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.

Prodigal Son

John Patrick Shanley returns to the Manhattan Theater Club with the play Prodigal Son, written and directed by him. His play Doubt: a Parable opened in November of 2005 in Manhattan Theater Club, was transferred to Broadway, toured around the country and the world and brought his author many rewards including Pulitzer Prize fro Drama and Tony Award for Best Play in 2005. The play was adopted for the screen and made into a movie in 2008, Doubt, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis.

Prodigal Son continues to explore some of the topics of Doubt. It’s an autobiographical coming of age story about a troubled youth in a religious educational facility, Thomas More Preparatory School in New Hampshire in the mid 60s.  It starts with Jim Quinn (Timothée Chalamet) arriving to school and talking to its director Carl Schmitt (Chris McGarry, who starred in Doubt on it’s national Broadway tour).

Jim is a sharp 15-year-old who is outspoken, very well read and passionate. He is also a troublemaker as he constantly starts fights with fellow students, steals and argues about God in religion class. Carl Schmitt has the opposite temper: he is a very reasonable and calm man, who is fearful of God and always follows the rules.  His wife, Louise Schmitt (Annika Boras), accuses him of choosing the path of idealism because of his laziness, “You don’t have to decide anything because ideals do things for you”.  Confronted with Jim, Carl will be forced to make decisions which will affect the young man’s life, and which will “make him,” in the words of Jim. And as much as we root for the young troublemaker, we also pay close attention to the emotional journey of the school director, which might seem very subtle but is equally painful and important for the play.        

In the conversation Carl has with one of his stuff members, Allan Hoffman (Robert Sean Leonard) he mentions that he saw Birds by Hitchcock recently and was terrified by it. The idea of unreasonable, uncontrolled forces of nature turning against people reminds us of the wild personality of Jim, which Carl tries to tame. That’s why he asks Allan, known for being friend and mentor of troubled students, for help. Both the director and professor had their personal mental wounds: Nikola, one of Allan’s students, was trying to commit suicide, for which the professor still blames himself; Carl accidentally killed his son and can’t forgive himself either. How Jim will turn out suddenly becomes a very personal matter to both of them, Jim becomes a symbolic, biblical “Lost Son” for both.

Timothée Chalamet makes a brilliant Jim. He starts out intensely and as the play progresses he fills more and more room with his witty and poetic talk which reaches it’s climax in the dialogue with the school director during the final exam. This is the kind of performance where you truly believe that this fictional person exists and breathes the same air as you do. The magical moment when the text of the play, the character, and the actor merge together while supporting each other, bring the words to life. Every little detail starts to shine and seems meaningful: the crooked tie, the way Timothée walks and hunches slightly.

The costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser were good in the sense that they didn’t destract from the actors. Prodigal Son takes place from 1965 to 1968 and at first I was slightly disappointed when I didn’t see more period specific designs and styling. With the exception of Mrs. Schmitt, everybody was dressed and groomed in a rather modern way, which I came to appreciate later in the play. I am glad the creators decided to go timeless rather then time-accurate in costume designs.

Scenic Design by Santo Loquasto had the same clear and timeless look to it. The majority of the scenes were happening in small, minimalistic sets, which were rolled into the middle of the stage and then rolled away. It all was tied together with the ark in the background and a “doll house” model of a school in it. Bare trees on both sides of it made the stage smaller and cozier providing a feeling of lightness and openness at the same time. Loquasto managed to achieve an atmosphere of a private school in New Hampshire on top of the mountain: you feel trapped in a doll house but at the same time you are surrounded by a great and massively open space, and the beautiful powerful nature.

The sound design by Fitz Patton and original music by Paul Simon gave the play its smooth flow. Music and sound effects were mostly used between the scenes but were much more then just transitions filling pauses. They carried the mood and felt more like the 60s than the visual elements. They were subtle enough to not draw attention to themselves but pronounced enough to be noticed and admired. Like the time when an instrumental piece reduced to just it’s tempo of a ticking clock, lights come up and we see Carl in his office. The massive grandfather clock behind him is soon to stop and he has to rewind it, which starts the scene.

Prodigal Son is worth seeing for good performances, especially that of the talented Timothée Chalamet. It may lack dramatic moments (all of them are happening towards the end and are a little bit jammed together) but even the quiet scenes are charged with energy like a taut spring. The show is very clean visually and feels like a gulp of a fresh mountain air.  

I and You

American Theatre Magazine named Lauren Gunderson one of the most produced playwrights in America in 2015, her play, I and You, received the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award in 2014 and was produced in over 20 theaters nationwide. New Yorkers will have a chance to see this critically acclaimed play in Theater 59E59 directed by Sean Daniels.

I and You opens intensely when Anthony (Reggie D. White) comes to Caroline’s (Kayla Ferguson) bedroom to finish a school assignment on Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Caroline spent months out of school because of her medical condition because of which she is in desperate need of a liver transplant. She communicates with her mother via texts and is not in the mood to spend time with any human being. Anthony is patient and persistent as he passionately talks about “Leaves of Grass” and is eager to share the beauty of the poetry with his partner for the assignment. Besides, the due date is tomorrow.      

