Theatre in Review: Fun Home (Circle in the Square Theatre)

	Judy Kuhn, Oscar Williams, Zell Steele Morrow, Sydney Lucas, Michael Cerveris. Photo: Joan Marcus

About halfway through Fun Home, Alison, the narrator, tells it to us straight: "I leapt out of the closet -- and four months later my father killed himself by stepping in front of a truck." Musicals don't come more honest, or devastating, than that. Based on Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir of the same name, Fun Home, now on Broadway after opening at the Public Theater last year, is a memory piece in which each recollection packs a powerful sting of longing and loss, an excavation of one family's life that arrives at long-buried and terrible truths. Out of the most challenging materials, some enormously gifted people have fashioned a lyrical musical drama the climaxes in a stunning series of knockout punches.

Lisa Kron's libretto moves quickly to establish the highly unconventional facts of life in the Bechdel family of small-town Pennsylvania. Bruce, the father, teaches English at the local high school -- and he also runs the family business, a funeral home, or "fun home," in the family lingo. In addition, Bruce is a house-proud antique collector who, working alone over a period of years, has transformed the family residence into a showplace. The opening number, "He Wants," delivered by Helen, Bruce's long-suffering wife, establishes his detail-obsessed approach to domesticity with witty exactitude. The number is sung in anticipation of a prominent local visitor, but, seconds after it is over, the family receives another guest in the person of a handsome young man named Roy. Oddly, the Bechdel children are familiar with him, while Helen is not, a fact that sets up a barely perceptible, but unmistakable, undertone of tension. The reason for the tension becomes clear a few minutes later, when Bruce invites Roy into his parlor and makes a pass at him.

A middle-class family with a closeted father: You could certainly get a drama out of that alone. But we already know that Alison Bechdel is a well-known lesbian cartoonist, and the musical quickly becomes the story of a father-daughter relationship founded on lies and evasions, one that can only end in a tragic letting-go. For, as Alison begins to understand herself and claim her identity, she unwittingly forces Bruce to see himself clearly for the first time -- a vision that proves unbearable.

Kron deftly unfolds this story in three simultaneous time frames, with three different actresses playing Alison at different ages. Sydney Lucas is astonishing as Small Alison, who, even at the age of ten, is beginning to grasp that she isn't the pink-clad princess that her father wants her to be. When Bruce yet again makes her wear a barrette, saying it will keep her hair out of her eyes, the little girl quietly growls, "So would a crew cut." A second later, spying an "old-school butch" delivery woman, she has a stunning epiphany in the number "Ring of Keys." She doesn't know why the woman fascinates her, but she can't take her eyes off her. A moment of recognition that will speak to just about every gay and lesbian member of the audience, it is the beginning of a crack in the father-daughter relationship that cannot be repaired.

Medium Alison is a freshman at Oberlin College, trying to get up the nerve to attend a meeting of the gay union. After plenty of hesitations, and many assertions that she is probably asexual after all, she falls into the arms of a self-confident young woman named Joan. The transformative effect of Alison's sexual initiation is vividly dramatized in the wryly funny morning-after number, "Changing My Major." In it, Alison becomes a fearless explorer of the terra incognita of her girlfriend's body; as delivered by Emily Skeggs, you feel that it is possible for someone to explode with happiness. If it did nothing else, Fun Home would be notable for these two sequences. We get plenty of plays about gay men, but, in my experience, no Broadway show, let alone a musical, has ever explored the intimate experiences of a young lesbian woman, especially with such clarity and humor.

Sadly, Alison's newfound happiness will have a destabilizing effect on the delicate balance that constitutes her family's existence. She writes a coming-out letter to her parents, which is received with a mixture of silence and patronization. Bewildered, Alison confronts Helen, who tells her that Bruce has been seeing men -- and sometimes boys -- on the side for years, and that the family has lived always on the precarious edge of scandal. Alison, who has long felt that there was something about her father that she couldn't quite pin down, suddenly realizes she doesn't know him at all.

