©Alliance Theatre Falsettos Playbill


About The Play
By Walter Bilderback (dramaturg)

The 1993-94 season marks the Silver Anniversary of the Alliance Theatre. As with all anniversaries, its raison d'etre is as much reflection as celebration. What is the function of a theater? More specifically, what should be the Alliance's function?

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schiller offered this view of the role of a theater:
"The stage, more than any other public institution, is a school of practical wisdom, a guide through social life, an infallible key to the most secret passages of the human soul...[it] is an institution where pleasure is combined with instruction, rest with exertion, amusement with culture."

These words reflect where the Alliance has come in its 25-year history. Our mission as a theater ultimately means taking responsibility as citizens in this society, a political act in the sense that Aristotle first defined "politics"-'the art of living in cities'.

What does this have to do with Falsettos? Well, William Finn's and James Lapine's musical deals with all of these thoughts. I was initially happy we were presenting Falsettos because it is good entertainment--a love story and a coming-of-age story with delightful music and lyrics. As we've gotten closer to production, the play has seemed increasingly more political (in both Aristotle's and the colloquial definitions).

As I write, an Atlanta-area theater is threatened with funding cuts for presenting two plays that merely acknowledge the existence of homosexuals, due to politicians who consider this a threat to "family values". Falsettos directly challenges this sort of thinking because it is overflowing with both homosexuals and family values.

The Roman philosopher Horace once wrote: "Nothing human is alien to me". It often seems today that both Left and Right want us to deny this, and replace it with the notion that only those things that reduplicate our own experiences--emotional, sexual, ethnic, racial--can be anything other than alien to us.

In examining the contemporary "art of living in cities", Falsettos combines pleasure with instruction, amusement with culture. And, with your participation as audience -- "the final member of the cast" -- Falsettos also gains potential as a tool for understanding and celebrating the rich tapestry of individuals and families in our city.

"However you define family, that's what we mean by family values."
--Barbara Bush, August 20, 1992

At the height of last year's election controversy over "family values", New York Times critic Frank Rich took his two sons, aged 12 and 8, to see Falsettos and wrote of the experience. It was the 4th of July weekend, coincidentally the anniversary of the Times' first report of AIDS in 1981. Rich admits to second thoughts when he realized his sons were the only children in the theater:

"Should I have taken the easy way out and joined most of the country's other families that weekend at 'Lethal Weapon 3'? Then again, I had chosen to take Nat and Simon to Falsettos in part as an antidote to the monolithic images of masculinity with which they are routinely assaulted by television and movies....

What did my boys take away from Falsettos? They liked the acting, the story... the jokes and the music. But they also responded to the show's family values."

Was his 8-year-old 'surprised' to discover that the gay characters in Falsettos were the same in most ways as heterosexuals? "They are the same, Dad." In other words, Simon Rich had decided that "gay people are just part of the family in Falsettos, and the values of Marvin's family are those of any other."

The contemporary American family is a diverse notion. Recent studies indicate that more than three-quarters of American households do not fit the definition of a "traditional" family. However, as Stephanie Coontz notes in her recent book The Way We Never were, the "traditional" family "is an amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never co-existed in the same time and place" and its major component, the Leave it To Beaver/Father Knows Best model, "was a 1950's invention that drove thousands of women to therapists, tranquilizers, or alcohol when they actually tried to live up to it."

On a more hopeful side, in a 1989 poll, 74% of the respondents agreed with the idea "that family is any group whose numbers love and care for one another." And there is a need, a dire need, for us to "love and care for one another" -- and be loved and cared for. Falsettos's "teeny tiny band" encompasses all of us trying to "grow up and hate less". In this way, Falsettos can be appreciated for what it is -- a love story, a coming-of-age story, a delightful All-American entertainment.


main Falsettos page