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Home , Alexandra Socha, Beth Malone, Diana Son, Emily Skeggs, Fun Home, Fun Home (musical)

History and Background

Book by , music by Based on the by SYNOPSIS

Both refreshingly honest and wildly innovative, is based on Vermont author Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed graphic memoir. As the show unfolds, meet Bechdel at three different life stages as she grows and grapples with her uniquely dysfunctional family, her sexuality, and her father’s secrets.

ABOUT THE WRITERS

LISA KRON was born and raised in Michigan. She is the daughter of Ann, a former community activist, and Walter, a German-born lawyer and Holocaust survivor. Kron spent much of her childhood feeling like an outsider because of her religion and sexuality. She attended Kalamazoo College before moving to in 1984, where she found success as both an actress and playwright.

Many of Kron’s plays draw upon her childhood experiences. She earned early praise for her autobiographical plays 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories. In 1989, Kron co-founded the -winning theater The Five Brothers, a troupe that used humor to produce work from a feminist and lesbian perspective. Her , which she both wrote and starred in, opened on Broadway in 2006. Kron was nominated for the Best Actress in a Play Tony Award for her work.

JEANINE TESORI is the most honored female composer in history. Upon receiving her degree in music from Barnard College, she worked as a musical theatre conductor before venturing into the art of composing in her 30s. She made her Broadway debut in 1995 when she composed the dance music for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and found her first major success with the off- Broadway musical (Obie Award, Award), which was later produced on Broadway in 2014. She was nominated for her first Tony Award in 1998 for composing the score for . In addition to Fun Home and Violet, Tesori wrote Thoroughly Modern Millie, the Musical, and Caroline, Or Change. She has composed and arranged music for countless theatre productions and films. Her newest musical, , premiered in San Francisco this may. Tesori currently serves as the co-Artistic Director of the Encores! Off-Center series at the City Center in New York.

ALISON BECHDEL is a critically acclaimed cartoonist and novelist. She has published two graphic memoirs: Fun Home, which details her relationship with her father and his , and Are you My Mother, which explores relationship with her mother. After graduating from , Bechdel moved to and worked in the publishing industry. While applying to art school, Bechdel began writing the . Originally a series of unconnected strips, Dykes to Watch Out For evolved into a structured story with a set group of lesbian characters—a woman named Mo and her in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dykes to Watch Out For is also the origin of the “Bechdel-Wallace test,” which is used to aid in the discussion of film, television, and other forms of media. To pass the Bechdel test, a work of art must feature two female character who have a conversation about something other than a man. The test has been an essential tool in contemporary film and media criticism and aids in Bechdel’s mission to better represent women on stage, page, and screen.

Bechdel now lives in Bolton, Vermont, with her wife. She was named Vermont’s Cartoonist Laureate in 2017 and was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2014.

FROM PAGE TO STAGE

Like many musicals, Fun Home is an adaptation of a pre-existing story. Originally published in 2006, Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir chronicles her childhood in rural . Like the musical, the novel explores Bechdel’s sexuality, her relationship with her father, dysfunctional family dynamics, gender roles, and her father’s suicide. It was on Best Seller List for two weeks.

When Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron set out to adapt the graphic memoir into a musical, they searched for a way into the story that represented Bechdel at different stages in her life. When asked about their process during an interview with GLAAD, Fun Home on Broadway Kron said, “The thing about (Joan Marcus) adaptation is you have to re- originate a thing. You can’t just say,

‘This is a musicalized version of this graphic novel.’ It has to have its own originating impulse, so that you feel like the experience you are having is the primary experience. And at the same time, you don’t feel like you’re watching a different thing, that whatever the effect of the book was, you’ll feel like it’s represented.”1

Fun Home the musical uses adult Alison to guide the audience through her memories. While the memoir is from the real life adult Alison’s point of view, the 43-year- old is not a character within the pages of the story. By creating this character, Tesori and Kron allowed the audience to process Bechdel’s childhood along with her, rather than observe it. In her forward to the script, Kron describes this character: “[The family] is living a lie and careening toward a tragedy (Small Alison) and (Bruce) “play they don’t begin to imagine. Our airplane” on Broadway (.com)

