A memory play with music, based on a graphic autobiography, Fun Home has a title with a double meaning. A gay woman remembers her family’s funeral home and the places she and they lived in as well as the home where she found her place and love in life. Her father becomes her major focus along with importantly finding her identity in college with her first love. At the start, Allison (likable Andrianne Hick) in her studio above the main stage area removes from a box objects that recall her father bringing them home from an auction. He (authoritative David Mann), an embalmer by business and English teacher by profession, takes over the scene as he later does the play. Bruce Bechdel’s introduced as a voracious lover of literature, history, the arts who loves his three children but can’t shake his sexual obsession with males. Acting their typical boyish selves, Brinley Degwert and Tanner Grant as Christian and John join sister Allison in the funeral home, even playing dead in a casket. This introduces the ever-looming future of death. Dad typically doesn’t like the diversion from work to do but he seems to have made himself at home with it. Doesn’t Allison remember him as flirting with it? It seems closer to him than his wife Helen (Kristin Carbone, effective as a long-suffering, wasted talent). The dramatic center places Allison at Oberlin College. There she recognizes she is gay and plunges into sex with classmate Joan (stalwart Skyler Rosenthal), who inspires song. Allison (a rightly emotional but physically miscast Mollie Posnik) writes a letter of revelation to her parents that they “get around” really answering. It takes her visit home with Joan in tow to learn from her almost despairing mother about Dad’s sex life. Allison now predicts that her new beginning in her life will be her father’s end. Bruce at last defends himself in a masterful pivotal speech by David Mann. The falling action of Allison’s drama of remembrance ensues. Finally, Allison recalls seeming to fly over a new home which will land her where she is as who she is. Like most of the flashback scenes, it is illustrated by projections. In almost every other case, appropriate minimal props including furniture work. Dina Perez’s costuming does a good job of characterizing ages, period, occupations, as well as being germane to adolescent Allison’s discomfort with dresses. Karla Hartley earns commendation for handling well the many shifts of time and emotion in Fun Home. They’re relatively easy to follow, however complex. Most of the audience I was in seemed very involved emotionally. And all seemed to grasp that the show is an important first for gays and having so many all the women involved in writing and producing it. My own feeling is that it didn’t explore its topics, with all its structural moving about, any better than a realistic, cogent, chronological flashback drama with musical interjections might do.
