Giving Way to Then (Fun Home)

At 8:00 tonight, the original production of Fun Home will play its final performance on Broadway.

It’s the right time for it—the show lasted for a year and a half, which is a solid run. This was never the sort of show that was going to have some sort of record-breaking performance, and in some ways it’s nice to see it end before replacement casts come in (this was a show much more connected with its original cast members than most, probably due to its more intimate nature).

All the same, it’s a shame to see it go. Even if the show itself was realistically never going to run more than a few years, it’s the exact sort of show one likes to see on Broadway. If we treat Broadway as a physical space defined by the works that exist within it, Fun Home was the type of show that just made that physical space stronger. Even if it wasn’t a show you would choose to see, it was good to know that something of that artistic ambition and real-world values was a part of Broadway.

Fun Home is, ostensibly, a memory play. Coined by Tennessee Williams to describe his own Glass Menagerie, a memory play exists primarily within the character’s, well, memories. The story unfolds as their recollection of past events in a more unconventional, stylistic manner than what is generally traditional for American theatre.  Certainly this appears to apply to Fun Home, a musical that is almost entirely through-composed about Alison Bechdel’s recollections of her father, and delivered in a way that plays with narrative structure, time jumps, and deliberate elision of specific memories.

But there’s a crucial difference in Fun Home that I think separates it from a true memory play. The nature of a show being from the vantage point of a character’s memory is that it necessarily calls the events of the play into question, as the “truth” of a scene is limited to what the character may choose to remember. A memory play toys with the idea of unreliable narrators and memories that can’t be trusted, and Fun Home rather noticeably avoids that. The first scene of the show is indicative of how memories work here—notice how Bruce mentions hauling in the box of junk from Mr. Gibbon’s barn, and when Alison recalls the same event later in the scene, she has to correct herself—“you were so ecstatic when you found it in a yard sale—no, no, wait, in Mr. Gibbon’s barn”.

In other words, the scene makes it clear that the memory is the correct version of events, irrespective of how Alison remembers it. This is reflected throughout the piece, as Alison’s vantage points for various scenes are written texts and physical objects—a piece of silver, a childhood diary, a college letter—physical manifestations of immutable events. Alison thus exists on the periphery of these events—an observer peering in to make sense of what happened. In a sense, it’s the inverse of a memory play. Where a memory play is a defined character creating uncertain memories, Fun Home is an uncertain character finding herself within defined memories.

I remember seeing Fun Home for the first time, almost a full year ago. It was a vivid semester for me, such that it’s hard to focus on that specific memory without a flood of others rushing in. It was my second year as a theatre major, having dropped out of film school to hesitantly pursue it the year before. It was my first semester as the music theory tutor for my school. I remember taking Intro to Makeup, which ended up becoming an unexpectedly formative class for me. I remember taking Acting II, and through it forming a very deep bond with one of my most valued friends. I remember meeting for the first time three people that would become uniquely special to me in ways I could never have predicted, and I remember the continuous work of rehearsal for the fall musical (The Addams Family), underlying all the other events such that the semester feels ensconced within the temporal reality of the production.

And of course, I remember flying up to New York for one day to see Sydney Lucas’s final performance in Fun Home.

It’s hard to describe the extent to which, as a college student in Arizona who lives with his parents, this was something I never thought would happen for me. The idea of impulsively flying to New York to see a Broadway show was so far from the realm of possibility it never even occurred to me as something I could ever do. But then the announcement that Lucas was leaving the show came, and an offhand thought about trying to go see it turned into an actual consideration. I remember talking with friends during makeup class about it, slowly convincing myself of the possibility, and my friend in Acting II telling me that ultimately, no matter the drawbacks, this was one of those things I would never be able to do again, and for that reason alone I should go for it. A few days later, after I found lodgings with a friend who attended NYU and my dad discovered a voucher at Southwest airlines, the trip suddenly became a reality.

I had only recently discovered Fun Home, a few weeks before the Tony awards that summer, but it had rapidly risen to be my favorite musical by the time the trip happened. I remember friends in Addams rehearsals telling me how jealous they were that I was going. I remember the flight to New York (two stops there, and one stop and a plane change on the way back), and getting lost on the way to Union Square, where my friend’s dorm was located. I remember the constant anxiety that something was going to happen to prevent me from seeing the show, and I remember the final relief when it washed away as I sat down in my seat. I remember the audience immediately applauding when Lucas made her entrance (and then awkwardly applauding Cerveris when he made his). I remember being stunned by the final set transition into the house as Emily Skeggs and Lauren Patten enter, crystallizing in a moment the truly bizarre nature of the Bechdel house. I remember the light swooping by Michael Cerveris and Beth Malone during “Telephone Wire”, simulating the passing traffic throughout the song. I remember Malone holding back tears as she delivered the final line staring at Lucas. And I remember the entire cast coming out after bows, along with Sam Gold, Jeanine Tesori, and Lisa Kron, hugging goodbye to Sydney Lucas.

