"Fun Home" at New Village Arts Theatre

Lisette Velandia (as Joan) and Priya Richard (as Medium Alison) in "Fun Home."    Photo by Daren Scott

              Sometime, somewhere, somebody must have said it out loud in filmmaking, theater-making or television-making circles: You can’t tell a story about a writer if you’re going to show him, her or them writing. For an audience, that’s deadly dull.
            So it doesn’t happen very often.
            But how about a show where we see the cartoonist cartooning AND writing at the same time?
            It worked for Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, whose “Fun Home,” a stage musical adaptation of cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s memoir won Best Musical and three other Tony Awards in 2015. In their 90-minute show, an actor portraying the current-day Bechdel is onstage throughout with drawing pencil/pen in hand, re-living and documenting in what would be her graphic novel “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” the most significant events of her upbringing in Pennsylvania – realizing her own sexual identity and discovering the secrets of her closeted father’s ultimately tragic life.
            I first saw “Fun Home” in 2018 when it was produced by the bygone San Diego Repertory Theatre with Amanda Naughton as the grown Alison. (Two younger actors play her as a child and as a college student in the show.) I counted it among my Top 10 theatrical productions of that year.
             Even so, I’d forgotten much of “Fun Home” in the years since, so it’s been fortuitous that there’s a new production onstage through March 3 at New Village Arts in Carlsbad with Kym Pappas directing.
            “Fun Home” is a frank and at times unsettling tale, though I’m not sure why the folks at NVA believe it’s necessary to announce a kind of trigger warning before the show starts. True, “Fun Home” is considerably more daring than the fare longtime New Village audiences may have enjoyed over the years, but the brave world of good live theater, which this is, is one that all of us should welcome just as bravely.
            The fact is, though “Fun Home” has its share of darkness, it’s truly an empowering story that Bechdel was compelled to tell in pictures and words, with Kron and Tesori following in her footsteps.
            The non-linear musical morphs back and forth in time, alternating between Bechdel’s girlhood living among an “ordinary” family of five, and her first year as a student at Oberlin College.
         “Small Alison” has a complicated relationship with her father, Bruce, who operates a funeral home (this becomes the source of the riffed “fun home” adopted by the three kids). She does not understand why her dad gets into trouble or why he sneaks away in the middle of the night.
        “Medium Alison,” meanwhile, comes to terms with her sexuality at college and begins a relationship with the kind and confident lesbian Joan.
            Throughout the parallel storytelling, the adult Alison (smartly played by Rae Henderson-Gray) observes, cartoons, writes and sometimes sings along with her family and younger selves. Now, as in 2018, this device isn’t so much awkward as unneeded. As much as I admire “Fun Home” it seems to me that perhaps having a grown-Alison monologue a couple of times during the show would have accomplished just as much as the presence of the character onstage all the time.
           What stands out most in “Fun Home,” even more than its pointed story, is Tesori’s music – melodic, stirring and well complemented by Kron’s lyrics. There is potency in “Ring of Keys,” wife Helen’s melancholy “Days,” and both “Telephone Wire” and “Edges of the World” near the end of the show. “Changing My Major,” in which Medium Alison expresses her joyous love for Joan, is funny and touching. The young kids’ “Come to the Fun Home” is what it is – kids singing.
            At some junctures it sounds like the actors are over-singing, but that may be because the music behind them is just too loud. It doesn’t need to be.
            The night I saw “Fun Home” at NVA, neither Brent Roberts as Bruce nor Lena Palke as Small Alison, appeared. I’d heard good buzz about Roberts, so I’m sorry I missed him.
            Henderson-Gray and Sarah Alida LeClair (as Helen) deliver sincere and ardent performances, respectively, with Priya Richard as Medium Alison the most memorable among the cast. This follows her appearance last year in New Village’s exquisite “The Ferryman.”
           “Fun Home” is a bold step forward for New Village Arts. Its return to the San Diego area after six years is a welcome one.
           “Fun Home” runs through March 3 at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad.