Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Concept:
Fun Home, by Jeanie Tesori and Lisa Kron based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, is strife with discord. Throughout Fun Home, we get a glimpse of Alison’s childhood as she understands it in adulthood. We are voyeurs in her relationship with her parents, particularly her relationship with her father, Bruce Bechdel. As Alison grows, we witness the transformation of her relationship with Bruce and how her relationship with her father shapes Alison’s identity.
Each of the characters is obsessed with the idea of assimilation. They want to assimilate to society’s idea of the perfect family. Each of them knows they’re being watched, and this knowledge informs their actions. Alison wears a dress so she isn’t different, Bruce plays the intellectual head of the perfect family, and Helen plays the part of the loving wife, who keeps everything together. Each plays their part, wears their costume, and each is miserable. Assimilation is key to this production, because not only is it the root of all of the problems in this
production, but it is a problem for many people today. For a long time, the nuclear family was the model that everybody followed, and it’s a model that is being discarded and replaced with personal choice.
In this production, I want to play with this discord. Alison and Bruce contradict each other on nearly every front. Alison and Bruce never see eye to eye and I want to physicalize this through both design and blocking. Alison doesn’t quite fit into Bruce’s world and Bruce into Alison’s. This should be evident from a simple glance. When the two are together, I want the audience to see and feel the discomfort between the pair. They’re oil and water, and I want to paint this picture through blocking and design.
Gender politics are relevant to a modern society. Now more than ever, the LGBTQ community is fighting for a voice and for rights. Gender, sexuality, identity, and personal choice are in the forefront of many political and social discussions today. People are stepping away from the gender binary and expressing themselves without the constraints of who society thinks they should be. Fun Home contributes to this ongoing discourse. It is relevant to a modern audience because gender and identity are relevant to a modern audience.
Character:
Through the course of the show, we see Alison at age eight, nineteen, and forty-three. But perhaps the most defining moments happen when Alison are when she is eight years old. Young Alison wants an independent and inquisitive child. Throughout the musical, we see that Alison wants to express herself. She observes the world and synthesizes it then produces art. Bruce Buechner, on the other hand, wants to cultivate a perfect life. He works tirelessly to create a perfect life with his perfect family in his perfect, magazine house. Their super objectives are in constant conflict with each other. Neither their interests nor their objectives aligned. In the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel herself, she explains that “I was the spartan to his Athenian, modern to his victorian, butch to his nelly, utilitarian to his aesthete”. Trying to get Bruce and Alison to agree would be like trying to get two magnets with the same charge to meet. There seems to be some invisible force preventing their union.
Throughout Fun Home, we see this dynamic return and shape Alison’s identity. Often, she would concede to her father’s wishes. Bruce Bechdel had a particular image in his mind, of the perfect family to occupy his perfect home. Alison didn’t always fit into his picture. At parties, she wanted to wear pants and t-shirts, but her father would costume her with a dress and hairbow. The few times Alison tried to make a decision for herself, her father would manipulate his daughter towards his own image. In “Party Dress,” Bruce says:
“Every other girl at this party is going to be wearing her prettiest dress and you would put on what? What? Your jean jacket? Trousers? It’s alright with me.You understand you’ll be the only girl there not wearing a dress, right? Is that what you want? You want people talking about you behind your back? It’s alright with me. Change your clothes. Well? Go ahead. You going to change?”
Alison changes her mind and decides not to change clothes. Her father manipulated her by appealing to her fear of being an outsider. By asking her if she wants to be an outsider if she wants people to talk about her behind her back, Bruce used fear to coerce his daughter into a dress. Bruce does this to Alison throughout the production, getting her to change her homework so she doesn’t turn in an “imperfect” map and turning off the television so she doesn’t watch a “crappy” show. He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, playing the role of a caring and protective father, instead
Alison conformed to her heteronormative gender role, not out of choice, but because it was forced upon her. Much of her youth, Alison spent simply trying to make her father happy, and suppressing her own emotion. Because Alison bit her tongue and quelled her identity for such a long time, coming out as gay to her parents was herculean. Alison was able to step outside of the exhibit that was her father’s life and cultivate her own life. There is an interesting gender dialectic in Fun Home. For years Alison is forced into the gender binary, as many are in society today. Now, more people are trying to step away from the identity suppressing gender binary and towards individual expression.
Design:
In Fun Home, Alison looks back on her life as she captions moments for her cartoons.
Each vignette we see within the story in some way defines how Alison sees herself and the world around her. These captions are significant to understanding how Alison, as an adult views each of these defining moments. To highlight these moments, I want to throw focus to Alison Each time she stops to caption a scene, the action on stage will freeze to tableaux. As Alison decides on the perfect words, the caption will be projected onto the scenery.
Because of the many locations in Fun Home, The transitions from one scene to another need to happen quickly. The set should be built to look like a page from a comic book, with boxes and caption bubbles. There are three main locations in the musical: the Bechdel house, the funeral home, and Alison’s school. When the scene changes, the light should throw focus from one section of the comic strip to the
other.
The scenery and costume design must interact with each other to make Alison stand out and to make Bruce look as if he and the house are a single organism. The color palettes for Alison and Bruce should contrast. Bruce should be dressed in warm earthy colors, in outfits that coordinate with the house, and Alison should be dressed in bright, cool colors that contrast with Bruce’s designs. Everything about the Bechdel House needs to be organized perfectly and in pristine condition. Every set dressing, hand prop, and fabric swatch should look as if it was made to sit right there. Young Alison should be dressed in jeans with a hole in them, a bright t-shirt with a stain, and wear her hair unkempt, She should look like a child who plays outside and skins her knee playing in the dirt, in direct contrast with her father’s pristine house.
Another idea I want to play with is that Bruce and Alison both are inspired by books, pages, images, and words. When Bruce reads he becomes it. He is the type of person who reads a home magazine and spends a week making his house look like the house on the pages of the magazine. Alison, on the other hand, processes the world and puts it on the page. Bruce shares books with Alison and they discuss them, just as the perfect, intellectual family should. Books should be in every one of the comics, on bookshelves, on beds and in piles on the floor. The few interactions they have are done on paper: a letter, a borrowed book, a comic.
At the beginning, when Bruce is rummaging through the things from Mr. Gibbins barn, I want to subtly give a background to Alison’s love for comics, while also indicating Bruce and Alison’s differences. Bruce’s “junk” is Alison’s treasure. He tosses out newspapers, magazines, and other various items, and Alison picks them up. Those newspapers, with their funnies pages, which Bruce thought was junk are the seeds of inspiration Alison needed to fall in love with comics.
Fun Home is a musical about choice: the choice to be who you are. Bruce never thought he had a choice. He cultivated a life around his idea of a perfect family. Alison broke away from this and developed her identity away from what her father and society wanted her to be. Alison Bechdel is fifty-six years old now, and the discussion of gender and sexuality is still going on now. Fun Home is relevant because of this. Who people are, what they choose to wear, who they choose to love is a discussion people still want to have, and because of this Fun Home is a significant contribution to our culture.