Copyright The Boston Globe
A new production of “Fun Home” from The Huntington, running in Boston from November 14-December 15, arrives in the thick of these developments. Director Logan Ellis says the political and cultural context is vital to the current production. “It’s a different time, and that makes it a different show,” Ellis says. “Ultimately, we’re trying to look at this through this next moment that we’re in.” “We’re doing a play about gays and lesbians, and the questioning of gender presentation is a big part of this play. Gay and lesbian sex happens [in the story] and is sung about and proclaimed about. And these are topics and discussions that go against our dominant culture at the moment.” Even from the beginning, “Fun Home” was viewed as an unlikely underdog. While Bechdel’s memoir was a bestseller and won a number of awards, it has faced attempted book bans, drawn the ire of lawmakers and been the subject of controversy on college campuses. So the idea of transforming it into a successful Broadway musical seemed like a wild stretch of the imagination. But its creators, the writing and composing team of Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, along with director Sam Gold, saw its potential. Not only is the story a psychologically rich exploration of a dysfunctional family, but the fraught subtext coursing underneath the relationships offered a promising foundation for songs. The play weaves in and out of key moments from Alison’s childhood in a small Pennsylvania town, where her father Bruce ran the local funeral home and worked as an English teacher, and her freshman year at Oberlin College. In the show, three actors portray Alison. Sarah Bockel plays the celebrated lesbian cartoonist trying to puzzle out the questions and confusions of the past. Maya Jacobson is the wide-eyed 19-year-old Alison blossoming in college and awakening to her sexuality. And Lyla Randall plays sweet young Alison, who hates dresses, loves to draw, and sings the signature anthem “Ring of Keys,” an ode to a swaggering butch delivery woman. Fussy and tempestuous, Bruce (Nick Duckart) nurtures his passion for restoring homes and collecting antiques, while Alison’s beleaguered mother Helen (Jennifer Ellis), an actress and singer, has spent years embittered by Bruce’s anger issues and affairs with men. Once at Oberlin, Alison starts dating a confident, experienced fellow student activist, Joan (Sushma Saha), who opens her eyes to her sexuality and queer identity. The older version of Alison is 44, the age her father was when he killed himself, and she’s trying to piece together the mystery of her father’s suicide, make sense of their relationship, and grapple with the connective tissue that bonded them — that they were both gay. “For [college-aged] Alison, she’s like, ‘I am my own person. I am different from you,’” Ellis says. “And of course, that backfires because his coming out reveals that they are closer than she thought." After years of therapy and self-reflection, she moves towards re-examining their relationship, despite the slipperiness of her memories. “She’s come back around and is like, ‘I’m ready to entertain that there’s more in common about us than I originally thought, and I want to open myself up to that, because I think that that’s gonna help me have a deeper understanding of myself,” Ellis says. That attempt at confronting and trying to heal old family wounds, Ellis says, “powerfully resonated with many people in America, and that’s been an incredible legacy of this work.” Indeed, “Fun Home”’s legacy extends to the path it helped paved to Broadway for other musicals centered around queer characters and LGBTQ themes, including Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop,” “Jagged Little Pill,” “& Juliet,” “Some Like It Hot,” and “The Prom.” And “Fun Home,” too, followed in the footsteps of trailblazing shows with gay themes and characters like “La Cage aux Folles,” “Rent,” William Finn’s “Falsettos,” “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and more. While “Fun Home” feels more urgent than ever, Ellis has cautioned his cast and creative team that they could “pay the price to put this up onto the stage right now” with audiences who may feel skittish about some of the sexual content. “[The show] has a lot of components that could trigger people. Injected into that is a little bit of the politics of the moment.” When it comes to depictions of sex and intimacy, there’s been an ongoing conversation in rehearsal, Ellis says, “about where the boundaries are, what is too far or too much for the audience to handle, and what is going to honor the source material [of the novel], which showed and described human bodies and queer sexuality.” “There’s this tension between wanting to be truthful to all the lived experiences that are being brought into the room, but then also wanting to protect everybody from potential backlash.” Having directed other queer-themed material that received some “incendiary responses, threats and hate mail,” Ellis says rehearsals with the cast and creative team started with “acknowledgement of…the fear in the air.“ He hopes the company draws inspiration from “the generations of artists and activists who have…dared to tell stories that exist outside of a patriarchal norm.” In this turbulent moment for LGBTQ rights, Jacobson emphasizes the life and death stakes at play in the true story and the outside world. “It’s a show about a gay man committing suicide and what happens when you stay in the closet,” she says. “And we’re not shying away from any part of this story.” Loretta Greco, the Huntington’s artistic director, says she chose to program “Fun Home” this season because the “why now?” question felt more pressing than ever. “We’re in a moment where people have rolled back in their compassion and their understanding,” she says, when there’s “less and less safe spaces for the queer community and especially the queer youth community.” While some audiences will have the “experience of seeing [themselves] reflected on stage and finding empowerment and community and ally-ship in that,” Greco says, others will “get to walk in someone else’s shoes and grow from the experience, to remember that we’re a lot more alike than we are different and to grow in our compassion for others.” “That’s the beauty of art. It’s not a speech. It’s not a rant. It’s not agitprop. It’s not a rally. But it is an act of joyful communion, and it gives you an opportunity to stretch people and help people grow. And what better way to do it than through a great story and music? Music is the fastest way to somebody’s heart and soul.” FUN HOME
