Join The Community Library and The Spot for a discussion and exploration of Fun Home, the 2006 graphic memoir by comic artist Alison Bechdel.
Come explore the graphic memoir’s story, themes and literary tropes with us before you see The Spot’s production of the musical adaptation in January. Director Brett Moellenberg and cast members will join us to discuss the adaptation of a graphic novel to the stage, the significance of this groundbreaking musical, our local production, and the issues of LGBTTQQIAAP representation that the memoir brings up. The cast may even perform a song or scene from the show!
The Library has several copies in our collection available for check out, and people are encouraged to join for the discussion even if they haven’t read the book.
Fun Home is a darkly funny family tale. Meet Alison’s father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family’s Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter’s complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned “fun home,” as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic — and redemptive.
The Fun Home musical was adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. It was the first Broadway musical with a lesbian protagonist. It opened Off-Broadway in 2013, on Broadway in 2015, and was nominated for twelve Tony Awards, winning five, including Best Musical.
The Spot is a non-profit theater company in Ketchum, as well as an educational venue for young artists to collaborate with professional mentors and produce exhilarating works, contemporary and classical, in an effort to make theatre accessible to the larger community & explore our collective humanity.
