Putting the Fun in Dysfunction

Review of Fun Home, Yale School of Drama

The Yale School of Drama production of Fun Home, the Tony-winning musical by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, is something to behold. A two-story home, with a band in the back on the ground floor and an artist-studio/observation post on the second-floor, graces the stage at the University Theater. The design by Jimmy Stubbs wonderfully foregrounds the notion of “home” that the musical, playing through December 20, interrogates with its story of dysfunction and coping.

The open playing space in front can become the Bechdel family’s museum-like home with its prized antiques, or easily morph into the funeral home that Bruce, the father (JJ McGlone), operates out of the house, or the dorm-room where Middle Alison (Doireann Mac Mahon) discovers the wonders of lesbian love with Joan (Madeline Seidman) or a hotel room where Small Alison anxiously interrogates her dad. A sliding door in a wall gives onto the piano Helen, the mother (Zoe Mann), an actress, practices on and, in one eerie tableau, the space where Bruce works on a naked cadaver (Dario Ladani Sanchez). Key to the appeal of this well-paced production is the way director/choreographer Danilo Gambini makes use of the space, moving the characters through a kind of memory house as Alison (Eli Pauley) tries to come to terms with the enduring influence of her troubled father.

The company of Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

As told, the story of Alison, a comic-book artist, consists of nonlinear scenes, as they seem to occur in Alison’s memory. Always addressing the audience, Alison pitches her appeal to us, making us witnesses to her vexed history. It’s not just the funeral home and her dad’s way of imposing his tastes and his standards (he dismisses comic-book art in favor of serious art). We learn that Bruce pursues young men for sex while remaining the patriarch and, though his wife is aware of his proclivities, that he hides behind a lie of heteronormativity that seems to warp him. And his underage liaisons put the entire family at risk. Then there’s that night in New York when Bruce is willing to leave his kids asleep in a hotel room while he goes out for . . . whatever he goes out for. Alison is upfront about all she doesn’t know about him, and her father’s death—she’s convinced it was suicide—confronts her as a need to weigh both his failings and hers.

The perspective of Alison, as someone who gradually finds the entertainment value of her life, is key to the power of the YSD production. Pauley gives Alison a reflective irony and her presence as onlooker is made manifest by the way Gambini keeps her placed on the periphery of scenes. The effect, aided by visual effects such as Camilla Tassi’s evocative projections of drawings, scribbles and text, and Nicole E. Lang’s varied lighting design, is of a world that is shaping itself into expressive arrangements as Alison gropes to find her own truth.

The songs that make Fun Home a musical have a certain obligatory quality, as if the story of Alison and her family—essentially a tale of estrangement—might be made alright if they can sing about it. The fun songs, like “Come to the Fun Home” and “Raincoat of Love,” show a lively knack for the kinds of family performers—the Jackson Five, the Partridge Family—that Small Alison loves (the latter number features Sanchez as a teenybopper heartthrob and Seidman and Mac Mahon as dead-ringers for Susan Dey in Phuong Nguyen’s costumes). When they appear in tandem, the three Bechdel children—Alison (Taylor Hoffman), Christian (Juliana Aiden Martinez) and John (Laurie Ortega-Murphy)—are fast-moving stick puppets, giving them the infectious charm of the kind of televised entertainment that would appeal to the children. Small Alison, a larger puppet voiced by Hoffman, with puppeteering by Martinez and Ortega-Murphy, maintains an air of melancholy that might be less available to a child actor (puppet design by Anatar Marmol-Gagne).

Middle Alison’s big number of coming out, “Changing My Major,” is thoroughly charming in Doireann Mac Mahon’s rendering—there’s shyness and heat and awkwardness and joy, and Mac Mahon moves about the space as if in a pas de deux with her own sense of wonder. The more emotionally taxing “Days and Days” is a knockout, delivered by Zoe Mann as the one place in the show when Helen comes into her own, finally reaching out to Alison and acknowledging the emotional costs of life with Bruce.

