Review: FUN HOME Autopsies a Family at Theatre Factory

I've always been a comics guy, ever since I was five years old and discovered my dad's shipping crate full of seventies and eighties cult titles like Howard the Duck and Doctor Strange. With an origin story like that, I have plenty of semi-educated opinions on the comics and graphic novel world: Marvel vs DC (DC all the way), Eastern vs Western style (I appreciate the starkness and minimalism of manga, but prefer the more literary, author-oriented world of indie comics these days), even artists or writers to avoid like the plague (anything from the Rob Liefeld "shoulder pads and straps and tiny feet" era of extreEEEEEEEEEeeeme action comics in the nineties). But the one comic opinion I was sure would never be shaken was that Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic trilogy could not POSSIBLY be adapted into another medium. It was so intrinsically linked to the artistic strengths and limitations of comic panels that it would not translate without losing its essence.

I was wrong. I was SO wrong. The first time I listened to the Fun Home cast recording (technically, I was listening to an untracked full-show bootleg with post-show audience talkback), I felt as though I had stared into the face of God: humbled, artistically emasculated in a way that felt good instead of demeaning. A masterpiece had been adapted into ANOTHER masterpiece. As an artist, there's a strange twinge of "I could never do that" when you encounter something like that. I felt it the first time I listened to Sweeney Todd, and again when I saw Hamilton. But it doesn't feel bad, despite that hint of melancholy. You don't mourn for what you can't make, you rejoice for the existence of someone who could. (Lest you think this little tangent is completely self-indulgent, hear me out: much of this show is about a frustrated artist pushing against their own limitations and the limitations of their form, and I wanted to draw that personal parallel.) No one else has said it yet, so I will: Fun Home is the Glass Menagerie or Death of a Salesman of musical theatre. 

The plot unfolds in nonlinear chunks, following forty years in the lives of complicated individuals: Alison Bechdel (Katie Kerr, with Kacie Capanna and Elli Anna Vallow as her preteen and college eras), a legendary cartoonist with a nasty cocktail of writer's block, OCD and PTSD; and her father Bruce Bechdel (Ben Wren), an English teacher, funeral director and home-restoration enthusiast with his own tightly wound mix of neuroses and diagnoses. Both are frustrated artists. Both are queer. But Alison came out in college, while Bruce never did, and he died in a suspicious incident assumed to be a suicide shortly after Alison came out. Now that she is the same age as her father was when he died, she attempts to exorcise her difficult family history by making it into a graphic novel.

This is difficult material, and requires a cast willing to take risks. Director Laura Wurzell has united a cast of performers strongly tied to Pittsburgh's famous bridge between community and professional theatre, plus a trio of fearless and subtle child performers who know when to go big and when to pull way back. Katie Kerr's grown Alison is a complex creature, clearly attempting to maintain artistic detachment while being slowly overcome by waves of emotion resonating from her relationship with her father and with her younger selves. She is the irresistible force, probing ever deeper "until now gives way to then," but she perpetually runs aground at Ben Wren's Bruce Bechdel, the immovable object. If Fun Home is the musical Death of a Salesman, Bruce is its Willy Loman, a perpetually defeated little man attempting to stay afloat in a life he does not fit in. Unfortunately for the Bechdels, Bruce expresses this in a tyrannical, order-obsessed temper and an obsessive cruising for gay sex, some of which is with his own current or former high school students. Yes, the tragic antihero of our musical is an emotionally abusive groomer at best, pedophile at worst, but the story isn't about his crimes, it's about the family unit. Bruce could be a monster, but there were moments of tenderness, moments of happiness and investment in the family. The story is about the place where these contradictions overlap. Ben Wren plays the line carefully, giving us just as many reasons to understand Alison's love for her dad as her resentment of him. 

In between the two is Missy Newell as wife and mother Helen Bechdel, who attempts to maintain order by pretending she does not see and hear what is happening in the home around her. Newell plays the matriarch's bursting-at-the-seams repression like a ticking time bomb, until a monologue and a song in the play's second half finally let the lid off the steamer. Her volatile chemistry with Wren and the kids threads bits of comedy and tragedy into the story at large. And then there's the kids, both of whom are saddled with some of the most demanding material ever given to a child or teen role: Kacie Capanna slays the queer-awakening anthem "Ring of Keys," in which she sees and identifies with a butch lesbian but doesn't have the language to express it, while Elli Anna Vallow's college-freshman Alison conquers the mountain of emotion, passion and joyful cringe comedy that is "Changing My Major to Joan." Joan herself, Maria Perez, is a warm and winning presence, providing that touch of lightness and functionality that Alison clearly relies on as an oasis from the Bechdel ecosystem; when she is introduced to the family late in the second half, it almost feels like two different realities overlapping.