Relationship Spotlight: Marvin & Trina (Falsettos)

As I’ve said before, the atypical “triangle” of Whizzer-Marvin-Trina in Falsettos really interests me.  Having already looked at Marvin/Whizzer and Whizzer-Trina, it’s time to look at the last side of the triangle:  Trina and Marvin.  In some ways, this is the messiest side of all (spoilers.)

Marvin’s whole “tight-knit family” arrangement is intriguing.  It’s good that he wants the various parts of his family – “kid, [ex-]wife, and lover” – to all get along, and no matter what, Marvin and Trina will always be connected because they’re Jason’s parents.  But the way Marvin goes about that is far less about peaceful coexistence than it is about control and ownership.  I can’t tell if he’s aiming for the former – later in Act II, this is finally achieved when the whole family comes together over Whizzer’s illness – but for much of the show, they’re definitely getting the latter.

That’s because, for Marvin, Trina is still “his wife” and thus beholden to him.  That means cooking meals for the family with Whizzer, being prepared to cater to any and all of Marvin’s whims, and most significantly, not exploring new relationships the way Marvin has.  Even though Marvin was never attracted to Trina and can’t offer her romantic love, and even though he’s moved on with Whizzer, he resents the idea of Trina doing the same.  When she starts seeing Mendel (admittedly complicated, since Mendel is Marvin’s psychiatrist as well as Trina’s and Jason’s,) Marvin goes into full meltdown mode, because in his mind, Trina is still his.

Needless to say, this puts a tremendous strain on Trina to be caught between Marvin’s demands and her own feelings for Mendel.  (Not to mention, Marvin’s continued preoccupation with Trina affects his relationship with Whizzer, and Jason is negatively impacted by all the tension – this is Marvin at his worst, and it’s hard on the whole family.)  Marvin’s need for Trina to conduct herself on his terms interferes with Trina’s right to pursue her own happiness, something she desperately needs.  Her marriage to Marvin (as with most of her life thus far) was marked by denying her needs/desires for the sake of appeasing Marvin.  It was unhealthy and destructive enough when they were married – now that they’re divorced, it’s awful to see Marvin still trying to exert that level of control over her.

As with all the relationships in Falsettos, Trina and Marvin’s dynamic changes in Act II.  We come back from intermission (with a two-year time jump) to learn that Marvin and Trina now have a more traditional ex-spouse arrangement, sharing custody of Jason and mainly interacting over matters concerning him, like planning his bar mitzvah and going to his Little League games.  I’m not gonna lie – when Marvin announces, “I still have my son on the weekends,” and then ruefully adds, “Just on the weekends,” it hurts, and as much of a mess as the Act I situation is, I do find myself wishing they could have made it work in a way that was respectful of everyone’s feelings.

But ultimately, it is for the better.  While Marvin and Trina bicker over the bar mitzvah plans, it’s far healthier than their previous dynamic.  It doesn’t have the same toxic edge – rather, it’s two stubborn people (still immature at times) disagreeing over what they want for Jason’s big day.  And really, the mere fact that they’re disagreeing is a huge improvement for them, because it means Trina is holding her own and standing up for her views instead of getting steamrolled by Marvin’s demands.  Clearly, getting more distance between them was a necessary step in allowing them to interact in a healthier way.

Relationship Spotlight: Marvin & Whizzer (Falsettos)

In Falsettos, every relationship in the Trina-Marvin-Whizzer triangle (not a love triangle exactly, but a triangle none the less) is fascinating to me.  Whizzer and Marvin provide all sorts of interesting material to dig into, a couple with tons of major problems that yet still offers enough of the good that you can hope they’re able to work it out.  As with many aspects of the show, the Act I and Act II sides of this relationship are practically night and day, meaning there’s plenty to explore (spoilers.)