1 Buck, Andy. “Fun Home: a Talk with Playwright and Actor Lisa Kron.” GLAAD, 15 Oct. 2013, www.glaad.org/blog/fun-home-talk- playwright-and-actor-lisa-kron. source for this inside information is the narrative voice in the captions that surround every frame, which points out every instance of the delusion, denial, hypocrisy, and retroactive irony. The voice is erudite, wry, and aching—the voice of a truth-seeker. It’s what makes Fun Home Fun Home. We turned that voice into a character and made it the center of our musical. That sound so wonderfully straight forward, and definitive— but it took years to make the whole thing work.”2 Fun Home off-Broadway at the Public Theatre (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

As Kron worked on the book and lyrics, Tesori searched for musical motifs that expressed the state of the Bechdel household. “Typically, the noise is a happy sound,” reported Daryl Miller of the . “There's even a song in which young Bechdel and her brothers devise a chirpy commercial for the family funeral business. But the soundscape darkens as the adult Bechdel wrestles with the cloudy circumstances of her father's death.” In the same interview, Tesori recalls being "very interested in the counterpoint of the household," referring to “the family's separate yet simultaneous activities.”3

Fun Home was developed over six years through various workshops and staged readings. Tesori and Kron were in residence at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in 2009 as well as the Sundance Theatre Lab and the Public Theatre’s Public Lab in 2012. At first, the musical was set in Bechdel’s home office, and focused on her Fun Home Broadway cast decision to write a graphic (Joan Marcus) memoir.4 The musical first

2 Kron, Lisa, et al. Fun Home. Samuel French, 2014. 3 Miller, Daryl H. “'Fun Home' Composer Jeanine Tesori Hears the Music in Everyday Life.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 23 Feb. 2017, www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-jeanine-tesori-fun-home-20170226-story.html. 4 Betancourt, Manuel. “From The Public to Broadway: Fun Home's Growing Pains.” HowlRound Theatre Commons, howlround.com/from-the-public-to-broadway-fun-home-s-growing-pains. premiered off-Broadway at in 2013, starring as Alison, Michael Cerveris and Bruce, and Helen, Sydney Lucas as Small Alison, and and Medium Alison. This time around, the musical centered on “Fun Home” itself, shifting focus from Bechdel’s process to the memories she explored. It also featured projections of the seen in her graphic memoir.5 The production was so well received that the run was extended several times and was awarded three , two Obie Awards, and eight Drama Desk Awards.

Fun Home opened at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre in April 2015. With the exception of , who joined the Broadway ensemble as Medium Alison, the principal cast remained the same. The celebrated production ran for a year and a half on Broadway before launching national and international tours. The first regional production of Fun Home opened just hours away at Vermont Stage Company in Burlington. The Broadway production of Fun Home won five , including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Score. Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori accept the Tony Award for Fun Home at the 2015 Tony Awards

QUEER WOMEN AND CHARACTERS IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE

Fun Home may have been one of the first Broadway musical with a lesbian protagonist, but countless queer women have made their mark on and off Broadway and the American Theatre at large. While there is no way to cover the breadth of queer women’s influence on the American Theatre in these Show Notes, we hope this gives you a peak into the rich history of queer female playwrights and characters.

One of the first major Broadway plays to feature two queer women was Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance. Written in 1907 in Yiddish, God of Vengeance centers on a Jewish brothel owner who, in his attempt to become respectable, buys a Torah and marries his daughter off to a Yeshiva student. His daughter, however, has an affair with one of the sex workers in the brothel. Before making its way to America, God of Vengeance successfully toured Europe after being translated into German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Italian, Czech, Romanian, and Norwegian.

5 Ibid., Betancourt

In 1922, Isaac Goldberg’s translation of God of Vengeance opened at the Provincetown Playhouse in . It later moved to the larger Theatre before opening on Broadway at the Apollo Theater in 1923. Approximately three weeks into the run, police detectives informed the cast and producer of the play that they were being indicted for obscenity. Despite a night spent in jail, the entire company posted bail and returned The Broadway cast of The God of Vengeance for the matinee the next afternoon. That May, the company was found guilty of obscenity due to God of Vengeance’s lesbian content, although the verdict was eventually overturned.