Teenagers share their thoughts on family, music and death while bonding over this poster presentation. Caroline is skeptical at first but soon she starts to really appreciate Whitman’s poetry and to trust Anthony with her fears and dreams. At some point she feels so comfortable around him that she puts on her favorite song, jumps onto the bed and starts playing air keyboard. This strong moment of fun and trust is followed immediately by a spasm of intense pain, after which Caroline panics and hides under the blanket yelling at Anthony to stay and to go and then again to stay. This moment of weakness only brings them closer together.

This one-set, two-character play would be a typical adolescent story about friendship and love and fear of death if not for an unexpected twist in the end. I won’t reveal it because some of us like to be surprised at the theater. Some of my friends who I went to see the show with told me that because of this twist in the end they liked the show that much better. I can see how it might work: slowly escalating narration takes a huge jump and right before the end the “eject button” is pressed and a viewer who, might be falling asleep by this time, is thrown out of his comfortable chair, metaphorically speaking.

I and You is a smoothly constructed Trojan horse bearing a secret inside but it’s also a one trick pony. You leave the theater still under the strong impression of the sudden reveal. But was the journey to it that enjoyable? Did I laugh? Not much. And it wasn’t the case where everybody is falling of his or her chairs laughing and I’m sitting there with a straight face, but that nobody was laughing out loud. Neither did I feel particularly moved or nostalgic for my teen years. Even though the dialogues were dynamic, very well paced, and both actors were good, I still had trouble connecting to the play.                  

The Changeling

The Red Bull Theater, where The Changeling is performed, specializes in the plays of Shakespeare and other authors of the Jacobean period of English literature (1558-1625). This is their twelfth season and I am already looking forward to the next productions. I don’t remember the last time when heavy, ornate Elizabethan English was so light on the ears and it allowed me to dive to the core of the story.

This is a story of love and madness, the main heroine of which, Beatrice-Joanna, portrayed by beautiful Sarah Topham, falls in love with Alsemero (Christian Coulson) days before the wedding with her fiancé Alonzo (John Skelley). She asks her father if the wedding can be delayed and pays De Flores (Manoel Felciano), her father’s servant, to kill Alonzo. De Flores is madly in love with Joanna and is ready to do anything for her; even commit a crime. Joanna despises him and every time she sees his face covered in burns she fills with anger and shows us another side of her nature – a neurotic, manipulative madwoman which she becomes more and more as the play progresses.

De Flores repels Joanna so much that she doesn’t want to take her own glove after she dropped it on the ground and the servant picked it up. She furiously tears off the second glove, tosses it to him and storms out. De Flores is left alone with an object from his love. He pulls one glove on his right hand and sniffs the other one with desire. This scene describes perfectly strong affections that one has for another. And even though these affections have different signs of polarity, the essence of these passions is the same, which will bring them together and kill them tragically. 

There is a second plot line to this play, which takes place in a madhouse. It has a comedic tone to it, which balances out the drama in the castle of Joanna’s father, Vermandero. Isabella (Michelle Beck), the wife of doctor Albius, is desired by two young men – Antonio (Bill Army) and Pedro (Philippe Bowgen) who pretend to be madmen in order to get closer to her. Isabella is flirty and giggly with her admirers but she never commits adultery while Joanna sinks deeper and deeper in sin.

To my deepest disappointment Michelle Beck didn’t bring up the character of Isabella to the fullest. She seemed slow and flat yet there is so much potential in this playful and foxy part. Her stage partners, Christopher McCann playing doctor Alibius and Andrew Weems playing Lollio, employee of the doctor, were more successful as comedic elements. Their costumes and manner of speaking to each other aided the comedy, especially when facing the audience instead of each other. The madhouse part of the ensemble seemed uneven and poorly fitted, as if they belonged to casts of different productions but were stitched together by a skillful director.

The minimalistic, entirely black set was beautiful. Three windows with reflecting mirror surfaces in the far wall were transformed into the windows of cells that housed the fools in the madhouse. The simple scenic design by Marion Williams was utilized to it’s fullest and gave actors the freedom to form a sophisticated layout of different places and keep their performance dynamic.

Costumes by Beth Goldenberg were a mixture of modernity and 17^th century nostalgia. Some of them were more memorable than others: the costume of the doctor in which he looked like one of his fools, the animalistic masks of fools, and finally Joanna’s gloves from the scene with De Flores described previously. The gloves were made of lace on the outside and leather on the palm, mirroring Joanna’s double-sided nature. The elaborate and eclectic style of Goldenberg’s designs gave the period play a modern flavor and played well against the black canvas of the stage. The costumes were mostly monochromatic that, combined with the blackness of the set, made the appearance of blood in murder scenes more dramatic. There was a scary realism in these abundant streams of blood.

The Changeling is a great play by itself and the Red Bull Theater Company succeeded in bringing it to the modern viewer. It truly felt like the text itself was the center jewel in the beautiful crown of this production.