The Loose Screws, Hot Flames and Infinite Joy of William Finn

When I met William Finn in 2005, at work on “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” he was seated in his office in front of what looked like a trash heap but might have been a desk. On a couch nearby, one of his collaborators sank slowly beneath a rising tide of detritus; when she spoke, Finn kept overwhelming her too. Bearlike and blustery, garrulous and appetitive, he grabbed at every idea floating around the room, just as he grabbed at insane rhymes and jangly melodies in writing his sometimes hilarious, sometimes haunting (sometimes both) songs.

The opportunistic lyrics were what first attracted me. By the time of “Spelling Bee,” Finn, who died Monday at the age of 73, had already made a name for himself with the “Falsettos” trilogy, his take on a family (and thus a society) shattered by disease and disaffection in the early years of AIDS. Yet despite the sadness of that story (the book is by Finn and James Lapine), the melodies are mostly jaunty and the words outrageously playful. In the show’s opening number he rhymes “four Jews” with “loose screws.”

Listen to a selection of Finn’s songs on Spotify:

As his later work kept digging deeper into dark themes, the rhymes got wilder, as if he were very hungry, and there was just one shrimp puff left on a plate at the other side of a party. In “A New Brain,” a show about his own near-death experience from a stroke in 1992, it was not unusual for him to match chewy words like “Thackeray” and “whackery,” even though they made little sense together. What they made instead was a tickling kind of Gertrude Stein spark, followed by an existential whack. Your ear was delighted while your brain was befuddled, which was perhaps the point because, he seemed to ask, does anything in the world make sense?

Forcing apparently incompatible things into messy proximity, if not alignment, was a Finn hallmark, and, I eventually came to think, his signal virtue. Almost all the liaisons in “Falsettos” — a nebbish and an Adonis, an angry wife and her shrink — are misalliances, and yet through suffering and, yes, bitching, they form a kind of family in defiance of fate. Fate interested Finn deeply; he loved the way the teenage competitors in “Spelling Bee” keep drawing words that showcase their weaknesses, like “lugubrious” for the boy with “a rare mucus disorder” and “cystitis” for the lisper.

“It’s like ‘Survivor’ for nerds,” he told me.

He would know. Even his non-narrative revues and song cycles — especially the exquisite “Elegies” — are about outcasts and sufferers who prevail while they can. They don’t mope, they flame. At a baseball game, Marvin, the “Falsettos” nebbish, tells Whizzer, his unfaithful lover, to “sit in front of me / I wanna see the bald spot!” because “it’s the only physical imperfection that you’ve got.” In “A New Brain,” the mother, angry at her son for being sick and gay, cleans his apartment by throwing away all his books. (Hence: Thackeray / whackery.)

It is only after acknowledging and withstanding awfulness — shame, grief, mortality — that Finn permits a glimpse of happiness. In the title song of the revue “Infinite Joy” he describes that emotion with the words “Goodness is rewarded / Hope is guaranteed / Laughter builds strong bones.” Near the end of “A New Brain,” he summarizes what we’ve just seen as “Stories of coping / Of hope against hoping,” before having his stand-in, a composer who has been through the wringer, sing, “I have so much spring within me.”

It’s a pun — the character originally wrote that song for a frog on a kiddie show. That’s William Finn all over: turning a joke, like the one played on all of us, into joy. I’m not sure the phrase makes sense, but it’s perfect anyway: He was hope against hoping.