The Long-Running Musical of William Finn's Life

by Ellen Pall

from The New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1998, Sunday

At the start of William Finn's latest musical, ''A New Brain,'' a Finn-like songwriter named Gordon Schwinn wrestles with something called the spring song for a children's TV entertainer. Minutes later, having dashed away from his piano to meet a friend for lunch, he puts down his fork, sings woozily, ''Something is. . .very. . .wrong,'' and collapses into his ziti. In May 1992, when he accepted two Tony awards for his first Broadway show, ''Falsettos,'' something was also very wrong with William Finn. His vision was failing, and he sometimes felt so dizzy that he couldn't stand. For the next six months, he would play tag with death, a harrowing chase that unexpectedly left him with what he calls a new brain.

''Falsettos'' was a fusion of earlier musicals about a charming but self-absorbed man named Marvin who leaves his wife for another man. The wife runs off with Marvin's psychiatrist; the new lover eventually dies of aids. Finn, 46, is as much a child of his generation as he is of traditional musical theater, and his intensely personal works bear signs of not only the legacy of Stephen Sondheim (no present-day musical-theater composer can escape that) but also those of the Beatles, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. A new William Finn show is an event, partly because his output is small but mostly because of the galvanic, indelible effect his work can have on an audience. His biting, peculiarly idiomatic lyrics in ''Falsettos'' are twisted with irony and subtext. The words don't always rhyme, and the subjects of the songs -- Jewish combativeness in ''Four Jews in a Room Bitching,'' the genetics of gayness in ''My Father's a Homo'' -- are as unorthodox as the story. The music is equally energetic, tricky and heartfelt.

Finn's brilliant form combined with the absolute topicality of his social themes first bowled critics over in 1981, when his ''March of the Falsettos'' (one of the Marvin musicals) made its debut Off Broadway. ''The songs are so fresh that the show is only a few bars old before

one feels the unmistakable, revivifying charge of pure talent,'' Frank Rich wrote of it in The

Times. Nine years later, Finn's Off Broadway follow-up, ''Falsettoland,'' found even greater acclaim as a unique statement of its moment.

Still, ''Falsettos'' won its Tony Awards greatly against the odds. Subversive, neurotic, funny, tragic and, like Finn, Jewish and gay, it was also small for Broadway: seven characters plumbing the depths of ambivalence. It was a breakthrough for Finn, his first taste of Broadway glamour, mainstream visibility, real money. For a couple of weeks after the Tonys were announced, his face was everywhere -- in magazines, in newspapers, on television.

It was, and is, a striking face. Finn looks from certain angles as if Al Hirschfeld had already drawn him: heavy eyebrows slightly tented with concentration, high, narrow forehead, spectacles halfway down an owlish nose, thick neck sloping gently into his shoulders, then on along the same angle into a lumpy, tactful indistinctness. He is altogether singular. At 6 feet 3 inches, bulky and awkward, he walks with a strange, teeter-tottering gait. He fumbles a dozen times simply preparing a cup of tea. He gestures expansively, speaks loudly and generally seems to take up more room than his mere mass would explain. He seems to move in a private helium cloud of unpredictability. His conversation is studded with chortles, guffaws, gurgles of laughter. He loves to laugh -- it has the quality almost of sexual pleasure with him -- and to make others laugh. He also appears to be missing a few of the protective social filters people usually keep between themselves and the world. He will flatly declare a startling truth (''I'm more talented than most people''), then look surprised when it startles. At times, he is capable of an almost electric empathy.

''Bill is just not like anybody I know,'' says James Lapine, Finn's longtime co-librettist, who also directed several of his shows. ''He is unabashed. There's something irrepressible, ebullient, a kind of great life force. And he's so unedited. You always know what he feels.''

And indeed, minutes after we first meet, near a rehearsal room at Lincoln Center, Finn blurts out his fear. ''Is it squishy?'' he demands. We have just seen a run-through of ''A New Brain'' (it will open Thursday at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater), and now he wonders if it has enough grit. Is it funny? Soft? Schmaltzy, God forbid?

