Have you ever been to a musical where you personally knew the characters of the story?
No, I don't mean the cast. I mean the actual characters portrayed in the play. I'm about to find out what it is like. Let me explain...
Some of you may be familiar with the lesbian cartoonist, Alison Bechdel. Until 2006, she was known chiefly as the artist responsible for the comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For." Then, in 2006, her autobiographical graphic novel, "Fun Home," was released. The book was a stunning success, both popularly and critically, and was named Time's Book of the Year that year. The book deals with Alison's relationship with her father, Bruce, a funeral director in her tiny, Pennsylvania town, and an English teacher at the local high school. Bruce was, as it turns out, a closeted gay man. He was also a mad perfectionist whose consuming passion was the restoration of the family's Gothic revival mansion. Bruce died in 1980, while restoring another house he had purchased -- he had crossed the busy road to dispose of some brush he had cleared, and was killed when, as he attempted to cross the road back to the house, he stepped in front of a Stroehmann's bread truck. Alison makes a pretty convincing case that his death was, in fact, a suicide, based on some discoveries she made in the aftermath of his death (he had apparently been discovered to be having an affair with a local teenage boy, and law enforcement was closing in).
It is a stunning book, well deserving of every accolade it has received. And now, the book has been made into a musical, which is playing at the Public Theater in New York, and was reviewed (quite favorably) in the New York Times this weekend.
So here's the thing: that little Pennsylvania town Alison grew up in happens to be the same one I grew up in. And her father was one of my high school English teachers. I was a year behind Alison in school. I worked alongside her mother (who also features prominently in the book) in the local summer stock theater for several summers. I attended numerous cast parties in that Gothic revival house her father restored. One of her two younger brothers was in the same Boy Scout troop I belonged to. Our respective families have associations that go back more than a century and a half. So seeing this musical promises to be a positively surreal experience!
[font size=4]Family as a Hall of Mirrors[/font]
[font size=3]‘Fun Home,’ a New Musical at the Public Theater[/font]
[font size=1]Cast members in “Fun Home,” adapted from the Alison Bechdel memoir by the playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori, at the Public Theater. [/font]
[font size=2 color="gray"]By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: October 22, 2013[/font]
At moments during “Fun Home,” the beautiful heartbreaker of a musical that opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater, you may feel you’ve developed quadruple vision, and not just because your eyes are misted with tears. It’s also a matter of those three actresses playing the same character at different ages, a device that usually feels strained in theater, but here comes off as naturally as breathing.
Then there’s that fourth party, someone who is so clearly cut from the same genetic cloth that you have to blink whenever he shares a stage with any or all of those actresses. It’s Daddy, portrayed in searing style by Michael Cerveris, a person whom his daughter, the middle-aged Alison (Beth Malone), will be living with and reincarnating forever.
The title of “Fun Home,” adapted by the playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori from Alison Bechdel’s wonderful graphic memoir, is a cozy abbreviation for the small-town Pennsylvania funeral home that Daddy runs. It also refers to the Bechdel family’s Victorian house, which Daddy is endlessly restoring with a perfectionist’s tyranny.
But, more broadly, this musical’s setting is one of those halls of mirrors, both familiar and unique, where most of us grew up. It’s a place where the images of who you once were always linger, and where, no matter how hard you try, you can’t look at anyone else without seeing some of yourself. Such is the curse and the comfort of belonging to a family.
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I can't even imagine how it would be to see the life of someone you knew portrayed like this.
I hope you have a great time!
If you feel like it, a follow-up post about your experience with the play would be lovely.
Just got home from seeing the musical, "Fun Home," based on Allison Bechdel's graphic memoir, with two other childhood friends who also knew the real people behind the story. The experience was so overpowering I hardly know where to begin. I am not generally given over to superlatives, but I can tell you without the slightest reservation that this was the closest thing to absolute theatrical perfection I have ever experienced. The acting, both individually and in ensemble, was, to a person, brilliant. From the three actors who portray Allison at ages 10, 20 and 43, respectively (or, as the playbill lists them, "Small Allison," "Medium Allison," and "Allison"
, to the two who played Allison's parents, Bruce and Helen, all delivered performances that were simply stunning. Judy Kuhn, as Helen Bechdel, was like seeing Helen herself on the stage. Both she and Michael Cerveris, as Bruce, managed to capture nuances of vocal inflection and gesture for their respective characters that are instantly recognizable to anyone who knew Helen and Bruce -- it is hard to conceive of how they managed to pull this off given that both were gone when the production went into rehearsals.
The musical is essentially through-composed. There is some spoken dialogue, but even t hat is accompanied by music. The score, with its complex harmonies and intricately interwoven contrapuntal themes, perfectly conveys the many complex, concurrent psychodramas that were in play in the Bechdel home.
The story is told by showing 43-year-old Allison as she is in the process of writing/drawing her book. For each new vignette, Allison, as narrator/author, announced "Caption," and then proceeds to say the caption that was used in the corresponding scene in the book. But it also shows her struggling with captions -- starting to say one, then discarding it and saying something else. Through it all, 43-year-old Allison is looking on, sometimes reinterpreting through her adult eyes, and others still struggling to make some kind of sense of it, on as "small Allison" or "medium Allison" experience the events.
I have to say also that the section that shows Allison's sexual awakening as a college freshmen, and the brilliant and memorable number that goes along with it (titled, "I'm Changing My Major to Joan" , is one of the most tender and sensitive treatments of sexual awakening I've ever seen on stage or on film.
As the show unfolds, as an audience member, you simply ache for all the characters involved. Even with Bruce, although it takes a pretty unflinching look at his foibles, it does so in a way that does not in any way demonize him. With all of its aching beauty and searing emotion, though, there is just enough humor to make it all bearable. I had tears streaming down my face through much of the play, but there was also plenty of laughter through the tears.
It sounds wonderful. And I'm so glad you got to go and experience this.
