Theater Review: Fun Home – Beech Creek Comes to New York

By Richard Lipez

Who would have thought that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, one of the most moving, brave-hearted books of the last ten years, would somehow evolve into one of the smartest, most rousingly heartbreaking musicals of the decade? But this is what has happened at the Public Theater in New York City, where Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music), along with a perfect director and cast, have turned Bechdel’s graphic memoir about one deeply troubled Beech Creek family’s life in the 1970s into a memorable theatrical event.

Bechdel has said in interviews that before it happened she couldn’t imagine her book as a musical. Yet in the hands of the talented and sensitive pros who took on the task, the complex saga of Alison’s lesbian coming out and her closeted gay father’s emotional struggles and eventual suicide reveal a dramatic arc that’s as full of musical possibilities as any stage work. All the best American musicals are about dark things, from Carouse l(wife beating) to West Side Story (gang warfare) to Gypsy (crazy mother) toSweeney Todd (bloody vengeance). Thwarted dreams and violent death in Beech Creek fit right into that history.

Kron’s book is a model of selectivity and compression, starting with the early scenes and songs about the Bechdel kids, Alison, Christian and John, coping as best they can growing up in the family funeral home with an angry, obsessive father and an unhappy mother who escapes from a bad marriage into music and theater. The kids pop in and out of caskets mischievously, and they do a hilarious mock TV commercial for the Bechdel Funeral Home. A later droll song-and-dance routine, “Raincoat of Love,” is a take-off on the Partridge Family that’s delightfully funny and woefully sad at the same time.

Three actresses play Alison at different ages, with the grown-up Alison ever-present to watch over and sometimes comment on the younger Alisons, and to offer up “captions” to vignettes of critical family events. One is “Caption: Dad and I grew up in the same Pennsylvania small town. And he was gay and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist.” Another is “Caption: my dad and I were exactly alike.” A few minutes later, it’s “Caption: my dad and I were nothing alike.” The main difference between father and daughter is, Alison, after an awkward start, is perfectly happy to discover that she is gay, and Bruce, unable to free himself of anti-gay prejudices, is stuck in a life of secrecy and shame.

It’s the youngest Alison who gets to sing one of the most poignant and powerful songs in the show, “Ring of Keys,” about her fascination with a butch delivery woman who triggers an early unformed erotic desire. This song sung by a child casually and effectively refutes the dumb argument that sexual orientation is a “choice” people make. It’s the college-age Alison who gets the sunniest and funniest song in the show. “I’m Changing my Major to Joan,” about Alison’s first lover at Oberlin, is a thrilling anthem to sexual discovery and joy, and it had the New York audience cheering the night I was there. I’d like to think that in Beech Creek it will also receive at least polite applause.

The most wrenching songs in the show are sung by Michael Cerveris as Bruce Bechdel and Judy Kuhn as Helen. Helen’s “Days and Days” is a searing hymn to the monotony of marital entrapment. Bruce’s “Edges of the World” is the one of the most hair-raising theater songs I’ve ever heard about a man at the end of his rope. And there’s a terrific duet, “Telephone Wire,” with Alison in a car with Bruce, as she tries over and over to connect with her lost and desperate father, the miles rapidly slipping by and time running out.

There are nine performers in Fun Home (including Joel Perez playing several of the young men Bruce snuck around with), and a tenth formidable character is David Zinn’s wonderful set. It’s nicely fluid in suggesting a variety of times and places, and late in the show it opens up to show how the Victorian house Bruce has been feverishly restoring appears to Joan, who with Alison is visiting from Oberlin. Acres and acres of Victorian wallpaper have never looked so lovely or so profoundly disturbing.

The Public Theater limited-run production of Fun Home was to have closed November 2, but its enthusiastic critical and audience reception has led to an extension. The closing date is now December 1. And chances are, that won’t be the end of this amazing piece of American theater.

(Richard Lipez writes for many publications, including The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Record. He is a Lock Haven native)