Alison, at 43, is a successful cartoonist looking to piece together the story of her past—trying to connect her memories of an exacting father in love with beauty and literature and restoring their home to the secrets of her parents’ marriage—her father’s affairs with young men, some underage; her mother’s knowledge of them—with her closeted father’s death—suicide?—at 43, four months after she came out to her parents as a lesbian. Part detective story, part exorcism, part portrait of an artist as a young and not-so-young lesbian, Fun Home plays out in three timeframes. Alison, a 43-year-old cartoonist, searches for a way in to the story about her relationship with her father; “Medium Alison”, a 19-year-old in her first year at Oberlin, is flushed with coming out, meeting a girlfriend, and sharing this all with her family; “Small Alison”, a nine-year-old girl, offers glimpses of life with two rambunctious brothers working the family funeral home (the Fun Home of the title), a mother who is both protective and distant, and a father whose interest in beauty leads him to tyrannical perfectionism and a life of secrets.
Alison: There’s you
And there’s me
But now I’m the one who’s forty-three
and stuck
Based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir, it took seven years for book writer Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori to recraft Bechdel’s narrative into a musical. The challenges were multiple: The book is recursive, looping back to several central events in Bechdel’s childhood and early adulthood; the book is refracted through intricate re-readings of books that Bechdel’s father, an English teacher, gave her; and the book is essentially told through images, nearly entirely or as Kron describes the book, “There are no scenes in the book of Fun Home. There are moments in time. There’s a frame where a kid is eating a bowl of cereal and a parent is leaving and then you have Alison’s narrative voice saying, ‘While this was going on, this is what was actually happening.’” And as Kron observes: “That’s not a scene.... It was extremely difficult to figure out what those characters would say.”
Alison: Caption: My Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town.
And he was gay.
And I was gay.
And he killed himself.
And I…became a lesbian cartoonist.
“It was very, very arduous,” says Tesori of the process of adapting Fun Home for the stage. The team had to find a way to turn cells-not-scenes of the graphic memoir into a theatrical event that could unfold with momentum and surprise. “How is it going to be in a long arc instead of these bits and pieces?... It took a full five years to really figure that out.” Kron and Tesori knew the piece would have a narrator, and were drawn to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Tesori kept a quote from the play in her studio: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” (The answer in the play is, “No. Saints and poets maybe.”) Kron and Testori conceived of Fun Home as a memory play, using the triple time signature for Alisons—at 9, at 19, at 43—to show Alison the artist looking back to move forward. Ultimately, the team melded scenes and characters, remade the chronology a bit, streamlined without losing the texture of the three times and people that make Alison. Bechdel herself—whom the team refers to as “T-RAB”, or The Real Alison Bechdel—finds the play’s poetic license effective, saying, “even the things they made up feel true to me.”
Alison: Caption: My dad and I were exactly alike.
Caption: My dad and I were nothing alike
Caption: My dad and I... My dad and I...
Tesori’s broad ear and interests were key to the slippage of time—and tone—for the musical’s particular blend of 60s / 70s pop homage (some Jackson 5, some Partridge Family) alongside the score’s aching ballads and dissonant harmonies of characters who never quite connect. Bechdel—who agreed to sell the rights to the musical assuming if it was bad, at least, as a play, not many people would know about it—was stunned at how well the transformation from book to musical was. She’d almost forgotten about the process when she received the script and a CD of demos for the musical. “That first moment of hearing it: I just felt it was this great gift. I felt seen... I wonder if it is because of the way two registers collide. In a musical, you have drama and music. In comics, writing and pictures. They operate differently, but with the same power. I guess I was expecting it was going to be some sort of lighter, frothier version of my life. I didn’t understand that a musical could actually go deeper, could cut sharper. I didn’t know that.”
Alison and Bruce:
I want to know what’s true, dig deep into who
and what and why and when
until now gives way to then
“People say to me—as a complement—that this is so much bigger than just a story about a lesbian,” reflects Kron on the audience reception for the play. “And I always say that this is exactly the size of a story about a lesbian.” Showing a lesbian in her artistic struggle and family messiness and childhood that was joyful and terrifying in turns was a first on Broadway, where Fun Home was the first musical to feature a lesbian main character. In evoking the ways, at 43, Alison’s self-image is still part innocent 9-year-old and part idealistic, full-crushed college student—and part middle-aged woman, deciding who she’s going to be, Bechdel, Kron, and Tesori offer something vital to the people who identify with the specific queerness, ruralness, or alt-culture of the setting. They offer something just as life-giving to people who don’t identify with any of those biographical details. Kron goes on to reflect on straight people’s response to the strength of their self-identification with Alison’s struggles and insights: “ What I realize that people are trying to say to me when that say that is that something has happened to them where their idea of the world has gotten bigger...You walk back out onto the street and then suddenly all these people are visible to you, that had never been visible before.... And that is the point of theatre, to make us visible to each other.”