History and Background

History and Background Book by Lisa Kron, music by Jeanine Tesori Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel SYNOPSIS Both refreshingly honest and wildly innovative, Fun Home 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 New York 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 OBIE Award-winning theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers, a troupe that used humor to produce work from a feminist and lesbian perspective. Her play Well, 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 musical theatre 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 Violet (Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award), which was later produced on Broadway in 2014. She was nominated for her first Tony Award in 1998 for composing the score for Twelfth Night. In addition to Fun Home and Violet, Tesori wrote Thoroughly Modern Millie, Shrek the Musical, and Caroline, Or Change. She has composed and arranged music for countless theatre productions and films. Her newest musical, Soft Power, 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 death, and Are you My Mother, which explores relationship with her mother. After graduating from Oberlin College, Bechdel moved to Manhattan and worked in the publishing industry. While applying to art school, Bechdel began writing the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. 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 friends 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 Pennsylvania. 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 the New York Times 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 Sydney Lucas (Small Alison) and Michael Cerveris (Bruce) “play they don’t begin to imagine. Our airplane” on Broadway (Playbill.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 Los Angeles Times. “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 the Public Theater in 2013, starring Beth Malone as Alison, Michael Cerveris and Bruce, Judy Kuhn and Helen, Sydney Lucas as Small Alison, and Alexandra Socha 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 comics seen in her graphic memoir.5 The production was so well received that the run was extended several times and was awarded three Lucille Lortel Awards, 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 Emily Skeggs, 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 Tony Awards, 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.

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