The Odd Couple

I had the great pleasure of seeing a good friend perform the role of Felix Unger in “The Odd Couple”a while ago. It is, of course, a very funny play, and all of the actors did a wonderful job of portraying the characters. As funny as it was, I found it to be really poignant and sad, as I was reflecting on the story later.

Here is Felix, a husband and father for 14 years, who is now completely unmoored and drifting after being cast off by his wife. He admits to his many faults and he feels absolutely terrible about what has happened. He is still that husband and father, but he is now thrust into the position of homelessness.

Home is so much more than an address. It is an identity. The place we call “home” in this life is meant to image the place that we are going to.

Felix comes to the home of his friend Oscar, a divorcee himself, and Oscar offers to let him move in, creating an “odd couple”. These two attempt to create a “family” but it is a disaster before it begins. The humor is drawn from the truth. These two men are very different, and although it is never stated, there is an effort to show Oscar as a male figure and Felix as the more feminine. He goes about trying to make a home, keep it a home and find the peace of place that he had in the heart of his family. His type A intensity and all of his anxieties make for many humorous moments. He never stops lamenting the brokenness of the home that he left, and there is nothing right about this new situation. He is lost and he is trying to find himself, but he never will because the self is a creature made for marital union, and cut loose it drifts and can’t settle.

He constantly talks about how he failed in his marriage, and he shares the joy that he found in his family with a couple of girls that Oscar has asked to come over for dinner. He shows them pictures of his kids and his wife, and they all end up crying over their losses. Gwendolyn is a widow, and Cecily is divorced. Felix' heart is still home with his wife.

The situation with Oscar devolves into something untenable, and Felix realizes that he needs to leave. Once again, “divorcing” from a person that he cares about.

At the end he is moving upstairs with the girls, another level of loss and another step in the wrong direction.

Felix was a man who had been living a life of union, and as that union is broken he becomes less

than the part of the marriage that he has lost. His “better half” was more than half. She held his heart.