‘Fun Home’ sets standard in musical theater
Poignant and emotional, play draws in audience with great intimacy
Bruce Bechdel is supposed to be eloquent. He’s the kind of poetically gifted academic who says what he means and means what he says, who can grasp the soft luster of old silver, then find the perfect Hemingway quote to describe exactly how it makes him feel.
Yet this man, who has such a way with words, is a mystery. By the end of “Fun Home,” the exquisite, heartbreaking musical at Theatre Under The Stars through May 28, Bruce remains tragically unknown to everyone in his life, including his wife, his children, his lovers and himself. Bruce becomes the ultimate stranger in modern theater, an existential enigma to rival Godot.
“Fun Home,” based on the graphic memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, is about Alison’s obsessive search for the truth about Bruce.
Growing up, she saw him as a domineering figure, confident and pretentious, the kind of father whose presence in the house didn’t always suggest love. Later in life, when everything began to unravel, he cowered into secrecy instead of reaching out to the daughter who might, of all people, understand him. Then, he was gone.
Alison’s memoir was an investigation into what happened and why, an emotional whodunit rendered through childhood memory clashing against adult interpretation.
The musical adaptation (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron) began at New York’s Public Theater with a proscenium staging, then moved to Broadway to an inthe-round production that was unusual for a musical. That staging, designed by David Zinn and directed by Sam Gold, opened up the Bechdel home and invited audiences in. The production’s ability to pop scenery in and out from the ground and make the play feel at once intimate and three-dimensional wasn’t just a technical marvel — it served the thesis that “Fun Home” is primarily a memory play, and the stage’s vanishing act became a symbol for Alison’s struggle to grasp the past.
Now, as “Fun Home” grows into its third incarnation with its first national tour, the musical returns to a traditional format without losing any of its potency. The production, employing multiple levels and layers on stage yet retaining a clarity and minimalism to suit its story, illustrates both the magical potential and frustrating limits of memory — the way the mind places certain objects in the spotlight while everything else melts into the dark, the way a moment you long for can vanish, no matter how many times you return to it.
Alison announces early in the musical that her father, who was gay, killed himself, then she became a lesbian cartoonist. She looks back to the puzzle of her youth, asking, “Who were you, Father?”
If musicals are by definition expressions of yearning, then “Fun Home” is a modern masterpiece in conveying that sentiment. Alison yearns — “I want, I want, I want,” she sings — to know her father. But he is like a phantom, floating just out of reach.
Actor Robert Petkoff gives us tiny glimpses into Bruce’s interiority. He offers a wry smile, a longing glance at himself in the mirror. Then Petkoff, an excellent withholder of information, yanks that glimmer of truth away. His jaw hardens, his broad shoulders tighten back up. His voice, golden and childlike a moment ago, is now gruff. When he hands a cartoonish drawing back to Small Alison (a charming Carly Gold), calling it “halfbaked,” it was as if you could hear Alison’s heart break. This man, we fear, may just be impossible to peer into.
I hesitate to call works of art great or momentous too often. But there is no other way to accurately describe what “Fun Home” has done for musical theater than to say it has set a shining new standard for intimacy onstage. Without any intermission, the musical builds and builds, sucking you into its vortex of loves and fears and wants, then ends in one of the grandest emotional climaxes I’ve seen that is also, from a technical aspect, subtle and small.
Having seen the play in-the-round at Circle in the Square in New York, then again at the Hobby Center, I was reminded of not just the existential mystery of “Godot” but also the haunting depictions of memory in the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Like Charlie Kaufman’s examination of fraught remembrance, “Fun Home” employs its artform in such an elegant manner that you cannot imagine the story told in any other form. But “Fun Home” remains a more delicate, painterly and warm portrayal of longing viewed through hindsight.
The new cast for the national tour (Kate Shindle sparkles as Adult Alison) rose to Bechdel’s challenge and filled these characters with a wide palette of expressions. After the story reached its devastating zenith, I looked around the audience to see how many others also were crying.
None of the other teary reactions were a surprise, nor was the overwhelming sensation of having glimpsed a life that had the potential for so much more. The feelings of both bliss and sorrow proved authentic. “Fun Home” had, once again, done us in.