Welcome to our Fun Home! We’re so glad you’re here.

    Shailee Rajak, our amazing dramaturg, has written a beautiful dramaturgy note that captures the questions that led us to want to do Fun Home, and the questions that grounded us in the rehearsal room. Since a chapter in my dissertation is devoted to Fun Home, I thought I might share with you some of the research behind this production’s explorations of photography:

    Heading into this production process, I was fixated on an aspect of Alison Bechdel’s process: she photographs. Many literary scholars and cultural historians have written about this, particularly in relation to Fun Home, and how she took photos of herself posing as the characters of her memories–her father, her mother, her younger selves, her college lover–and then she would draw her cartoons from those photos. So she embodies the memories of her past to first capture them into still objects before she traces them into cartoons. It’s a fascinating, painstaking, and personal process that resonates deeply with Performance Studies’ invitations to consider how modes of archival research can take the form of embodied performance. In thinking about how we might bring Bechdel’s photography process into our production, I returned to a 2017 essay by cultural historian Robin Bernstein published in the journal American Literature. In the piece, Bernstein analyzes Bechdel’s use of digital photography which, as Bernstein notes, became a tool newly available to Bechdel during the George W. Bush presidency when destabilization of “truth” and “fact” grew rampant. Bernstein suggests that Fun Home’s narrative attention to “how or if reality is knowable” (123) coupled with Bechdel’s digital photography practice positions Bechdel’s work as a political counterpoint to “the Bush presidency’s crimes against reality” (134). Bechdel challenged the Bush administration’s erosion at truth’s stable ground by materially illustrating for readers the political significance of performing efforts to search for and uncover truths including those of personal, familial pasts.

    The last 25 years in the US have required each of us to face notions of “the truth” in all sorts of ways. And so the political dimensions of photography as a genre and practice associated with I want to know what’s true—a line that recurs in the musical–inspired us to further explore photography’s elaborations of cycles of memory and creative process. This was the seed for how we wanted to invite you, the audience, into Alison Bechdel’s mind, memories, feelings, and process. Process as a lesbian cartoonist, and process as an aging person, aging at the threshold of 43, the age of her closeted gay father’s suicide, a process that requires a search to really see, envision, script, and draw what her future might look like on the other side of his early ending.

    Many people nurtured this production to bring it to life, and I am endlessly grateful. Musicals are the ultimate celebration of collaboration, and many, many people’s hard work, care, craft, and vision exists both onstage and off. I hope you’ll leave the theater with more reasons to give love, and to advocate for the thriving of the live arts on our campus and beyond.