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.