“Combative” is the word that immediately comes to mind for Marvin and Whizzer in Act I.  So much of their relationship is somewhere between charged competitiveness and an all-out power struggle.  A good chunk of that is down to Marvin’s lingering adherence to stereotyped gender roles (despite the fact that he’s now in a same-sex relationship.)  Marvin struggles with who he is as a man, and he often manages that by forcing Whizzer to conform to a “submissive housewife” ideal, staying home and doing the cooking/housework while Marvin is the provider.

Obviously, this isn’t a role Whizzer is well-suited for, particularly the “submissive” part – he resents being told what to be, and that makes him act out to provoke Marvin.  Both men admit that “of all the lesser passions, / [they] like fighting most,” and fight they do, over everything.  Whizzer chafes under the narrow boxes Marvin tries to put him in, and when he asserts himself, Marvin takes it as a threat to his own sense of manhood (so much of this show is just Marvin learning to be okay with who he is.)  These battles extend from the major to the minor; when they break up in the second half of Act I, it’s literally over a chess game.  Marvin has this need to make Whizzer less to make himself more, and when Whizzer refuses to “be a patsy” for him, Marvin can’t take it.

Yeah, dysfunctional up the wazoo, clearly.  Whizzer and Marvin both hurt one another a lot – much of this is on Marvin and his issues, but Whizzer certainly isn’t one to take the high road – and when they break up, it’s a long time coming.  However, even amidst all the fights and mindgames and messed-up power dynamics, there’s also this core of what they could be together.  Each loves the other deeply, not quite knowing what he’ll do with himself when they part ways, but throughout Act I, they both play this game of chicken with their feelings.  Neither is willing to be the first one to bend and admit he needs the other, and so they both make themselves miserable by keeping the other at arm’s length, both insisting on waiting for the other to give in first.  As such, when they part, it breaks both of them.  More hurt, more heartbreak, which only makes them want to hurt each other more.

Despite the love beneath the damage, it’s the kind of relationship that I’d ordinarily be hard-pressed to root for.  I think that the time jump in the second act – skipping ahead two years – is really the only thing that gives these guys a chance.  It’s clear that Marvin in particular has grown and changed a lot in the interim, without which there’s no way they could make it work.  But they do.  When they see each other again at Jason’s baseball game, each is justifiably wary but still drawn to the other.  They’re also made painfully aware of how much they miss the other; it’s implied that Marvin hasn’t been with anyone since Whizzer, and it seems that Whizzer went back to his old habits of casual fun with no feelings attached.  Although each tries to warn himself away from the other, they find themselves circling one another again.

I’ll be honest here:  I really love the playful joy and depth of feeling in their Act II relationship, but I do think it feels a little unrealistic considering their issues in Act I.  Yes, they’ve both grown and changed, and when everything hits the fan, they have something to deal with that eclipses any of their former problems, but it feels like there are a few steps missed in between.  To an extent, it feels like most of Marvin and Whizzer’s thornier edges get shaved down in order to maximize the tragedy when Whizzer gets sick, and while I understand the impulse, they’re a lot less the extremely messy, engrossingly-complex characters they were in Act I, and I wish the show could have balanced the two sides a little better.

However, I understand the reasoning behind it.  When the second act of Falsettos was written, unlike its first, we were in the thick of the AIDS crisis, and there were a lot of people in the world who didn’t care about the fact that gay men were dying from a horrific disease.  Writing about gay characters with HIV was an inherently political act, and I get the need on a writer’s part to go above and beyond to make the audience recognize that character’s humanity, to feel sympathy for him and his partner when he dies.  The fight for representation has been long and is still on-going, and at different points in that fight, the tactics needed have been different – I understand that, and so I get why the characters are softened the way they are.

And really, like I said, I do love it.  I love that Whizzer and Marvin play racquetball together and are able to enjoy being competitive, playing and teasing each other but not acting like their (read:  Marvin’s) masculinity is at stake.  Given what he’s like in Act I, it’s amazing how unselfish Marvin is in his love for Whizzer as his health declines.  It’s visceral and heartbreaking, but Marvin is in it for the long haul, with no intention of bailing no matter how awful it gets.  And of course, most of all, there’s the exquisite “What More Can I Say?”, where Marvin tries to articulate his at-long-last understanding of love while Whizzer sleeps beside him.  Gorgeous.

