Broadway Teacher’s Workshop
Day # 3 Fun Home Critique
Susan Frank
“...Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This quotation from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy says it all. If you ever needed to process your dysfunctional nuclear family, “Fun Home” might help you begin to face this possibility. This musical stretches the definition of the art form, and brings it up a notch. It tells the story of a young woman’s quest to understand her family and its eclectic dynamics, it shares her discoveries of her own and her father’s sexuality, and then takes one art form (a graphic novel/memoir) and transforms it into another one. There are three talented actresses that play the protagonist at different stages of her life, a small child, a teenager in college, and then the adult cartoonist looking over her life trying to make sense of it through her cartoons and captions. It is a small cast, which includes the parents, the three children, the father’s male lovers, (all played by one man) and Allison’s first lover in college, as well as the adult Allison, the graphic artist overseeing the whole show throughout.
There are so many beautiful production elements that make this show amazing. The stage is small, and it is played in theater in the round. You are never far away, no matter where your seat is, from the facial expressions, the movements, the thoughts of the actors. They move as if they were moving in real life, and you believe you are in their home, seeing their discoveries for the first time with them. It works on so many levels, and you can also tell that the actors love it as well. They move gracefully and naturally on-stage, they move set pieces around, the children and mother dust the furniture, as the father told them to, waiting for people to consult the father at the funeral home, or waiting for people to visit the historic home they live in. They sing only occasionally, not like other musicals where every other moment you are just waiting for the next song. However, the theater in the round works for these songs as well, where the singers are moving around singing right to you, as if they are desperate for you to understand this part of the story they are sharing with you. They can’t help but make you feel that the song and story is just specifically for you, personally, no one else.
Another design element that works extremely well are the trap doors in the floor. There are big pieces, like the huge casket, that appear and disappear from the floor. The only big “dance” number is when the casket reappears with all the children in Partridge Family-like costumes and microphones singing and dancing on top of the casket. There are other key moments, when the piano appears and disappears into the trap door, and is replaced by the bench/car.. It is impressive how elegantly the actors all move around the stage, knowing where the holes are. This element works on a profound level as well. It is a metaphor for the cartoons Alison is creating and finding captions for, which help her and the audience with the discoveries about her family origins and secrets. It shows how Alison is struggling with memory and how it is elusive and difficult to capture. Finally, It shows how her father has compartmentalized his life into understandable boxes: he is a professional, then he has this ideal of a perfect family, and then he carries on this secret life of affairs with men.
This show is only a hundred minutes long and runs without an intermission. It is efficient, without seeming rushed or forced in any way. This is a design element as well, and between the concept of the show with captions and cartoon moments, the fact that the set pieces come and go so effortlessly adds to the efficiency of the show. The other design element that goes with this is the use of the lights that make squares and rectangles on the floor of the stage. This shows the moments when the cartoonist is thinking through the story, and she freezes the frames to find the captions. The beautiful quiet lighting that changes during these intense moments, like when the father leaves the children in the New York apartment; it is haunting, it is wise, it is moving. It uses elements from musicals, like songs, dances, and lighting to tell the story, but somehow it causes the audience to think on a much deeper level. It reads like a straight play with some songs added to it.
The acting in this show is superb. It is seamless, you are never aware that they are acting. In the post-show discussion the actors shared with us that they were going to Orlando on an early flight the next morning to give a performance of Fun Home in support of the families of the victims of the Orlando Shooting. The child version of Allison draws during the show, and the older version of Allison shared with us that that evening she was writing words like, “Peace, hope, Love, we are going to help people” which had us all in tears. It is clear that every actor in this show has transformed themselves into the person living these intimate moments of discovery. The directing helps this to come to fruition for the audience, but the actors have worked very hard to make it seem effortless.
These actors are more than portraying characters from a memoir. They are carrying a mission for unconditional love, a message of non-judgment and tenderness towards all life choices and sentient beings. When the teenage Allison sings reverently and humorously about “changing her major to Joan”, in her underwear no less, I wept. She is so earnest, she is so divinely creating innocence in first love, she is discovery and ephemeral bliss itself. When the adult Allison goes for a car ride with her father, trying desperately to share her reality and her sameness with her father, and coming up short because he just can’t go there, you are in every awkward conversation you ever tried to have with a loved one. It is subtle, but the repetition in the song, the fact that they never actually look at each other, the way they shift in their seats in this car carries every emotion you could imagine in your heart.
Between the innocence of the voices that are singing these tender songs, the lightness of every artful decision: the small chamber orchestra, the use of the stage, the thoughtful lighting, the evocative script, the small venue, the real-life look of the characters and their costumes, all of this contributes to a total catharsis for the audience at the end of the show. No one cannot be moved by this show. “Fun Home” creates empathy, it creates non-judgment in its artistry, acting and direction. It is the quintessence of poignancy, and it cares for its characters and its audience in its openness, its humor, and its balance between gravity and life affirmations.
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