Four years later, producer and director Gilbert Miller brought Édouard Bourdet’s French play, The Captive, to Broadway. The play premiered on September 29, 1926 at the Empire Theatre. It focuses on Irene, a lesbian in love with another, older woman, Madam d’Aiguines. Irene is trapped in an engagement to a man named Jacques, however, and feels tortured by her desires. While the play was well attended, especially by women, many papers ran articles condemning the production and its contents. The play ran for 160 performances before it was shut down due to obscenity charges. It was one of a handful of plays that prompted the Wales Padlock Act, named after the literal padlocks that were used to lock theatre doors for up to a year after a production was deemed “obscene.” The legislature created the act to ban plays “depicting or dealing with the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex perversion.”6

Nearly a decade later, in 1934, Lillian Hellman’s The original The Children’s Hour program drama The Children’s Hour opened at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on Broadway. In it, two school teachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, are falsely accused of having a lesbian affair by a disturbed and mischievous student, Mary Tilford. The two lose a court case

6 Sova, Dawn B. (2004). Banned Plays: Censorship Histories of 125 Stage Dramas. Infobase Publishing. pp. 37–39. ISBN 978-1- 4381-2993-8. mounted against them by Mary’s grandmother and eventually leave the school. The accusation brings Martha to confess to Karen that she is in love with her and, in guilt and grief, Martha commits suicide. Unlike the plays before it, The Children’s Hour was a financial and critical success in New York. However, its subject matter prevented it from being performed in and Chicago.

In 1959, a young playwright named Lorraine Hansberry broke the mold when her play, A in the Sun, premiered and she became the first black female playwright to be produced on Broadway. The play explores the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. While there are no queer characters in A Raisin in the Sun, it is widely accepted that Hansberry was a lesbian, based on her letters, personal notebooks, and writings about feminism and homophobia. Additionally, the Nina Simone song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was written about Hansberry only a few years after her untimely death.

Lorraine Hansberry at her typewriter As time went on, other (David Attie) queer female playwrights used their voices to highlight more of their opinions and experiences. For example, Susan Miller’s 1973 play Confessions of a Female Disorder traced the growing up and story of Ronnie, who felt trapped by the expectations of the world around her. Miller went on to write several other plays about queer women, including My Left Brest, which won an Obie Award in 1994. Playwright and director María Irene Fornés, a leading player in the off-off-Broadway movement, defied expectations in 1977 with her play Fefu and Her Friends, which featured a cast of all female characters. Within the play, the characters discuss their own perceptions of self, gender roles, and societal concerns. María Irene Fornés In 1989, Lisa Kron co-founded The Five Lesbian Brothers with Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, and Peg Healey. Their troupe often performed at the WOW Café, a feminist theatre space in the East Village of New York City, and the New York Theatre Workshop. Their work was both satirical and expressionistic, focusing on ideas and themes rather than time and genre.

Later on, ’s Stop Kiss captivated audiences off-Broadway at The Public Theater in 1998. It focuses on two women, Sara and Callie, who are attacked as they share their first kiss on the streets of New York one night. Sara falls into a coma as a result of the assault, and Callie must navigate the situation while Sara’s ex-boyfriend, Peter, arrives to nurse her back to health. and in the original production of Stop The script explores female Kiss relationships, sexuality, and both the exhilarating and terrifying sides of New York. The production was highly praised and Son won the GLAAD Media Award for her work.

A few blocks uptown, became the first Broadway musical to feature a lesbian couple in 1992. It was followed by musicals like , The Wild Party, The Color Purple, and If/Then. In 2015, (playwright) and Rebecca Taichman’s (director) innovative play, Indecent, opened on Broadway. It was Vogel’s Broadway premiere, although she has been celebrated within the theatre community for decades and won the in 1998 for her play . Indecent is based off of the controversy surrounding Asch’s God of Vengeance, which pushed the boundaries of Broadway nearly 100 years earlier. The play follows the writer, actors, producers, and community members who believed in Asch’s work from the first reading of the script in a friend’s living room to the performance of the play in a Jewish Ghetto during . It featured choreography by David Dorfman and music by Lisa Gutkin. It earned a Tony Nomination for Best Play and Taichman the Best Direction of a Play Award for her work.

There are countless other queer women producing work all over America: Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Lucy Thurber, and Carolyn Gage, to name a few. New projects, such as WP Theater and the Public Theater’s Indecent on Broadway (Carol Rosegg) Trans Theatre Lab, continue to uplift a myriad of queer voices and modes of storytelling. If you are interested in learning more about queer, trans, and gender non-conforming theatre artists, we recommend checking out The Kilroys, Ring of Keys, the Trans Theatre Lab, and Honest Accomplice Theatre’s Trans Literacy Project. Cast and Creatives

OUR WESTON PRODUCTION

Come to the Fun Home! That is, the Bechdel household. Fun Home poses a unique design challenge because it is based off of real people and is set in Alison Bechdel’s childhood home. Take a look at how the set and costume designers put their unique twist on these very real people and places.