As Bruce, JJ McGlone is perfectly suited to the role. He looks the English teacher—one of Bruce’s occupations—and he plays the doting or disgruntled father well and is able to mood-swing in a way that makes Bruce feel complicated. His striped suit and glances at his reflection while singing “not too bad,” let us know he’s something of a player, but he’s also vulnerable in ways that make him not quite the grown-up Small and Middle Alison assume he is.

Alison (Eli Pauley) and Bruce (JJ McGlone) in Fun Home with music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, directed by Danilo Gambini. Photo by T. Charles Erickson, Yale School of Drama, 2019

The trajectory of Bruce’s character is given two powerful moments late in the play. Gambini places the important car ride between Bruce and Middle Alison (but with Alison taking her place—indeed, the shutting out of Middle Alison behind a sliding wall is very effective) on the edge of the stage. The intimacy that the two almost find is there for us more than for them, and so the scene registers as the tragic lost chance Alison sees it as. Finally, Bruce’s big number, “Edges of the World,” is sung by McGlone from a platform on the second floor, a provisional space from which he tries to survey not only an old house he’s trying to renovate, but also a life that, like the house, may be beyond repair. Like Helen’s “Days and Days,” “Edges” expresses Alison’s sense of her parents’ desperation, which becomes, via song, uplifting and poignant.

Finally, the flying Small Alison—a puppet sustained in midair—is fully buoyed by the merging voices of Hoffman, Pauley and Mac Mahon, affording us a complex moment in which the child contains the elders and the elders share the child’s simple trust in a father who has yet to bully or betray her. Fun Home, in this fully satisfying production, lets the wishful thinking of art’s answer to life hang on that fleeting moment of perfect balance.

Fun Home
Music by Jeanine Tesori
Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron
Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel
Directed by Danilo Gambini

Music Director: Jill Brunelle; Scenic Designer: Jimmy Stubbs; Costume Designer: Phuong Nguyen; Lighting Designer: Nicole E. Lang; Sound Designer: Noel Nichols; Projection Designer: Camilla Tassi; Puppet Designer: Anatar Marmol-Gagne; Production Dramaturg: Emily Sorensen; Technical Director: Dominick Pinto; Stage Manager: Edmond O’Neal

Musicians: Jill Brunelle, keyboard 1; Liam Bellman-Sharpe, guitar; Margaret E. Douglas, bass; Frances Pollock, keyboard 2; Jim Stavris, drums; Emily Duncan Wilson, reeds

Cast: Taylor Hoffman, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zoe Mann, Juliana Aiden Martinez, JJ McGlone, Laurie Ortega-Murphy, Eli Pauley, Dario Ladani Sanchez, Madeline Seidman

Yale School of Drama
December 14-20, 2019

The Cab of the Cab

Review of The Satellite Festival, Yale Cabaret

Billed as “a weekend of new works across multiple venues and genres,” this year’s Satellite Festival at Yale Cabaret—the fourth—was a curated collection of musical performances, solo shows, looped electronics, and a play in a truck. What follows are impressions from attending five shows in quick succession on the festival’s opening night, Thursday, March 28.

The evening began in the Cabaret space at 8 p.m. with Exit Interview, featuring playwright Christopher Gabriel Núñez in his persona Anonymous (And.On.I.Must), a rapper with a very frenetic style and a warm intensity. Earning whoops and cheers from a rapt audience, and much encouragement from the YSD students working the kitchen, Núñez paced and swooped through a range of material, one hand holding a mic, the other vigorously beating the air. While most of the songs were fast and aggressive, giving off an angry urban vibe, a few were more lyrical, including one that Núñez introduced as a “love song for the ‘90s.”  Hooks were plentiful, and Núñez’s singing voice, those times when he vocalized, has a husky, soulful intensity. My favorite part was the final number when the artist was joined by an impromptu collection of students and audience members, including one old enough to be a grandfather to some of the others, who proceeded to groove with the most upbeat and infectious song of the night.

