'Fun Home' at Cain Park is a Complex and Funny Exploration of Family Secrets

Credit: Photo Credit: Every Angle Photography

Fun Home, now at Cain Park’s Alma Theatre, is a glorious puzzle—a contradictory and searching mess that requires the audience to sometimes work as hard as the actors to fully experience the way this show illuminates the tragedy of family secrets and haunting memories. And on top of all that, it’s wickedly funny.

Based on the prize-winning graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, this musical (book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, music by Jeanine Tesori) explores how a “typical” family with three kids in a small Pennsylvania town face their demons. And not always successfully.

The core of the story revolves around Alison and her dad Bruce, a closeted gay man who fetishizes his overly tidy, antiques-filled home. That environment also serves as the locus for the family’s funeral home, which they refer to by their pet nickname which is also the title of the play.

Bruce is a disarming and at time volatile bundle of charm, grace and anger as he tries to deal with his attraction to men. His furious contradictions drive his wife Helen away, at one point with her playing the piano in the living room while he is, um, entertaining a young man elsewhere in the house. Fun home, indeed.

All this lands heavily on eldest child Alison, alongside her two brothers Christian and John. Alison embodies all the guilt and confusion the playwright grew up with as a gay child. To achieve that, Kron breaks the character of Alison into three separate characters: 43-year-old Alison (Tasha Brandt), college student “Medium Alison” (Gabi Ilg), and teenage “Small Alison” (Juliana Shumaker).

In this way, we’re able to experience Small Alison’s growing awareness of her sexual orientation, first in “Party Dress” where she rebels against wearing a frilly outfit to a dance. Then later in the stirring anthem to “Ring of Keys,” when she is electrified by the sight of a butch delivery woman. As Small Alison, Juliana Shumaker nails the latter number, which is the most memorable song in the show.

That attraction for women comes to full flower when Medium Alison meets fellow student Joan (Zoë Lewis-McLean) at Oberlin College and Medium Alison sings that she’s “Changing My Major (to Joan).” Gabi Ilg brings a powerful voice to the role while also investing her dialog scenes with clarity and commitment.

Over that same span of years, Bruce continues his struggle with his sexual identity, and makes some truly unfortunate decisions along the way. Scott Esposito makes Bruce both lovable and cringe-worthy. He delights Small Alison when they play airplane, with him laying on his back and supporting her aloft with his feet on her hips. But those soaring moments quickly dissolve, overwhelmed by Bruce’s rages that are triggered by those hidden desires.

As Helen, Natalie Green mostly suffers in silence, until later in “Days and Days” when she finally reveals her true thoughts: “Days made of bargains I made because I thought as a wife I was meant to/And now my life is shattered and laid bare”).

Grown-up Alison narrates the story from the drawing board where she does her cartoon/graphic work. And she occasionally floats through the others’ scenes, just observing and sometimes offering commentary.

This structure creates a devilishly challenging task for Tasha Brandt, who plays Alison as an adult. The character is continually conflicted by her memories and contradicts herself while trying to find an equilibrium with her dad. Brandt manages this balancing act successfully at times, but her character tends to recede a bit more than it should.

This fractured father-daughter relationship is captured in “Telephone Wire” when they go for a car ride, with Alison trying to figure out a way to communicate (“Say something! Talk to him!/Say something! Anything!”). Meanwhile, her dad is lost in his own thoughts (“There was a boy in college/He had black wavy hair”). As it turns out, that wasn’t just another chance, it was their last chance.

Fun Home is a play dealing with heavy topics, but Kron’s sharp wit and Tesori’s evocative music save the day. And under the wise and thoughtful direction of Joanna May Cullinan, it becomes one of those musicals that, if you put in the effort, will reside within you long after the curtain falls.

Fun Home
Through August 27 at Cain Park. 14591 Superior Road between Taylor Road and Lee Road in Cleveland Heights, 216-371-3000, www.cainpark.com.

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