Alison brings Joan home to meet the parents, an act that triggers what is surely one of the most powerful climaxes in modern musical theatre. Helen, who has remained a terse, watchful presence, pours out a lifetime of regret in "Days and Days," an account of a marriage made up of one accommodation after another, until one day there is nothing left. Judy Kuhn's delivery of this sorrowful song cast a profound hush over the theatre at the performance I attended. Until this point, Beth Malone, who plays Alison as an adult, has mostly stayed on the sidelines, offering running commentary. (Casting a gimlet eye on Bruce and Roy together, she cracks, "It's like a 1950s lesbian pulp novel. 'Their tawdry love could only flourish in the shadows.'") Now she steps in for Medium Alison in the urgent "Telephone Wire," in which she goes for what will be her last car ride with Bruce, an event over which hangs a terrible question: Would things have turned out differently if they had managed a truthful conversation?

Throughout, Michael Cerveris fully inhabits the role of Bruce, a man who has built for himself a life he doesn't really want, who tries to fill the hole inside with frantic activity, and who desperately wants to believe he is a bohemian intellectual and a bit of a roué. (There is nothing more melancholy in Fun Home than his repeated assertion, "I still might break a heart or two.") In the eleven o'clock number, "Edges of the World," he struggles to hold onto these illusions even as rivers of rage and self-hatred pour forth; his carefully constructed personality comes apart in full view. Bruce is one of the most psychologically complex characters to be seen in a musical in years, and Cerveris captures him in all his pitiful, preening glory. This moment fully exposes the terrible paradox on which Fun Home is founded: As Alison puts it, "I had no way of knowing my beginning would be your end."

In this song and elsewhere, Kron proves to be a natural lyricist, using indirection to reveal carefully hidden emotions and a kind of plainspoken poetry that is never maudlin. Even in the show's comic numbers, such as the title tune, in which the Bechdel kids act out an imaginary TV commercial for the family business, or "Raincoat of Love," in which Small Alison reimagines the Bechdels in terms of a Partridge Family-style sitcom, Kron's way with words is unfailingly right. Beginning with the quizzically ascending reed notes that open the show, Jeanine Tesori's score, ranging from the haunting "Maple Avenue" refrain ("Welcome to our home on Maple Avenue/See how we polish and we shine") to the kicky '70s pop beat of "Fun Home" and "Raincoat of Love" to the sheer art-song beauty of the three final numbers, represents her very finest work.

Sam Gold, directing his first major musical, gracefully creates a world where one time frame spills into another, supplying any number of memorable moments: The adult Alison suddenly stunned to see her ten-year-old self standing right in front of her; Alison in her studio, watching her long-ago family fill the stage; Alison burying her face in her hands in embarrassment at the college gaucheries of her younger self; the mischievous Bechdel kids caught hiding out in one of Bruce's coffins; and a strange, oddly gripping moment when Bruce calls Small Alison into the mortuary to do him a small favor, a scene that ends, not for the last time, with Alison wondering what her father is really about. In addition to those already mentioned, there are fine contributions from Zell Steele Morrow and Oscar Williams as the young Bechdel boys, and Joel Perez as the many young men in Bruce's life. In a class by herself is Roberta Colindrez as Joan, whose casual, candid manner sends breezes of honesty through the Bechdel household. (She is especially amusing, staring at a volume by Colette sent by Bruce, and noting that her father never sends her novels by lesbians.)

The decision to refashion the Off Broadway production, which played in a conventional proscenium configuration, to an in-the-round staging for Broadway has only increased Fun Home's intimacy, which is all to the good. David Zinn's rethought scenic design makes excellent use of a series of elevators, which can conjure up a team of musical television stars and, in one especially gripping moment, the Bechdel parlor, in all its fussed-over glory. There's an especially telling moment near the end, when the house vanishes bit by bit, leaving Alison only with her memories. Zinn also provided the costumes, which are especially well-suited to each character in each time frame. Ben Stanton's lighting delineates eras and emotional states with seamless skill. Kai Harada's sound design, given the difficult task of dealing with the circular configuration, achieves the transparency and intelligibility that the show demands.

For all the darkness in Fun Home, humor is never far away and it ends on a note of reconciliation with the past that is strangely moving. All three Alisons come together, and we finally see how they add up to the whole woman. At the beginning of the show, Alison, trying to write about her family, is terribly blocked. By the end, she owns her past and is free to describe it in all its humor and sadness. If that isn't a triumph, I don't know what is. -- David Barbour