(Above) A bird’s-eye-view of the Fun Home set model Courtesy of Set Designer Howard Jones

(Above) A rendering of the Bechdel Home paint and wallpaper Courtesy of Set Designer Howard Jones

(Left) A rendering of the Bobby Jeremy and Susan Deys costumes Courtesy of Costume Designer Mara Blumenfeld

AN INTERVIEW WITH ACTRESS ANDREA PRESTINARIO Compiled by Rachel Liff, Artistic and Administrative Assistant

RACHEL LIFF: When did you first encounter the story of Fun Home? What makes it special to you?

ANDREA PRESTINARIO: I saw Fun Home when it played at Circle in the Square on Broadway in 2015. As a queer woman, I was so excited to see the production, knowing it was based on lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s memoir. But I was ill-prepared for how transcendent an experience it became. In the history of musical theatre, there has never been a lesbian protagonist until Fun Home. Which means, every time I have bared witness to a story in a musical, it has never been my story. So being both a musical theatre performer and a queer woman and getting to see those two parts of my identity finally converge when they had been otherwise separate? It was a very moving and emotional experience, one I won’t ever forget. Representation matters: case in point.

RL: What excites you most about playing Alison?

AP: What excites me most about playing Alison is getting the chance to play a character that is so closely linked to my own personal story. And yet, Alison and I are still very different: it’s so fun to step into the shoes of an old-school butch seeing as I am feminine-presenting queer person in the world!

RL: You recently co-founded Ring of Keys, a national network of queer women+, trans, and gender non-conforming artists working on and offstage in musical theatre. What inspired you to do this?

AP: I co-founded Ring of Keys along with my friend Royer Bockus, who is also a queer musical theatre performer. Our friendship was born out of the realization that while we inhabit a professional space that is LGBTQIA+ friendly, we as queer women are underrepresented within that space. We joked about making a “club,” but then got serious about it, and created a network for the queer spectrum that is underrepresented within our industry. Society at large often thinks of the world of musicals as very gay, but it isn’t always wholly representative. Well, it’s very “gay” but not very queer. Meaning: it’s representing cis gay men stories and artists, but what about the full spectrum of queer? Ring of Keys strives to kick-(ball-change) the closet door open and reveal a vibrant, diverse musical theatre landscape for the future: we want to queer the stage.

RL: What has been the most challenging part of launching Ring of Keys? What has been the most rewarding?

AP: The most challenging aspect of Ring of Keys is that we are relatively new, and anytime you’re building something from scratch you are presented with obstacles you just didn’t anticipate. One such obstacle is determining how to create a network that is both inclusive and exclusive at the same time: we are an inclusive network for the diversity of genders that queerness contains, but we also want to build a network that is exclusive for its Members to elevate their stories and create opportunities in a heteronormative world. The challenge then is in finding the parameters between inclusivity and exclusivity. The most rewarding aspect of Ring of Keys has been the incredible enthusiasm from allies, as well as Members. “KEY” Members have responded to us with comments like “I’ve been waiting for this,” and “having this community has made me feel less alone.” This has been incredible affirmation that making this kind of space is necessary and desired. It’s the inspiration to keep going and keep charging forward.

RL: What do you hope audiences take away from Fun Home?

AP: While Alison’s sexuality is truly just a counterpoint to the larger context of the show’s story, I still think I want audiences of Fun Home to walk away with a deeper understanding for queer stories and queer history. This is how we build empathy.

AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR MALCOLM EWEN Compiled by Rachel Liff, Artistic and Administrative Assistant

RACHEL LIFF: When did you first encounter the story of Fun Home?

MALCOLM EWEN: I first heard buzz about the show when it was moving from off- Broadway onto Broadway. I didn’t get the chance to see it before the Tony Awards, but the first thing I saw of the show was when I saw the character of Small Alison sing “Ring of Keys” on the Tony broadcast, which I loved. It was clear that the show was intimate and exciting piece of theatre and I knew that I wanted to see it and eventually wanted to get the chance to work on a production.

RL: What excites you most about directing this piece?