The character of Alison (or “Big Al”, as the fan colloquialism goes) is of course the key to what makes Fun Home work. It was a choice that Kron and Tesori fought for against strong objections (Tony Kushner notably thought the character should be cut altogether), and it uniquely crystallizes what the core of the show is. It’s easy to imagine an adaptation of Fun Home that works as a literal, chronological representation of the events in the book, or a version where Alison acts only as narrator, never involved with the narrative at play.

But instead, Kron and Tesori make the choice to center the entire show around Alison as a character, and use the events of the narrative as a means of catharsis for her emotional arc. It’s a fictionalized arc, to be sure—there’s no real indication that the real-life Alison Bechdel went through a similar arc when writing Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, but in many ways the clear distinction between Alison Bechdel the real-life cartoonist and Alison the fictional character works in the show’s favor. At any rate, the show arises out of her perspective—of facing the task of writing about her troubled relationship with her father and her own coming out as a lesbian, and coming to terms with the parallels she finds between her and her father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide at the age Alison is at the start of the show.

One of the main musical
building blocks in the score

What characterizes Alison’s arc is that she pointedly refuses to engage with the events she observes, constantly distancing herself with ironic comments or observational captions. It’s not a repression of the events displayed, but a shield that prevents her from truly connecting with important parts of her life. In the score, Tesori utilizes precise, carefully-chosen voicings that make the most out of sparse arrangements and minimalist construction. Out of these comes a major musical building block of a repeated pair of three-note figures, with the bottom note rising a whole step then stepping down again. It’s a musical ambiguity that extends out of Alison’s precise uncertainty when she begins writing, and this sort of extension applies to much of the score. Note how Helen’s piano scales appear as underscoring in the opening number, highlighting the connection between the scene and Alison’s memory.

Helen's scales underscore "Opening: It All Comes Back"

The opening number is itself an impressive feat of laying out many of the musical ideas that reoccur throughout the show—in particular the ones that occur as motifs for both Alison and Bruce. These motifs appear first in precise, carefully defined patterns—both Alison and Bruce are masking their own insecurities with a forced order, Alison in her drawing and Bruce in his restoration work. But it unravels rapidly, both as the historical reality of Bruce’s life takes hold, and the present emotional arc for Alison becomes more and more pressing, and finally results in a free-flowing explosion of chordal material as Bruce sings “Edges of the World”, and Alison is finally forced to confront her father’s suicide.

The formalism breaks down: First image from "Opening: It All Comes Back",
Remaining images from "Edges of the World"

The formalism of the opening number returns in the finale, but this time with a new sort of flowing quality—where the opening had been in a strict 4/4, “Flying Away” flits between 6/8 and 5/8, carrying with it a gentler, freer quality. As Alison faces the memory she tried in vain to avoid, she learns how to use it. The memory ceases to be a burden and instead becomes a tool for change and progression.

It’s almost unnecessary to say that seeing Fun Home live completely changed me, but it truly had a unique impact coming in the midst of such an eventful semester. It wasn’t my first time in New York (I had gone twice as part of high school drama trips), but it was my first time going alone. For whatever reason, where I had been intimidated and almost terrified by the city during the high school trips, I managed to completely fall in love with it on my own, finally able to approach it on my own terms. The Fun Home trip started a series of New York visits, and instilled in me a desire to live in the city someday—a monumental step forward from even a year before when I approached the idea with a sense of dreadful inevitability. It also finally cemented for me the need to work in theatre: where before I was oscillating between theatre and music, still uncertain of my goals, in that semester I became completely and totally confident that theatre was the right place for me. Suddenly there was a tangible reality to my dreams—an actual destination to work towards rather than a hypothesized possibility. And then, of course, some three months after I saw the show I came out as bisexual. And while I can’t credit the show with that realization, it’s difficult to argue there’s not at least some implicit connection between the two events.

Ultimately, Fun Home is about the self. It’s looking at who you were to help inform who you are and where you need to go. And it’s important, as we commemorate its closing, to think about the importance this show carried. It was the first all-female writing team to win the Tony Award for best score. It broke new ground in queer representation, telling a story from a vantage point that is criminally underfed in the today’s media. The effect the show has had on LGBTIA+ people throughout the nation, particularly the youth, cannot be understated. And I think it’s important that we not let that fall away. Fun Home shouldn’t become some deserted avenue of history, representing a possible path of progression that was never taken. It’s important that we take the steps it gave us and keep going—to better ourselves as individuals, as a people, and as a society.

As the final performance tonight is consigned to memory, let us engage that memory and create works that will be for future audiences what Fun Home was for us.