Finn made his reputation on his bold, sardonic humor and tough-minded emotionality, his ability to pick apart the nuances of desire and rage among quirky, readily identifiable characters. But a happy ending -- Finn recovered completely from his own ordeal -- gives little occasion for sardonic wit. What happens when a master ironist finds his bliss?

''I feel like I'm turning into Willa Cather,'' he says anxiously. ''Every 'and,' 'the' and 'but' full of this Midwestern longing and love and moistness.'' He sighs, bewildered. ''I used to be a sarcastic, funny writer.''

The trouble with Finn's brain announced itself over the course of a year in a hundred ways. Apart from the dizziness and the swift decline of his vision, his legs would sometimes jerk up and down of their own accord. He jumped into the sea one day and suddenly couldn't swim. Yet, ''denial is so strong,'' he says, ''I really didn't think there was anything wrong with me.''

His eccentricities masked the trouble. Lapine remembers laughing as Finn's usual lumbering gait, always distinctive, grew even more erratic: he would clutch at the seats on the aisles of the theater where ''Falsettos'' was playing, or prop himself up on the buildings outside. Finn laughed too, and blamed his neuroses. When his legs acted up, he says, ''I thought: You have to relax. You're a wreck!'' His long, strange speeches at the Tonys elicited puzzled, but fond, amusement.

It was his vision that finally drove him to a doctor in August 1992. Months earlier, he says: ''I had gotten to the point where I could only see a tiny bit, out of the bottom of my eyes. Everything else was white. I'd sometimes walk around like this.'' He tilts his bearded chin high in the air, first to the left, then to the right. ''If you see tapes of me being interviewed around then, I look like a crazy person.''

The visit to his ophthalmologist triggered a rapid series of urgent consultations. Something, it was soon clear, was blocking the flow of fluid around his brain, causing it to accumulate in his skull, a condition that can lead to coma, brain damage and death. The first reading of a CAT scan suggested an inoperable tumor. Finn wrote his will. Then he checked into New York University Hospital, where a shunt was inserted to drain the excess liquid. Unexpectedly, he woke up from the procedure with half his face paralyzed.

''This was the worst night of my life,'' he says. ''I still thought I had a tumor, and I thought it had taken over. I said, 'Could you give me some painkillers?' And the nurses said, 'Sure!' And when they said that,'' he laughs, a high bark, ''I knew I was a dead man.''

Then came the first of half a dozen magnetic resonance imaging tests -- for Finn, a hopeless claustrophobe, a nightmare all its own. He got through it with the aid of friends, drugs and a tape of Leonard Bernstein's ''Make Our Garden Grow'' played over and over. It turned out he had an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, a congenital plumbing error that allows blood from an artery to flow directly into a vein, gradually creating a mass of tissue, which was what had blocked the fluid in Finn's head. Because the AVM was in his brain stem, conventional surgery would be too dangerous; he was referred to the University of Virginia Hospital for Gamma Knife surgery (a form of radiation). He didn't make it to Virginia just then, however. Finn was out of the hospital only a few days when his AVM hemorrhaged. Now, whenever he tried to stand up, he would ''tip over.''

Back in the hospital again, ''Every night, I dreamed of standing,'' he remembers. ''Lapine would visit and say: 'Oh, good, you're in a walker! We'll have a walker song.' He'd say, 'Take it down, take it down,' '' meaning, Keep notes so you can write about this later. ''But I was dying. I wasn't taking anything down.''

Lapine was only one of a crowd who surrounded Finn during his ordeal. Finn is famously loyal to his friends and family. He grew up the oldest of three children in a comfortably middle-class home in Natick, Mass., and started composing on a guitar he was given for his bar mitzvah. (He still attends services.) At Williams College, he majored in literature and American civilization, but wrote, directed and sang in musicals for fun. He moved to New York in 1976 and was soon surrounded by first-rate young singers eager to hitch their careers to his talent.

