Fun Home proved to be a sheer delight — well, maybe not a total delight since it ends with the suicide of the heroine’s father (Bechdel subtitled the original graphic novel A Family Tragicomedy, which about sums it up), but a great show that combined comedy, tragedy, romance, emotion and music in full measure. Musically it’s the best non-Sondheim new musical I’ve heard in decades — though the rapid-fire Sprechstimme of Tesori’s music and Kron’s lyrics is rather Sondheimesque — and dramatically it manages to make a shifting time sense work thanks to the casting of three separate actresses as Alison: one as an eight-year old girl (either Taylor Coleman on the “red team” or Isabella Pruter on the “orange team” — there wasn’t a handout with the program to tell us which one we were seeing in this performance, but the actors playing Alison’s two brothers were similarly dual-cast), one as a college freshman at Oberlin discovering herself, and in particular her sexuality, for the first time (Claire Adams), and one as a middle-aged woman looking back on her past (Amanda Naughton). The adult Alison is shown writing and drawing the graphic novel and trying to make sense of her past so she can communicate it to her readers. Alison Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania (though she calls it something else in the show), in a large Victorian home her father Bruce Bechdel (Jim Stanek) has restored. Bruce is an English teacher in the local high school — the college-age Alison jokes to her college friend (and first lover) Joan (Alexis Louise Young) that of course she was in her dad’s English class — as was everyone else in town — and he also inherited the Bechdel family business, a funeral parlor. (The title Fun Home is not only a play on “Fun House,” it’s also a pun on the abbreviation “Fun. Home” out of which Alison and her two brothers do a musical number, supposedly a commercial for the establishment, which is done in the style of the Jackson 5.)
Alison’s mom, long-suffering
housewife Helen Bechdel (Bets Malone), is a peripheral part of the story and
one wonders about what she was
like and how she and her daughter related (a story the real Bechdel addressed
in a second graphic novel, Are You My Mother?, published in 2012 and dealing largely with Alison’s
therapy sessions over her relationship with mom), just as one wonders what
became of the two other Bechdel kids. We’re given the story — or at least the
outcome — at the beginning, and the principal action turns on Alison’s
coming-out at Oberlin (where there’s even a “Gay Union” — and yes, it’s nice to
be flashed back to the days when our community had a name instead of just a preposterous set of initials) and
the sheer sense of freedom and liberation she feels. She does make one big mistake, however: rather than come out
to her parents in person, she writes a letter home stating that she’s now
realized she’s a Lesbian, she’s in love with a woman (she even brings her
girlfriend Joan in a set of scenes that mark the show’s adroit mix of comedy
and drama) and she feels freer than she ever has now that her girlhood distaste
for dresses, her love of male clothes and her tomboy-ish wish to join her dad
in male stuff and get him to play “Airplane” with her (reprised at the end —
this show is full of reprises and some of the themes in Tesori’s score get
repeated so often they practically count as Leitmotifs), as well as her father’s nicknaming her “Al,” all
has come clear to her. This letter strikes her family like a bomb: dad is in
shock and it’s from her mom that Alison learns that her father has been having
affairs with men throughout their marriage.
It reminded me of Duke Ellington’s
portrayal of the Emancipation Proclamation in his Black-history symphony Black,
Brown and Beige, with the young slaves
(represented by powerful, biting, open trumpets) eager for freedom and
desperate to grant its opportunities, while the older ones are fearful that
being liberated is just going to deprive them of the meager privileges they’ve
worked so long for, including the right to rest and relax once in a while.
Alison and her dad both may be Queer in the sense of attractions to their own
gender, but what Alison sees as a source of liberation and pride her father
sees as deep-seated shame, and it leads him to take his own life by stepping in
front of a truck on Highway 150 (where years earlier he’d taken Alison and had
her feel the road vibrations as the trucks passed) four months later. Fun
Home did hook one of my pet peeves,
Bisexual invisibility — Alison clearly regards, and wants us to regard, her
father as “Gay” even though he was able to sustain a heterosexual marriage and
father three children, and in one college scene she receives a book her dad has
mailed her, a novel by Colette, and Joan has a what-was-your-dad-thinking speech referencing Colette’s affairs with women and
referring to her as a Lesbian. (It was all I could do to restrain myself from
shouting into the theatre, “Colette wasn’t a Lesbian! She was Bi!”) But that
was a minor glitch in an incredibly enjoyable show — I loved every minute of it
and told Charles after it ended, “This was the birthday date we should have had two weeks ago.”
