‘Fun Home’ hits home

CEDAR RAPIDS - Like theater fans across the country, Joan Benson of Iowa City will be glued to her television Sunday night, eagerly watching the Tony Awards with a group of friends.

Unlike most others, one of the pivotal characters in the much-lauded show 'Fun Home” is based on her and bears her first name.

The hit Broadway musical is tied with 'An American in Paris” to lead the pack with 12 nominations each. Both are up against 'Something Rotten!” and 'The Visit” for Best Musical honors.

'The Visit,” nominated in five categories, features Cedar Rapids native Timothy Shew and Elena Shaddow, wife of Cedar Rapids native Michael Harrington. Cedar Rapids native Kevin Worley is in the musical revival of 'On the Town,” up for four awards.

'Fun Home” is based on Alison Bechdel's graphic novel about growing up in a dysfunctional family with a father described as a 'volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life.”

The Broadway adaptation depicts Bechdel at three interwoven stages of her life: growing up in Pennsylvania and playing with her siblings in their father's funeral home, which they dub 'the fun house”; coming to grips with her own sexuality in college; and as an adult, trying to make sense of her father's secrets and life.

Benson was Bechdel's first girlfriend, dating in 1980 when both were undergraduates at Oberlin College in Ohio. Their relationship is highlighted in the graphic novel. In the musical, Alison's ardor over her first sexual encounter with Joan is captured in the showstopping song 'Changing My Major,” in which Alison gushes that all she wants to study is Joan.

Benson came out to her mother long before the graphic novel came out in 2006, but watching her mid-80s mother read the tale four or five years ago on a visit to Benson's house was a little unnerving. Her mom wanted something to read, and picked up Bechdel's book.

'We sat on the porch, and I read my book and she read ‘Fun Home' in front of me,” Benson says. 'And then she finished it. I said, ‘What did you think?' She said, ‘It was educational.'”

Benson, 54, who grew up in Michigan and works as a senior writer at Stamats Communications Inc. in Cedar Rapids, has been out to her family for years. Her parents and siblings came to Iowa City to celebrate her marriage to teacher Michelle Hills on May 31, 2014. That gathering was made even more poignant when two weeks later, Benson's father passed away.

Death, family and acceptance are among the many themes explored in 'Fun Home,” but Bechdel's family dynamics were much darker.

Benson has seen the show twice in New York, and says watching Joan's story unfold on stage was a little surreal - and educational.

'It is surreal,” she says, considering 'the layering of reality” between her memory, Bechdel's memory, the graphic novel's depiction and the musical's depiction of that moment in her life so many years ago.

'Theater's this living thing, so there's also the audience's reaction to it, happening at the same time,” she says. 'At the same time, I'm sitting in the audience having my experience at the theater. It's all of those things happening all at once. It begins to feel almost like fun house mirrors with reflections back and forth.

'Underlying all of that, it's an amazing musical, it's an amazing play, it's very moving, and although of course I start being totally focused on me being in the play, I'm really a secondary character, and I knew all those other people up on stage, too. And I see their lives played out, and the sadness and the drama of that. The first time I saw it, I really ended on that feeling, really mourning her parents.”

She doesn't describe it as sad, however.

'It is, in the end, heartwarming,” she says. 'There is sadness at the heart of it, but there's also incredible warmth, so I don't think of it as a tragedy. People aren't shattered at the end - people are made whole by remembering, and the music helps a lot with that, too.”

And even though Benson doesn't remember some aspects the way Bechdel does, saying she feels 'so disconnected” from her 19-year-old self, she applauds Bechdel for putting her story out for the world to see.

'I admire her for that,” Benson says. 'It is not my drive as a writer, but she has really been true to that. That is part of the text of the play, too, about putting it out there in order to understand it for yourself and to try to understand what the story means, and what remembering it means.”

She describes Bechdel's telling as 'courageous,” citing how Michelle Obama recently encouraged Oberlin's graduating class to 'run to, and not away from, the noise.”

'I think that each of us in our lives, to live our authentic lives, need to run to the noise,” Benson says. 'It may not be a big, heroic moment, but it is dealing with what is real, and not trying to run from it. I think that is what Alison has done in her work.”