''People orbited him,'' says Chip Zien, who had major roles in the ''Falsetto'' shows and is featured in ''A New Brain.'' ''I think they thought he had magical powers of songwriting.'' Zien himself dropped a perfectly good role in an established show to appear in ''In Trousers,'' Finn's first New York show. ''When I met him,'' he says, ''I basically thought Bill was crazy. He was sitting there at my audition, this gigantic person, and he started screaming at me: 'Do it again! Do it with your hands in your pockets!' But I felt it was somehow the wave of the future, this wild, funny, strange, very original music.''

''In Trousers'' made its debut in 1979 at Playwrights Horizons. It flopped; but a year or so later, Finn met Lapine, who had just directed a play of his own at Playwrights. Lapine's first impression was of a force-10 noodge. ''Bill wanted me to direct that 'March of the Falsettos,' '' he recalls, ''and he was so unrelenting about it, I finally said yes just to get this guy off my back.''

Around this same time, Finn also met Arthur Salvadore, with whom he has shared his life ever since. Salvadore, a businessman, figures in ''A New Brain'' as Roger Delli-Bovi, Gordon's patient, responsible lover. Finn's mother, who died only recently and was his greatest enthusiast, also figures largely in the piece; with the rest of his family, she was at the hospital constantly.

After Finn's hemorrhage, his doctors decided to inject glue into the vessels of the AVM to plug it up. (Glue? ''Actually, Krazy Glue,'' one of his doctors explains. ''Medically graded Krazy Glue.'') A first attempt failed. In preparation for a second, he was kept in bed for two weeks, hopped up on steroids, which made him hallucinate.

In September 1992, he had the Gamma surgery, which eventually obliterated the AVM. That December, the paralysis in his face suddenly cleared up. Soon, he recovered his balance. Miraculously -- modern-medicine miraculously -- he was cured. ''It was like 'Alice in Wonderland,' '' says Lapine. ''Bill went down a rabbit hole and came back out.''

After the radiation, Finn experienced a year or so of unprecedented serenity. ''This was the time that I felt I had the new brain,'' he says. ''A new way of thinking. Simplifying, not being cynical. All these embarrassing things to say that are actually true.'' Winning the Tonys had already brought him a feeling of ease, he adds, a sense that he no longer had so much to prove. But surviving his ordeal ''doubled and tripled'' the feeling of contentment. Friends confirm the change. In younger days, they say, Finn was known for a certain fierceness -- quick temper, blazing eyes, brash self-assertion, roaring ego. But his trip down the rabbit hole ''sort of humbled him, made him a little more gentle,'' says Mary Testa, who plays a panhandler in ''A New Brain'' and has known Finn for more than 20 years.

''He's still the same Bill, but not as ego-driven, as megalomaniacal,'' she adds. ''Those were always endearing qualities, but he was always slightly impossible. And it made him a little more possible.''

Before he got his new brain, Finn says, ''The littlest things used to bother me. I'd stand at the elevator and curse it.'' He laughs. ''I would curse the conversation at the elevator. Now I thought: 'Everything's wonderful. The elevator's taking its own time, and don't rush it.' Nothing irritated me. I was dancing around the city.''

Finn discusses this part of his story with acute discomfort. It is certainly nothing the man who wrote ''Falsettos'' could, or would, have described. ''I sound like an idiot,'' he keeps interrupting himself to protest. ''I think this makes me sound a little like a doofus.'' But Finn is no longer the man who wrote ''Falsettos.''

After the radiation, ''I felt like a totally new person, given a second amazing chance,'' he says. Before, ''I had always felt either superior or inferior, outside normal interaction. And in some way, my delight with life allowed the barriers to come down.'' For the first time, he adds, ''I felt a part of the human race.''

He crows uproariously at the mere thought, then grows serious again. ''All during the hospitalization,'' he says, tears coming to his eyes, ''I expected to die. I thought people were just joking with me, and lying to me, and putting on a good face. But after the radiation, I felt----.''