ME: The musical by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori turns an introspective memoir into a compelling exploration of a number of timely themes. The play, in part, is about finding your place in life - finding the community that you belong to. One character goes through a process of discovery about finding their place and another battles a lifelong problem of figuring out where and how they might fit in. It is about one person’s life opening up as another's life closes in itself. The narrative story lines are complex as the story moves between various times and places fluidly - which will make the clarity of the story telling crucial to help the audience not one track of where we are at any given moment.

Finally, Fun Home’s intimate nature is a perfect show for our new Weston Playhouse at Walker Farm space. It will benefit from the intimate seating and of the space. Much like the Playhouse productions have long benefitted from the theatre being an intimate size for a proscenium theatre - many people find that the large scale musicals we often do there have more impact due to the smaller size of the theatre. And we hope that we will hope the walker space will combine the intimacy of the Rod & Gun Club space with much better audience and artist accommodations. It’ll be fun to explore a new space!

RL: Why did you, Tim, and Steve choose Fun Home to be a part of your final season as Artistic Directors? ME: Well, it was an obvious choice in some ways as it won a number of Tony Awards including Best Musical in 2015. Doing recent award winning shows is crucial to the mission of the Playhouse. We should be offering a wide variety of material to our audience and to our community of artists - new shows as well as old, cutting edge as well as familiar. This diversity of work provides both challenges and opportunities for the audience and the theatre artists. Finally, Fun Home deals with difficult subjects in an incredibly smart and thoughtful way. It’s a rare musical that has such emotional power and is so intelligent at the same time - all the more reason to bring it to Weston audiences.

RL: What makes this project different form others that you’ve directed at Weston?

ME: I think the autobiographical nature of the play makes it different than most theatre pieces. The first person presence is manifest throughout the play. There are three actresses who play Alison Bechdel at various ages in the play - that’s pretty unusual. We are working hard to make sure that all three of them read as the same person.

Also, the play is based on real life events in Alison Bechdel’s life and depicts real people recreating their actual actions. You have be careful to try and understand what might have motivated those real people to take the actions that the characters also make during the play. You try to figure out why they did those things to try represent them fairly. Of course, it can be argued that the events in the play are filtered through the lens of Alison Bechdel's eyes but then again isn’t every autobiography viewed through the author’s eyes?

While it isn’t all that uncommon in modern theatre, the play moves through a varied timeline and a lot of locations without much set up - depending on the production to make everything clear through the acting and technical elements. The scene changes should move quickly and seamlessly without stopping the action of the play.

RL: What do you hope audiences take away from this production?

ME: That people come away from the show with a renewed interest in listening to their family members when those family members are in difficulty. And that folks realize that family bonds are important and need constant attention lest they atrophy. And I hope that the play promotes tolerance of the different lifestyles people have. And finally, I hope that it will encourage people to live the life they want to lead.

Reading List

Other Works by Lisa Kron

2.5 Minute Ride

101 Humiliating Stories

Well

The Five Lesbian Brothers’ Guide to Life Other Works by Jeanine Tesori

Violet

Thoroughly Modern Millie

Shrek the Musical

Caroline, or Change Comics and Memoirs by Alison Bechdel

Fun Home

Are You My Mother?

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For Discography

Fun Home (A New Broadway Musical), P.S. Classics, 2015 Further Reading about Comics

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud, William Morrow , 1994 Further Reading about LGBTQ+ Perspectives and History

How to Survive a Plague by David France, Alfred A. Knopf, 2016

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Penguin , 2007

Gay New York by George Chauncey, Basic Books, 1994

A Queer History of the by Michael Bronski, Beacon Press, 2011

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele, Publishers Group West, 2016

Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino, Random House, 2007

Other LGBTQ+ Novels, Memoirs, and Poetry

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock, Atria Press, 2014

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, Random House, 1956

When We Rise: My Life in the Movement by Cleve Jones, Hachette Book Group, 2016

100 Crushes by Elisha Lim, Koyama Press, 2014 Where to learn about other LGBTQ+ Playwrights, Artists, and Theatrical Initiatives

https://www.ringofkeys.org/

https://www.transtheaterlab.org/

http://honestaccomplice.org/the-trans-literacy-project/

https://thekilroys.org/ Other Online Resources

http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/

https://www.glaad.org/

http://www.thetaskforce.org/

https://transgenderlawcenter.org/