Tony Award-winning play ‘Fun Home’ explores gender roles, sexual orientation at Theatre Cedar Rapids

"Fun Home" is the deceptive title of the musical based on Alison Bechdel's graphic novel, which is inspired by her unorthodox childhood in rural Pennsylvania.

The dark, unique production, which runs from March 27 to April 6 at Theatre Cedar Rapids, touches on gender roles, sexual orientation, emotional abuse and dysfunctional family life.

Three different periods are covered during "Fun Home," which is short for funeral home, since Bechdel's dad juggled double duties as an English teacher and a mortician.

"One of the things I love most about 'Fun Home' is that it's not merely an adaptation of Alison Bechdel's story as told in the graphic novel," Theatre Cedar Rapids director Angie Toomsen said. "Rather, it portrays Alison actively journeying through her past, using the graphic novel's creation itself as her personal catharsis. Meeting three Alisons at three key ages, in a way that hops the timeline in a nonlinear manner, is very freeing to take on. It means there are no set rules for how we approach the staging."

There's Bechdel as a child, a young adult and a present-day version. The latter, played by Claire Ottley, narrates the play.

"Alison Bechdel's life was very challenging," Ottley said. "Her relationship with her father was incredibly complicated. This is a tragic story presented as a cartoon. It's a super unique production. It's interesting witnessing her catharsis writing and the opening number when she says 'I need real things to draw from since I don't trust memories.’"

The impact of Bechdel's unusual childhood is evident. After her father shows his daughter a dead body for the first time, Bechdel, who wrote journals throughout her life, jotted down the experience with the cadaver as another day in the life.

"Dad showed me the body today. Went swimming and had egg salad for lunch," Bechdel wrote.

"Her journaling was a coping mechanism for her anxiety," Ottley said. "She had a compulsive need to be journaling all of the time. The experience of running a funeral home and being around death isn't something the average person experiences. It meant nothing to her father, but it was incredibly impactful for her."

The focal point of "Fun Home," which won five Tonys in 2015, including Best Musical, is sexual identity. While Bechdel is in college, she comes out as lesbian at the same time her father is outed as a gay man.

"I think it's an incredibly important time to share the lives of queer people in theater," Bechdel said. "It feels a little heavy, but it's important."

Ottley’s latest gig is quite different from her last role when she played Belle in "Beauty and the Beast."

"This is the biggest stretch I've had in my career in community theater," Ottley said. "But I love it."

Ottley, 33, is enjoying performing in a heavy musical, which also features bits of comedy.

"This is not just a dark play," Ottley said. "There's much more to 'Fun Home' than that."

The combination of dialogue and music works well.

"Though it has two incredibly fun and satisfying Broadway bangers and an '11 o'clock' number (a show-stopping song that emerges late in the second act), it hits more like a play in a gently tethered duet with its score," Toomsen said. "The dialogue is rich and interwoven with compelling musical motifs that act as synapses of sorts as Alison makes connections among the pieces of her past. The result is viscerally cathartic."

Toomsen is ecstatic to have the opportunity to direct such a complex and deep play.

"When I first saw ‘Fun Home’ on Broadway at Circle in the Square, I was swept off my feet by its innovative storytelling structure," Toomsen said. "I have replayed that production in my mind and hoped I'd one day have the opportunity to produce it. It's so finely calibrated and delicate in the way it unfolds Alison Bechdel's complex excavation of memory. It's honest, funny, and often as odd as any individual's life seems when one starts digging through boxes of family past, from what is 'everyday life' to kids growing up with a family funeral home, to more blindsiding, unearthed revelations."

Toomsen believes "Fun Home" is an incredibly timely work. "It feels even more important right now to tell stories like this," Toomsen said. “'Fun Home' invites us to consider how the intricate set of social, familial and personal forces shape who we become, and how we face internal and external barriers to fully stand in and live our truth. This is still very much a literal life and death struggle for many people."

"Fun Home" is a change of pace for Theatre Cedar Rapids, which Toomsen welcomes.

"This presentation of 'Fun Home' is a new kind of offering for us," Toomsen said. "It's simple, pared down storytelling, a departure from the large sets and spectacle TCR is known for and its two-week, shorter run give us the freedom to share a wider range of musical and play offerings amid our bigger blockbusters."