Seeking a gay father in the shadowland: Alison Bechdel's FUN HOME at Theatre Raleigh

Angela Travino as Alison Bechdel, in Theatre Raleigh's FUN HOME

FUN HOME
4.5 stars (out of 5)
Theatre Raleigh
theatreraleigh.com
Through Sept. 5

Longtime fans of iconic lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel know that she frames Fun Home, her autobiographical, Eisner Award-winning 2006 graphic novel, in the cautionary myth of Icarus and Daedalus.

But after seeing the regional premiere of its 2016 Broadway musical adaptation, in the sensitive, discerning Theatre Raleigh production that closes this Sunday, my thoughts turn to Orpheus and Eurydice instead.

The variations on that myth are numberless – as many as there have been mourners, over millennia. Still, a few things remain consistent, for the most:

In it, one precedes the other into the dark world below. In great grief, the second gains the power to leave the land of light and life, and seek the absent in the shadowland. Sometime in that sojourn they catch a glimpse or more of the beloved, and though they cannot ever bring them back, something, in the quest, is yet redeemed.

Sometimes, a single memory without pain makes the forbidding trek worthwhile – that, and a life, the seeker’s own, permitted to resume after an extended pause for a journey underground that gave no guarantee, ever, of return: a little death, in and of itself.

Bechdel’s character finds both in her search for answers among the artifacts of her childhood, decades after her father Bruce’s bewildering death.

We learn how crucial those artifacts are early on, when Bechdel’s character says she needs “real things to draw from because I don’t trust memory.” In that, daughter and father are alike; wary of “romantic notions of some vague long ago” in the opening song, “It All Comes Back,” both characters are ultimately drawn to “dig deep into who / and what and why and when / until now gives way to then.”

Going in, fans of Bechdel’s famous “family tragicomic” should know that playwright Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori’s 2016 Tony Award-winning take unavoidably simplifies the book’s complexities – and loses many of its mythic, literary and art-world nuances in the process. In all fairness, it would take more of a miniseries than a musical to do otherwise with such a densely-layered text.

But as a work in which an adult artist explores her lesbian coming of age during the same period that her closeted father could find no way forward and apparently killed himself, the musical version of Fun Home stands in its own right as a document of the historical queer struggle to navigate our culture’s often treacherous and changing currents.

It is tragic and telling that, even though daughter and father live in the same place, the site of the family funeral home cited in the title, they truly don’t live in the same times. The single generation that separates the two, and their radically differing experiences of the time in which they live, not only divides and estranges them; it spells the difference between life and death for one.

Kron and Tesori’s lyrics and score are uneven in places, yet they frequently ambush us with sharp insights on a difficult childhood in a family marred by secrets, denial and abuse.

Travino (in shadow), Sarah Smith & Ben Jones

In the poignant chorus of “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue,” Tesori's diminished fifth brings a cutting longing to the words the wife and children sing: “Everything is balanced and serene / Like chaos never happens if it’s never seen.” That occurs before a background counterpoint all but subliminally conveys an unstable father’s threat: “Stay very still and / maybe we’ll please him / Make one wrong move and / Demons will seize him.”

Needed comic relief comes when the kids (Rebecca Clarke as small Alison, and Ben Jones and Jude Stumpf as her brothers, Christian and John) band together to make a slice of 80s pop music in their imaginary TV funeral home commercial, “Come to the Fun Home.”

Darker tones arise in “Helen’s Etude,” Tesori and Kron’s tangled fugue of denial and desire. In it, Bruce (edgy Christopher Gurr) seduces a former student supposedly hired for yardwork – a trope so timeworn that the adult Alison (crisp Angela Travino) embarrassedly compares it to “a 1950’s lesbian pulp novel: ‘Their tawdry love could only flourish in the shadows.’”

Averi Zimmerman & Travino

When a teenage Alison flees these far-too-close confines and discovers her true sexuality as first-year student at Oberlin College, actor Averi Zimmerman winningly conveys the awkwardness, terror – and true delights – of first love as she sings of “Changing My Major” to her new girlfriend, Joan (given a needed calm and grounded read here by Faith Jones).

And the crowd cheered at “Ring of Keys,” Kron and Tesori’s joyous song of recognition, when Clarke’s Young Alison first sees a delivery woman – an “old-school butch,” bringing supplies to a local luncheonette – and gains an early vision of a possible new way to be in the world.

At points, adult Alison’s discoveries in her journey through the past surprise her. Though her father traveled throughout Europe during and after his time in the military, she marvels that a very small circle encompasses his mostly self-circumscribed life in the song, “Maps.”

But more than once, other sudden insights challenge the adult Alison to the core. After a flashback to her parents fighting prompts her childhood self to generate a desperately happy – and hallucinatory – song and dance number, “Raincoat of Love,” the oldest Alison shakily tries to steady herself: “It’s only writing, only drawing. I’m only remembering something, that’s all.”

Even darker revelations follow. After her mother (Sarah Smith) warns college-age Alison, “Don’t you come back here. I didn’t raise you / to give away your days / like me,” the adult Alison arguably tastes a moment of true damnation as she replays the final conversation with her father in the harrowing song, “Telegraph Wire.” Looking back, the adult Alison keeps repeating, “Say something to him,” adding that it “doesn’t matter what you say / just make the fear in his eyes go away.”

Christopher Gurr, as Bruce

Travino’s riveting performance here conveys the stakes as a last chance for connection – and possibly redemption – with her deeply troubled father slips through her fingers, and the needed exchange, though spoken, is never heard. That fate is clearly evinced in Bruce’s subsequent, metaphorical solo, “Edges of the World.”

On her trip into the underworld, the only one that Alison can ultimately save is herself. In “Flying Away,” the finale and fugue for three voices, the young, older and adult Alisons integrate their experiences as they joyfully sing to one another. 

All but literally they lift themselves out of the dark and the past on a redeeming memory, one without pain: of the metaphorical wings her father helped her begin to craft during an early childhood game of airplane – resilient, colorful pinions made out of imagination, a deep-seated ethos, strong self-knowledge and acceptance, and love.

Wings are useful when exiting the shadowland. Bechdel’s are strong. In Fun Home, they show us how to ascend as well, in a production that is strongly recommended.