Favorite Characters: Marvin (Falsettos)

I picked up the cast recording from the revival of Falsettos not too long ago and watched the filmed recording of it a second time when it aired on PBS at the end of October.  In short, I’m all about Falsettos at the moment, so get ready for a scattering of related posts over the next who-knows-how-long.  First up is a post on our main man Marvin.  I hesitated somewhat about calling this a Favorite Characters write-up, since Marvin has such massive, massive issues and does some majorly uncool things over the course of the show.  However, that’s very much the point of his character – he’s a mess, the show makes that very clear, and a lot of his journey is to get to the point where he can be okay with who he needs to be without taking his fears out on other people.  In that, I find him really fascinating, and that’s why I ultimately went with the Favorite Characters title (some spoilers.)

The most interesting thing to me about Marvin is the fact that he’s such a radical and such a traditionalist, both in the same breath.  He did what was expected of him, have a wife and child, because that’s what you do, and he miserably played that charade for a while, but when it couldn’t work for him anymore, he did get out.  He came out, divorced Trina, and got together with Whizzer.  There are plenty of men who might have stayed in that situation their entire lives, but Marvin realized he couldn’t and didn’t.  What’s more, at the start of the show, he’s adamant about wanting a “tight-knit family” in which he, “kid, wife, and lover” all coexist together – not exactly as one fully cohesive family, but he certainly wants Trina in his life as more than merely an ex, and he doesn’t want the Trina-and-Jason part to be separate from the Whizzer part.  Considering the setting, rather upscale and very Jewish in the late ‘70s, that’s quite the ask for someone who was very recently putting himself forward as a “typical family man” (I’m going for the mainstream definition of that at the time – obviously, a family man can look like all sorts of things.)

Where this very innovative idea of what Marvin’s family should be runs into trouble is where it rubs up against his still trenchantly old-fashioned ideas about relationships and gender roles.  Having divorced Trina, he has absolutely no right to get possessive over her when she takes a shine to Mendel, but Marvin still thinks of her as “his wife” and makes an utter nightmare of matters for everyone in the way he (very badly) deals with that.  He also plays out the same stereotypical thoughts about assumed roles in his relationship with Whizzer, expecting his lover to take on the same “devoted wife” duties he placed on Trina during their marriage; in his mind, making dinner and being ready to satisfy him on command are “what pretty boys should do,” and he can’t deal with Whizzer not falling within those narrow dimensions.

Throw in Marvin’s very fragile sense of his own masculinity – seen in the way his defenses immediately go off the deep when dealing with Mendel and the way he gets so combative and competitive with Whizzer – and you wind up with a perfect storm of a character.  Even though it’s very clear that he’s making himself just as miserable as he’s making everyone else, Marvin continually messes up those around him.  His young son, his lover, his ex-wife, her new beau – he doesn’t discriminate, and everyone gets caught in the wake of his insecurities and misguided notions about what men and woman ought to be.  I think the show strikes a very delicate balance with him in Act I, having him wreak so much havoc on others, especially those he purports to care about, while also keeping him so genuinely sympathetic.  Yes, there are definitely times when I root for another character to stick it to Marvin, but even more so, I root for him to stop getting in his own way and let himself live.

Fortunately, that’s what Act II is for.  Another day, I’ll talk about the two very different halves of the show, but the time that elapses during the intermission do wonders for Marvin’s psyche.  While he’s still very screwed-up and insecure (in short, still very recognizably Marvin,) he’s lost enough to understand the importance of valuing what he has, and the approach he takes to the people in his life is, for the most part, very different.  Rather than seeing him cling to those he “covet[s]” possessively, he cares for those he loves more unselfishly.  He has his missteps and backslides, obviously, but it’s very heartening to see him at least starting to find the ability to show love to others, and to himself, without hurting them.