Fun Home

“Fun home” is short for “funeral home” which is where Alison Bechdel, the author of the graphic novel “Fun home: A Family Tragicomic” grew up. It was her father’s business. The memoire took seven years to complete. It was published in 2006 and become a big success holding the first position on the New York Times Best Seller list for two weeks. In 2013, Fun Home was made to an off-Broadway musical by playwright Lisa Kron, composer Jeanine Tesoria and director Sam Gold in Public Theater. The Broadway production opened in 2015 in The Circle in the Square Theater, was nominated for Tony Award in 12 categories and won 5 of them, including Best Musical.

The story features Alison, a 43-year-old lesbian cartoonist, reminiscing about her childhood and relationship with her dad who was a closeted gay man in a small town in Pennsylvania and killed himself while she was in college discovering her own sexuality. She is trying to trace the reasons for his tragic ending and bond with him by drawing her memoires.

We see three Alisons on stage: present day Alison (originally Beth Malone, but it was her understudy Nicole van Giesen in the performance I attended), youngest Alison (Gabriella Pizzolo) and middle Alison (Emily Skeggs). As Alison remembers scenes from her childhood and college years, we see them coming alive on stage. Sometimes she watches quietly from the corner bent over her drawing desk, sometimes she follows the characters from the past as if she is trying to say something to them. She comments on their actions, and emotionally relives every joyful, sad, confusing or embarrassing moment: growing up in the funeral home with her two brothers, first romance in college, coming out to her parents.   

Alison tries to put pieces of her life together and steps into her memory herself, towards the end, in one of the most powerful songs of the show, Telephone Wire. Shortly after her coming out she visits home and introduces her girlfriend Joan (Roberta Colindrez) to her parents. Alison goes for a ride with her father and is trying to connect with him in light of the new circumstances of her self-discovery. But the talk doesn’t go as smooth as she hoped it would. She didn’t realize it was her last chance at the time.  

What makes the effect of this song even stronger is the emptiness of the stage. The bench in the middle of the slowly rotating circle functions as a symbol for a car. Alison and Bruce (Michael Cerveris) sit on it, stare in front of themselves, their faces brightly lit. In this emotionally unbearable moment, where time bends and the grownup woman tries to have a conversation with the memory of her dad, the scenic and costume designer, David Zinn, steps away and leaves the stage to the actors. Though his stage design for the show is very intricate for the most part.

I should mention first that the Circle in the Square has a thrust stage where the seats are located around the stage with the first rows on the same level as the floor of the stage. The orchestra, which consisted of seven musicians, is located on the stage as well. This layout is supposed to give the audience a more intimate experience and works for Fun Home perfectly. As the play progresses, we see characters moving furniture around: some of these motions are purely technical, and some are part of the scene, as in the song Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue where the entire family cleans and polishes their historical house.

A lot of the set changes happen through seven trap doors in the floor. Those trap doors gave an opportunity for furniture and people to appear and disappear and were also used as grave-like holes in the final song by the dad, Edges of the World. He is in the new house he bought for restoration but the stage is empty. He walks between the rectangular holes in the floor singing about how everything in this house is falling apart, meaning, of course, his own life.

Michael Cerveris leads us gradually to the catastrophe of his character when, in the beginning, we had no idea what he was hiding. Bruce is introduced to us for the first time in the scene where he brings home two boxes of objects he picked up at somebody’s house. He sings passionately about damask linen and a silver kettle that he pulls out of the box. We see how the antiques excite him and then we see how Alison pulls out the same silver kettle from her “box of crap” and starts the painful journey into her own past.

It seems like Victorian furniture is what defines her parent’s house for Alson. David Zinn and his team did a great job finding authentic chairs and lamps and little chachkies lying on the surfaces, which were a bit difficult to see in detail from the upper rows. These little clusters of clutter seemed somewhat lonely and loose on the empty stage at times, especially in the beginning where the audience is supposed to appreciate the beauty and richness of the house’s décor. But towards the end when we see the house through Joan’s eyes, it truly looks spectacular: every piece of furniture brought on stage is placed perfectly, with three chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, the perfect decorum of a household cracking from the inside.                       

The Lighting design by Ben Stanton is worth mentioning. The colorful squares on the floor during Come to the Fun Home number really made it. What started as kids playing at filming a commercial for their family funeral home was transformed into an ultimate fun and joyful childhood memory. Alison with her brothers dancing in and around the coffin probably became the happiest moment in the show.

This scene has a “twin scene”, Raincoat of love where light design plays a crucial role as well. Alison was watching a sitcom on TV when her farther came around and turned it off with anger. Helen picks up a fight with him, to which little girl’s reaction is to shut her ears with her hands and to start humming the tune from the opening of the TV show about the happy family. Tacky colorful projections of daises come down from the ceiling and start dancing on the floor. The orchestra hits the silly tune and the entire family starts to dance and sing cheesy lyrics: “Everything’s all right, babe, when we are together!”

The light effects being utilized are not only for the kid’s fantasies. When Alison calls her parents from college we see them on a bare stage, each in a frame of light. This indicates the distance between them, both geographical and emotional and is also reminiscent of a frame in a graphic novel.

The other element of the musical’s origin is verbal: often opening the scene, Alison says “caption” and gives it a sort of a title, bringing us back to the fact that she is drawing a cartoon about her family. Her captions are attempts to grasp the past and to make sense of it. Sometimes it seems like they are “messages in a bottle” which she tries to send to people in the past. “Dad, I had no way of knowing that my beginning will be your end!” – cries Allison trying to yell over her parents fighting. It becomes apparent to us that she tries very hard not to blame herself for the death of her father.         

It’s remarkable that even though the play is about the relationship between Alison and her dad, the character of Helen, her mom, beautifully portrayed by Judy Kuhn, is poignant. It comes together in her final song, Days and Days, one of the most touching and beautiful songs of the show. It uses lyrics of Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue in the beginning only, with no chorus of little kids to support her. It is impressive how one song is capable of telling the entire life story of a character trough delicately woven lyrics and music. I guess this is the true power of musical theater: to not only bring out emotions but to tell complex stories in the duration of a song.