Christopher Gabriel Núñez, “Exit Interview”

Upstairs in the rehearsal space, second-year sound designer Liam Bellman-Sharpe and dancer/choreographer Sarah Xiao collaborated in Untitled semi-improvised dance/music piece, an atmospheric work that seemed to pit the musical direction of the piece against the physical component. At first, Bellman-Sharpe, with a prop forearm swaying, played guitar riffs with his back to Xiao. In a nude leotard wearing face-paint and a blonde wig, Xiao, in striking lighting, crept about the floor, holding poses and moving in slow motion. Later, Bellman-Sharpe, also wearing a nude leotard with face-paint and a head-wrap, faced Xiao and played arpeggios while counting aloud, at intervals, through a sequence of numbers. Eventually, the numbers seemed to meet with no response and went off on unpredictable sequences, with Xiao ignoring or interpreting the direction (if that’s what it was) as she chose. The guitar parts Bellman-Sharpe played had a crisply fluid sound, never too abrasive or strident, while breaking once or twice into a rhythmic number. Xiao’s movements were always spell-binding, executed with a flair for precision and contortion as when, early on, she bent over backwards while emitting a breathy flutter. As the piece wound down, Bellman-Sharpe produced a cellphone to Skype with his mother in Australia while Xiao arranged him in fetal position on the floor.

Sarah Xiao, Liam Bellman-Sharpe, “Untitled semi-improvised dance/music piece”

Back downstairs in the Cab, first-year actor Malia West’s black girl burning: an open letter addressed white culture in general as “you,” giving you to understand the mix of defiance, grievance, and pride felt by a black girl growing up in a society that under-appreciates and stigmatizes her race. Citing black female cultural heroines such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntosake Shange, Maya Angelou and others, West gave her audience—many of whom snapped fingers in response to a particularly pithy line—a clear sense of the tradition empowering her. A funny and spirited set-piece, which might be called “no you can’t touch my hair,” worked through a series of possible responses to the off-putting request to touch a black person’s hair. West worked rhyme and sing-song rhythms into the piece, but generally kept to a measured spoken word cadence she has clearly mastered. The different voices of the piece—called “a poem, a plea, a panic attack, a prayer…and some praise”—took us through a variety of emotional states, from anger to love to doubt to inspiration, and finally to simple admiration of West’s strength of conviction.

Malia West, “black girl burning: an open letter”

Upstairs again to hear second-year director Kat Yen, in This is Not Art, It’s Just Asian, give voice to her many frustrations with theater’s treatment of Asian Americans. Yen’s spoken piece was very much in her own person, telling of her experiences in a direct and disarming way. When she applied to the Yale School of Drama, Yen told us, she insisted that she was not interested in staging Asian American plays. Now, concluding her second year, her view has changed, but there aren’t enough actors of Asian descent to stage an Asian American play at YSD. The change in her view, it seemed, came from a heightened sense of individual cultural identity currently much in vogue in the School, which, in her view, caused her to be pulled off projects that required a certain ethnic authenticity, thus restricting her still more. The most telling grievance—at least as a set-piece—was Yen’s story of visiting the home of her white fiancé’s parents and being told by her future mother-in-law that her bedroom was decorated in the tropes of “Asian Ladies of the Night.” The story worked as an awkward and painful indication of how Asian women are perceived by a culture with a strong tendency to identify them with exotic sex workers. Yen also opened the question—as she read from author Frank Chin’s take-down of author David Henry Hwang—of how a fragmented and disparate Asian American culture can find a clear sense of political voice.

Kat Yen, “This is Not Art, It’s Just Asian”

The evening ended—in the usual late night 11 p.m. time-slot—with third-year theater manager Sam Linden’s UNAMUSED: a feminist musical fantasia adapted from an essay that was based on a true story about a play that was based on a true story—a work adapted from Alexandra Petri’s story, “We Are Not A Muse,” about having to attend a writing workshop where an ex-boyfriend, Dave, uses their breakup as material for a story. Taylor Hoffman played Alexandra as more perky than bitter, seeing the humor of her situation while mining it for laughs. A Greek Chorus added their takes on the dynamic, in which a “he said/she said” exchange escalates into “what he said about what she said” and vice versa. The songs are mostly light and jaunty with some ready wit in capturing the kinds of vanities that get ruffled whenever someone puts one’s business out there. In one song, Dave (Dario Ladani Sánchez) wandered a bit off-key, drawing shared looks from the Chorus. Whether deliberate or not, the effect created was along the lines of “he’s a guy, he’ll get by.” And that attitude did indeed underscore the resentment aimed at Dave, who, oblivious to any viewpoint not his own, sailed blithely along with his self-involved account. Linden’s play has the wherewithal to include a meta-moment in which Alexandra reflects that she made Dave the fodder for her presentation just as he had done to her. And that view gamely takes us back to the fact that, when it comes to breakups, even if we get both sides of the story, we never do get the whole story.

