The haunting pull of memory and its potential power to destroy or shape identity come to life in the Tony Award-winning musical Fun Home, produced for the first time in Bloomington-Normal this weekend.
Based on a true events from graphic novelist Alison Bechdel and the struggle to write her autobiography as she reflects on her past will be performed by the Community Players Theatre March 5-7 at the Normal Community Activity Center.
Kayla Pulliam Mendoza returns to the director's chair for Fun Home. She’s worked on and off the stage of the Community Players since the summer after she graduated high school.
Pulliam Mendoza has played Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and Meg in Little Women but has also directed and served as a dramaturg for the century-old theater troupe.
“The people and the chance to be creative with others is beautiful,” she said in an interview for WGLT's Sound Ideas. “The fact that everyone chooses to do this in their free time, and that we all come together to make art, is one of the most rewarding things that I’ve ever experienced.”
The last time Pulliam Mendoza directed a show was 10 years ago. To say the least, the director’s commitment and context to the show is fundamentally different.
“…I’m very picky when it comes to directing jobs, because I need to feel passionate about the project,” she said. “I do feel that when a director is passionate about what they’re doing, it inspires the cast, it inspires the crew and everyone just has a better experience.”
To direct, Pulliam Mendoza said she needs to be obsessed with a project, and Fun Home fits the [play] bill.
A Fun(eral) Home
In 2015, the Tony Awards did a performance from Fun Home as a part of the traditional showcase of the year’s Best New Musical nominees. Pulliam Mendoza remembers the performance of Ring of Keys.
“Normally, when you go to the Tonys, you see big production numbers, a lot of dancing, flashy. They want to grab your attention because they only have a minute to do so,” said Pulliam Mendoza. “But Fun Home, it was just a little girl singing a song about feeling seen for the first time, and I sobbed when I watched it.”
For reference, Something Rotten! was also nominated that year in the same category, a musical characterized by the big, flashy numbers like Pulliam Mendoza described, but at the end of the night Fun Home took home the Tony.
Fun Home was a game-changer, more like a play than a musical itself. The cast is small; the settings are intimate and it’s based on the true story of author Alison Bechdel.
One of the realities Alison must face through the course of the show is that both she and her father are gay, a tension she struggled to address while he was alive.
“It is about lesbian cartoonist, Alison Bechdel. If you’ve heard of her, she’s quite popular, her graphic novels and cartoons, but it’s about her as she processes and searches for answers regarding her father’s death, the secrets he kept in life and their shared life in their home, which as a funeral home in Pennsylvania,” Pulliam Mendoza said.
Fun Home was the first major musical to feature a lesbian in the lead role. It flows like a play with a lot of singing, because there are no breaks or blackouts. It follows Alison through three formative points of her life.
“So, we see adult Alison, then in processing her memories, she pulls back from two key moments in her life,” said Pulliam Mendoza. “One, when she was a child living in Beech Creek in the funeral home with her family, and another when she is a student at Oberlin College.”
With the inclusion of three versions of Alison, three actors are required, in this case, Breeann Dawson [adult Alison], Mia Archos [medium Alison] and Khaleesi Elder [small Alison].
Pulliam Mendoza said it has been a great challenge to coordinate three people at the same time to reflect on one person over the course of a life.
“So, the three of them have had extra rehearsals from the rest of the cast where we work on, how do you put your glasses on your face? How do you tuck your hair behind your head?” she said. “What has made Alison and what changes between each version of Alison.”
Themes of love and loss
Finding identity and confronting grief are heavy topics for both the actors and the audience to face, but if a musical is well-written, as Fun Home was described by Pulliam Mendoza, a mood lift is not far away.
Even so, the cast is faced with these themes constantly throughout rehearsal, like Pulliam Mendoza, who lost her husband last year.
“That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do this show, because I have a really good understanding of how that can change the way you view everything, and also about how to process that and to not bring in your own trauma into what you’re doing in the space,” she said. “…at the end of every rehearsal, we de-roll, which we have a mantra that we repeat which is that, ‘I am not my character, my character is not me. I will leave my character in this space until we meet again.’”
The old mantra for actors used to be the opposite where they would give into the trauma to ideally improve a performance, but Pulliam Mendoza said most now regard the practice as unhealthy.
Last month, the Community Players lost a friend, longtime actor and supporter Bruce Parrish. As loss is real at the theater, a show with that theme can still bring people together.
"This show is a family, and it’s a small cast, and it’s a small, very hands on crew. We all are wearing multiple hats in the show because of that, we’ve all kind of just really been there for each other and for me when stepping into this role of director of the show after my loss, being with these people and being able to discuss in an abstract way…to discuss grief,” she said.
“And now, with Bruce passing, all of us now experiencing some level of grief, it’s kind of a way for us to process that feeling without giving into it, and without losing ourselves in the grief.”
Whether with the passing of a friend like Bruce, or a husband like Victor, Pulliam Mendoza said the production allows all those who are a part of it to put their love for others into their roles on stage.
