Arts & Culture | Theater | Yale School of Drama
| Doireann Mac Mahon as Medium Alison in a recent rehearsal for Fun Home at the Yale School of Drama. The play, directed by third year Danilo Gambini, runs Dec. 14-20 at the University Theater. Lucy Gellman Photos. |
Alison Bechdel is a college student, pacing back and forth outside of the gay student union. Already, she has approached the union’s door, pondered going inside, run away. On her way out, she’s locked eyes with another student, a pretty girl who seems to have it all figured out. Blood rushes to her cheeks. She turns her thoughts inward and takes a deep breath.
“Please God, don’t let me be a lesbian,” she says, and it is totally, heart-wrenchingly genuine. “Please God, don’t let me be a homosexual.”
Medium Alison (Doireann Mac Mahon) is one of the characters populating Fun Home, the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s eponymous graphic memoir with book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori. This month, the play comes to the Yale School of Drama thanks to third-year director Danilo Gambini.
The play runs Dec. 14 through 20 at the University Theater on York Street. Tickets and more information are available here.
Based on the 2006 graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the musical follows artist Alison Bechdel as she unspools her family history, a tale that includes her father’s suicide at 43 years old and her work as an out, gay graphic artist when she has reached the same age. In between, the artist tells the story of how her family got to that point, peeling back the layers as she explores her father’s time in the closet, her mother’s largely silenced rage, her own sexuality and sexual discovery and her father's untimely death.
| Doireann Mac Mahon as Medium Alison and Madeline Seidman as Joan. |
The musical, like the novel, is at turns bitterly funny, gut-churning, and candid, with deep dives into complicated family dynamics and the heartbreak and grief of the closet. As it comes to life with a score that is full of heart, it relies on a nesting doll of a structure in which the grown up author Alison (Eli Pauley) is joined by a child-aged Small Alison (Taylor Hoffman) and college-aged Medium Alison (Doireann Mac Mahon). The title refers to the author's childhood home and the Bechdel Funeral Home that the family runs.
Characters revolve in and out of this world: Alison’s late father Bruce Bechdel (JJ McGlone) and mother Helen (Zoe Mann), her first love Joan (Madeline Seidman), her siblings and smaller ensemble characters played deftly by Dario Ladani Sanchez. They jump between moments in the graphic novel—Pauley stands at times with a huge sketchpad and pencil in hand—bringing out a story that is deeply human and equally sad.
For Gambini, the performance has been years in the making. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, the director first saw the work in 2015, when he was able to snag a standing-room-only ticket for the show. It was the same year that the show had first come to Broadway (it played off-Broadway for two years before that), and Gambini found himself mentally racing to keep up with the first number.
“And then, she says [of her father] ‘and he was gay, and I was gay. And he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist,’” he said, quoting the script from memory. “And I was like, what?!”
| Danilo Gambini: “You have the depths of humanity and human emotion onstage. The show is airtight. There’s nothing dangling. Once you discover such good material, it comes with responsibility.” |
Gambini watched the rest of the play with bated breath. He watched as Bechdel struggled to write through the discovery of her own sexuality, and retroactively the discovery of her father’s. He watched as she entered college and fell in love, as her mother played Chopin and sang through a kind of quiet suffering. He found himself mesmerized by the show’s song “Ring Of Keys,” in which Bechdel sees an “old-school butch” and realizes that she’s gay.
At the end of the show, he stayed in exactly the same place while people filed past him. As he remembers it, the show had moved him so profoundly that he couldn’t get out of the theater until he had processed it.
“I just sat on the floor, crying, for like 15 minutes,” he recalled in an interview at Book Trader Cafe downtown. “It touched me so deeply.”
For Gambini, the play was a revelation. Growing up, the gay characters he saw in popular culture were sidelined, marginalized, or killed off, a trend that is changing slowly but has been hard for television and media to shake, according to a 2018 report from GLAAD. Until playing an ensemble member in the musical RENT during his time in film school, the only out, gay main character he knew of was Jack McPhee on the show “Dawson’s Creek.” So when Broadway showed him its first explicitly lesbian protagonist, he was amazed.
“You have the depths of humanity and human emotion onstage,” he said. “The show is airtight. There’s nothing dangling. Once you discover such good material, it comes with responsibility.”
| Eli Pauley as Alison and Mac Mahon as Medium Alison in Fun Home. |
Originally, he wanted to bring the play to São Paulo, where he was still working as a freelance director and producer. But the costs were exorbitant, and the play got put on the back burner for other work. The following year, he headed to the Yale School of Drama, where he threw himself into classes. The musical was never far from his mind.
He is equally quick to champion the value of musical theater at a time when some people “still think it’s jazz hands,” he said. Gambini has directed time-tested tragedies and histories: last summer he took on Euripides with Anne Carson’s new translation of the Bakkhai at the Yale Summer Cabaret, just months after a stunningly bright take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But he knew he wanted his third-year project to be a musical. And specifically, this musical.
“This is musical theater that talks to the exposed nerve of society,” he said. “This can be political. This can be artistic. For me, it is also a very valuable and dignified path … music and singing can be a straight channel to the soul and the heart. It’s another realm of exploration.”
As the cast and crew barrel toward the show’s opening, Gambini is working to bring the storyline to audiences with a fresh perspective, integrating projections, swift set and scene changes, and nods to the puppet arts.
| Zoe Mann as Helen Bechdel in Fun Home. |
At a recent rehearsal, Mac Mahon started in on the same scene, running through the paces of Medium Alison’s pre-coming-out college freakout over and over again. An hour later, McGlone and Mann negotiated the dynamics of anger until they had stuck their landing.
Gambini gave pointers: try talking to God more intimately, any maybe not looking skyward. Don’t worry about screaming lines midway through a song if that’s how Helen Bechdel is really feeling. Test out stillness and movement and pauses. Especially the pauses.
Four years after first seeing the show, he said he’s still transfixed by the book and lyrics. He pinpointed “Ring Of Keys” as perhaps his favorite moment in the musical, as Small Alison reaches for sexual vocabulary (“I want .../I want …”) she doesn’t have yet. He added that he’s incredibly excited to open the show to New Haveners later this month.
“It takes a village to do musical theater,” he said. “When you have such a good show on your hands with so many talented people, it’s almost like dealing with a classic.”
Fun Home, based on the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel and directed by Danilo Gambini, runs Dec. 14 through 20 at the University Theater on York Street. Tickets and more information are available here.