Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right saw the musical “Fun Home” on Broadway over the weekend. The story is of a lesbian’s coming-out in the 1970s, complicated by her closeted gay father’s suicide.
And it’s way more complicated than that. Dad is a high school English teacher who also manages the family funeral home, (that the kids have renamed “Fun Home”), and who has relationships with an assortment of the young men over the years. So the play is a detective story, in which Alison Bechdel tries to solve the mystery of who her father, now dead, really was, and how their relationship contributed to the person she is as a 40-something adult.
Like many adults remembering their childhood self and their father, she has an ambivalent relationship with him, particularly since his closeted identity keeps everyone in the family perpetually unsettled.
Ok, so that may not sound like a fun time at the theater, however, it is terrific. It is staged in the round, so it feels like an intimate performance, one that makes you a part of the family on stage. The play describes the arc of Alison’s life from childhood, to college student, to middle-aged cartoonist who lives in Vermont. And three different women play Alison in the various stages of her life.
Alison the child lives in an old mansion, plays with her brothers in the funeral home’s coffins and can’t abide all those things girls are supposed to like, such as frilly dresses. Since she grew up to be a cartoonist, the adult Alison in the play often begins speaking by saying “caption”. “Caption,” she says, sitting in her studio remembering her childhood:
Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist.
That’s your plot summary right there. That, and the question of what Alison might do about the pain she sees in her parents, or about the pain they cause her as she assumes her identity as a lesbian. She sees that coming out as a freshman in college coincided with the end of her father’s life. She returns home to learn of her mother’s realization that mom had wasted her life in a lie. And yet, you have a sense here of a family that will just keep going, as families always have to do. That there is really no going back.
Kids have a way of forgetting as they are growing up, that their parents are simultaneously growing old. Their beginnings are their parents’ middles and endings. The play’s universality comes from its awareness of how we never fully know those closest to us, and of the undercurrent of grown-up secrets, intuited by children, that exists to some degree in every family. As “Fun Home” makes all too clear, parents, kids and their mutual happiness (or misery) are inextricably linked.
Maybe there is a moment when a child suddenly sees through the parents they love. Maybe it happens slowly over time. Whenever it happened to you, that progression from simple love to a fuller realization of the people your parents are, may not be so nice to contemplate, but “Fun Home” helps you get there. It forces you to visit your own past, and to think about your own children, whom you know get to make their own lives, and have their own fun, away from you.
No wonder the audience sprang from its seats at the ending, and at the start of seeing their own families in clear relief.
Here are three songs from “Fun Home” to help you get going this morning. First, “Ring of Keys” is about coming to an awareness of the sexual future that awaits the young Alison. Young Alison recognizes herself reflected in the body of a woman unlike any she has ever seen before:
For those who read the Wrongologist in email you can see the video here.
Second, in “I’m Changing My Major to Joan”, the college freshman Alison sings after her first sexual experience with a schoolmate, Joan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAyN13HLSMs
For those who read the Wrongologist in email you can see the video here.
Finally, in “Telephone Lines”, the older Alison tries to find a way to talk to her father about their sexual identities, but fails, like many kids (and their dads) do when awkwardness overtakes the moment:
For those who read the Wrongologist in email you can see the video here.
If you can get to the Circle in the Square Theater, do it.
Most of us (my guess anyway) think our parents are crazy and our families a mess as we grow out of childhood. So it was with relief for me that my son, as he reached adulthood didn’t completely disown us. Now we are fairly close and even do things together. Nothing suggests we were ever perfect, but we were ok. He’s now 37 and has a good job. Maybe that’s all we get out of this.
@ Terry: The play caused 3 of the 4 of us to reflect on our fathers, to talk about how they could/can be so difficult to talk to after we became adults. Like you, I have worked very hard to be available to my kids, all of whom are adults now. Try to have lunch one-on-one with them at least once a quarter. Still, it isn’t easy to go deep very often with any of them.
Wrongo,
As I read this I took a moment to think about the relationship my father and I had. He was a god like figure to me as a child. A cross to bare when I was a teen and one of my best friends when I became an adult.
It took some time for me to realize that he had walked the same path that I was/am on and that he was just a fallible as me.
I take every moment I can with my sons because I know how much I miss having them with my own father.