Charlie Romano, foreground at piano; Dario Ladani Sánchez, Taylor Hoffman, background, “UNAMUSED”

And, on Friday night only, in a workspace at 149 York Street, two Alexas, the voice-activated electronic assistant developed by Amazon, were locked into an exchange of lines from Samuel Beckett’s seminal play of absurdist situations and gnomic communications, Waiting for Godot. The play’s very repetitive structure was perfect for the robotic interactions between the two machines as created by Elliot G. Mitchell. Listening for about ten or fifteen minutes, I was tickled each time Alexa 1 and 2 reached this exchange: A1: “Let’s go” A2: “We can’t” A1: “Why not?” A2: “We’re waiting for Godot.” After that line, A1 might come back with different responses from different points in the play. But each time the “why not” was in the exact same inflection, as though the question were being asked for the very first time. At times, the “happy path” by which one Alexa responded to the other would produce a shorter loop, coming back to repeat the same material, as for instance the bit about the willow tree (“no more weeping”). The part about Gogo and Didi possibly hanging themselves was included as well—which could only make one sympathetic to the two poor machines with less means of accomplishing the task than Beckett’s characters. The series of insults was particularly amusing in the affectless voices of Alexa 1 and 2.

A range of experience, certainly, containing much anger and distress, but also mystery, poetry, and the celebration of creativity. The festival atmosphere, as opposed to the one show per weekend format, lets one encounter different audiences throughout the night which can become a factor in how one experiences a particular show. Co-Artistic Director Molly FitzMaurice called the Satellite Festival “the Cab of the Cab,” as a weekend of pieces in progress or not full-show length or simply less like plays and more like cabaret performances. As ever, the Satellite Festival is a various occasion to sample more of the talent passing through the Yale School of Drama.

The Festival’s creative teams:

Alexa, wait for Godot
Created by Elliot G. Mitchell
Projection Design: Camilla Tassi

black girl burning: an open letter
Written and performed by Malia West
Dramaturg: Gloria Majule; Lighting Design: Riva Fairhall; Sound Design: Bailey Trierweiler; Voiceover: Adrienne Wells

dot the jay
Performed by Robert Lee Hart and Dario Ladani Sánchez

Exit Interview
By Christopher Gabriel Núñez aka Anonymous (And.On.I.Must)
Beats by The Brainius

This is Not Art, It’s Just Asian
Written & performed by Kat Yen

Truck II
Written by Margaret E. Douglas
Directed by Danilo Gambini
Dramaturg: Madeline Charne; Truck Design: Sarah Karl; Sound Design: Emily Duncan Wilson; Costume Design: Alicia Austin; Technical Director: Alex McNamara

Cast: Margaret E. Douglas, Sarah Lyddan, Juliana Martínez

UNAMUSED: a feminist musical fantasia…
Adapted from “We Are Not A Muse” from A Field Guide to Awkward Silences by Alexandra Petri
Book, Music & Lyrics by Sam Linden
Directed by Kat Yen
Music Director: Charlie Romano
Producer: Yuhan Zhang
Dramaturg: Henriëtte Rietveld

Cast: Taylor Hoffman, Ipsitaa Khullar, Edmund O’Neal, Zak Rosen, Dario Ladani Sánchez, Jessy Yates

Untitled semi-improvised dance/music piece
Created and performed by Sarah Xiao and Liam Bellman-Sharpe
Costume Design: Alicia Austin

Satellite Festival
Yale Cabaret
March 28-30

The Yale Cabaret will be dark for the next two weekends, then returns April 18-20 with Fireflies by Donja R. Love, an Afro-queer playwright, poet and filmmaker from Philadelphia, directed by first-year director Christopher Betts, who directed School Girls; or the African Mean Girls Play earlier this season.