in the company of hundreds of fellow theatergoers. The sense of shared compassion evoked — and sometimes expressed, through cathartic tears or a collective hushed silence — can in itself provide solace, binding us together in a feeling of shared humanity.

Of course this revival is not the first time the New York theater has revisited this time period. Larry Kramer’s full-throated polemical drama “The Normal Heart,” first produced at the Public Theater in 1985, was revived by the same theater in 2004, and another production opened on Broadway in 2011. Tony Kushner’s majestic epic “Angels in America,” first seen on Broadway in 1993, was revived by the Signature Theater Company in 2010. But both of those plays are almost entirely about the epidemic, the cultural clashes it inspired, and its impact on the lives of its characters. And while both are leavened with wit, they are fundamentally serious plays.

In other words you know what you are getting when you go in, whereas “Falsettos” — even the title has a bright chime about it — is in many ways a traditional musical comedy, a genre that does not regularly encompass the dark realities of death and disease. I suppose that’s why Whizzer’s sudden fit of wheezing hit me so hard. I was having such a good time commiserating with the characters’ comical neuroses and their attempts to achieve emotional equilibrium, in songs featuring music and lyrics that often have the peppery charm of light operetta, that I was blindsided by the onset of Whizzer’s illness.

In this respect, of course, the musical precisely echoes what happened in the lives of so many thousands of men (and women) during those years. They were grappling with the things people deal with every day — getting the kids to school, planning a vacation, or tending to larger matters of life and career — and taking for granted a future potentially full of possibility. And then, well …

And then.