One of the first questions we asked during tablework sounded more like therapy than dramaturgy: how do you love someone who has also given you grief? We laughed, nodded, paused—and someone said, “Well, that’s family.” That felt right. Fun Home lives in that tension between affection and ache, between laughter and the silence that follows. The more we worked, the more we saw that this musical isn’t only about remembering a life or familial histories. It’s about learning how memory works—how it folds the past into the present and asks us to live inside both.

    Alison’s remembering resists order. It moves like breath that loops through different versions of herself, ones which coexist rather than replace one another. Watching her speak to her younger selves feels like watching time rearrange itself. That idea shaped our rehearsals—the tune that repeats like stubborn thoughts, the box of objects that holds emotional residue, the light that lingers too long in the silence. Each element became a way of thinking about inheritance and legacy, about what we carry forward and what we refuse. Alison’s journey is not simply about returning to her father’s story but about contending with the kinetic process of aging beyond it—recognizing his pain, his repression, and the structures that confined him, while also daring to imagine a life past those limits. The tension between identification and transcendence sits at the heart of this production, a reminder that to grow up queer is to age against history itself.

    Within that reckoning lives queerness. Fun Home is a story about interior life—what it means to seek emotional truth when the world outside denies it. To stage that interiority in 2025, when queer and trans lives are again contested, feels like a quiet act of defiance. This musical does not make declarations; it listens. It insists that small details—a piano, a map, a key, a hesitant silence—can hold entire histories. It reminds us that the domestic can be radical, that remembering itself can be a form of resistance.

    There is something beautiful about restaging a Broadway musical in a small black box with friends, peers, lots of tape, and our unbridled imaginations. What we discovered through this process is that Fun Home asks more from us than recognition. It asks for collective participation. Every night, the play remakes itself in relation to the people watching, with each audience member bringing their own memory into Alison’s archive. We hope they leave not with resolution but with resonance—with the sense that theatre allows us to inhabit another’s remembering, to see our own reflected there, and to keep building homes from what the world has taught us to hide.