A serious yet playful reimagining of parental memory through surreal childhood dreams conflating with the imposition of adult reality

Caleb Levin, Odin Vega, Lyla Randall in Fun Home; directed by Logan Ellis; photo by Marc J Franklin

The winner of five Tony Awards including Best Musical, Fun Home is a beloved, groundbreaking, and soulful story of conceiving your parents by way of adult point of views. Constructed from Alison Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir, the musical unearths Alison through childhood, college, and adulthood as she decrypts her coming-out story, and her compounded relationship with an astute, labile, and closeted father.

How have the mysteries of her father’s life shaped her own discernment of love and integration of her lesbian identity? With a lofty score by Jeanine Tesori and a terse, emotionally charged book by Lisa Kron, Fun Home is a mesmerizing, must-see theatrical experience, directed by Logan Ellis.

Among the multifarious thematic spirits of the unfeigned theatrical biographical missive by Bechdel (creator of the popular comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”), Fun Home, a play on words meaning ‘Funeral Home,’ is a rip-roaring song and dance journey into a childhood past to come out soaring into the greater understanding of present-day adulthood. It explores how we perceive our parents from our childhood perspectives and how we come to understand them better through adult introspection.

Through the plays’ use of the musical genre, it was able to achieve magical dreamlike moments that may have otherwise proved to be a challenge. The main characters’ understanding of her mysterious complex and brilliant father left me feeling a need to understand his obscure sense of aloofness myself. His perhaps deliberately vague characterization left me with a queer desire to learn more about his enigma, much like the way some of us feel about our own fathers.

Amidst all the adult complexities of parental woes and domestic tensions, growing up, navigating college life while discovering her budding sexuality, the main characters constant presence on stage to explain in a literal sense the multitudinal stages of her life effectively kept the audience in on her private thoughts and youthful perspectives that kept spectators engaged and invested. I, for one, was really rooting for her and symbolically rooting for my own childhood self remembering the mysteries of my own parents and homelife.

Fun Home alleviated the tense moments of the production with a hot handyman in tight seventies short shorts, awkward first dates and sexual encounters that conceivably made some uncomfortable, albeit in a “fun” sexy way. This play speaks to the phenomena of children wanting to understand their parents better through childhood dreamlike imaginations, wishful thinking and adult realistic reflections conflating to give us a serious study of childhood understanding of adult relationships but in a “fun” way; thus consequently that’s a five out of five stars for me!

For more information, visit the website for The Huntington.

 

Jacques Stanley Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student through Harvard University. His latest publication You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self and other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of Wyoming , Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, and Amazon. He has been published in prestigious publications such as Spirit of Change Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Litterateur Redefining World and Cooch Behar anthologies out of India, Poets Reading the News, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, and Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others.