He half rises, blinking hard. ''Could we take a walk?''

Finn leads the way through mazy corridors to the stage of the Newhouse, where the director and choreographer, Graciela Daniele, is patiently overseeing the actors' first day on the set. Finn sits near her to watch as Chip Zien, playing the children's entertainer -- a scary-saccharine frogman named Mr. Bungee -- bounds out of televisionland and into a hospital room where Gordon has been contradicting his mother. Hopping on and off Gordon's bed, Mr. Bungee admonishes Gordon in song to mind his manners: ''Be polite to all your cousins,/Even those that you think/Couldn't really be related./One day you may require their lung./Forget how they were when they're young./You may recall a childhood slight./But always, always, always be polite.''

''A New Brain'' follows Gordon Schwinn from his collapse into the pasta through a highly stylized treatment and recovery; into that narrow narrative framework are woven flashbacks, fantasies, inner monologues, even hallucinations as Gordon, his mother, his lover and his friend Rhoda cope with the crisis. Though death lurks in every scene, much of the material is comic.

The show began as a sudden spate of creativity during Finn's recuperation. ''I would get to the middle of one song and it would suggest another. I was in a groove. The music had a pop feel that I didn't find irritating.'' In other words, words sung by Mr. Bungee toward the end of the show, ''What once seemed boorish and hokey/ Now seems incredibly okey-dokey.''

The first song he wrote was ''I Feel So Much Spring,'' the song that Gordon is wrestling with as a ''A New Brain'' starts, and that in its completed form ends the show. As the new songs flowed out, Finn would periodically phone Ira Weitzman, associate producer of musical theater for Lincoln Center Theater, and bellow, ''Let me play you this!''

''He would put the phone on top of the piano and sort of scream-sing,'' Weitzman recalls. ''You could hardly hear the words, but the melodies were soaring.'' After months of phone calls, Weitzman asked Daniele to visit Finn's studio.

Daniele had directed the initial, pre-Broadway staging of ''Falsettos'' at the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and Finn contributed lyrics to her shows ''Tango Apasionado'' and ''Dangerous Games.'' A small, vigorous woman who radiates maternal energy, Daniele recalls that at the time of that visit: ''Bill had maybe 40 songs. No structure, no plot. He said, 'These are things I was thinking about when I thought I was going to die, and I think it's a revue.' And I said: 'O.K., but I don't think so, I think there is something more important. There is a life experience trying to be told.' ''

A series of readings and workshops followed. For a while, Finn thought in terms of ''a musical documentary'' with ''only the facts'' of his illness. But as he and Daniele worked the material over, the show came to be less about a medical ordeal and more about creativity, less about physical than artistic survival. Eventually, Daniele suggested asking Lapine to help with the book.

It was a logical thought. The last major show Finn tried without Lapine, ''Romance in Hard Times,'' took him much of the 1980's to create, then vanished without a trace after a brief, thankless run at the Public Theater in 1989. ''I get stuck,'' says Finn, explaining the process he refers to as ''lapinizing.'' ''Lapine gets me unstuck.''

The three refined the material. Lapine invented Mr. Bungee; the medical information grew less accurate and more funny. As Lapine suggested, a song about using walkers was written, tried, then thrown out. But the life-affirming ''Spring'' song stayed. ''If you try to articulate what the show's about,'' Lapine admits, ''it's so cliched. Smell the flowers. But what makes it unique is that it is told through Bill's voice.''

Now that the show is in previews, Finn says he finds it ''a little embarrassing'' to be exposed without all the protective armor his old irony and sarcasm provided. Similarly, some audiences may miss the prickly ambiguities of his earlier work. ''I don't think 'A New Brain' is without spikiness,'' he says. ''But it's tempered. The lyrics -- I was no longer afraid to say simple things simply. You can be rueful and dark and ironic and say these simple things cleverly,'' he adds. But to let a song flow directly from the heart is harder. ''I don't know that I could have achieved this in earlier days.''

Originally published in The New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1998.

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