On Repression: Fun Home and Bat Boy

Sarah Bockel and Nick Duckart in Fun Home. (Photo: Marc J. Franklin.)

It’s not the Huntington Theatre Company’s fault that the opening night performance of Fun Home occasioned repeated displays of virtue signaling on the part of the audience; that’s what you get these days when you produce a play that wears its liberal heart on its sleeve. (The cheering began with the pre-show announcement, for God’s sake.) But Logan Ellis’s production of the musical, adapted by Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, makes it easy for an audience to declare their allegiance. The show, which premiered at the Public Theatre twelve years ago under Sam Gold’s direction, is already didactic. It’s a memory play narrated by a character based on Bechdel, who grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s, in a museum-like Victorian house that doubled as the small town’s funeral parlor (hence fun home, the family’s nickname for it), with a father who divided his time between undertaking and teaching high school English. Though Alison’s reminiscences permit her to revisit her eleven-year-old self, they focus on her coming out as an Oberlin freshman and, in the wake of that announcement, her mother Helen’s revelation that Alison’s father Bruce was a closeted gay man with a taste for young, sometimes underage men. Bechdel’s trajectory ends happily: she grows up to become a famous cartoonist. Bruce, on the other hand, ends up a suicide.

I saw Fun Home on Broadway and found it – like the graphic novel – too insistent, and Michael Cerveris seemed to be blurred out by the role of the father, whom he played, albeit with sensitivity, as the family’s Invisible Man. (Besides Bruce, Helen and Alison, there are two little boys, Christian and John, whose characters are underwritten and who disappear when their sister enters college.) Kron’s book didn’t work for me, though adapting the source material was such a tricky prospect that I couldn’t help but admire the effort, even though the laudatory reviews and the raft of awards the show won during both its off-Broadway presentation and its subsequent Broadway run appeared to confuse attempt with achievement. Jeanine Tesori’s songs, with their unpleasing melodies and trite lyrics, didn’t help. Yet the New York production had a real sweetness. The night I saw it the house included a small crowd of gay teens who clearly had taken Fun Home to their hearts, and their authentic personal response swirled together with that sweetness and made the evening endearing – even though I had to fight my sense that what the musical ends up saying is that if you repress your sexual impulses you’ll become bipolar and step in front of a truck.

At the Huntington Fun Home is so simplified that I’m afraid that was pretty much my takeaway. I didn’t believe much of it. Under Ellis’s direction Nick Duckart plays Bruce as an unsympathetic perfectionist and a practiced seducer whose playful, simpatico early relationship with his daughter is buried under his more shadowy aspects. Kron wrote the character as lost, not sinister. Three actresses share the role of Alison: Lyla Randall as the child (referred to in the script and the playbill as Small Alison), Maya Jacobson as Medium Alison, i.e., Alison the college student, and Sarah Bockel as the looking-back narrator, who’s around forty. Ellis coaches a child-star performance out of Randall; she’s clearly talented, but what she does on stage would be better suited to the revival of Annie I saw at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival last summer. Jacobson, whose version of the protagonist is better written than the other two, is fine, but the scenes built around her coming out are hampered by the decision to make Joan (Sushma Saha), her first lover, so butch. As a freshman at Oberlin, Alison manages to get herself over to the gay union on campus but she’s too terrified to walk in, and that’s when Joan shows up. Saha is an appealing performer, but didn’t it occur to Ellis that in her terror of committing herself to an action that she feels will define her she’d more likely to run away from a force like Joan than be immediately drawn to her?

The best scene comes almost at the end, when Alison the narrator, remembering a car ride she took with Bruce on her first trip home from Oberlin (when she brought Joan home to meet her folks), steps in to replace Medium Alison and imagines the conversation she wishes her father had been able to have with her, confiding in her about his initial sexual experiences. (It’s the highlight of both Bockel’s and Duckart’s performances.) As Helen, Jennifer Ellis does the best sustained acting. I recall how much I liked Judy Kuhn in that role on Broadway; I don’t wish to take anything away from either of these fine musical-theatre actresses, but Helen is the character Kron had the least difficulty shaping.

From left: Taylor Trensch, Alex Newell and Gabi Carruba in Bat Boy: The Musical. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The musical parody Bat Boy: The Musical shares with Fun Home the notion that repressing your true identity can only lead to tragedy. But Bat Boy’s titular character, the progeny of a woman whose innards were invaded by a colony of bats, is doomed anyway – not just by the lynch mob mentality of Hope Falls, the West Virginia town where he tries to win acceptance, but by his irresistible appetite for blood. The fall offering from Encores! was a rare revival of this show, which opened off Broadway in 2001. The Encores! version has been revised by its book writers, Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, its songwriter, Laurence O’Keefe (best known for the score he and Neil Benjamin contributed to Legally Blonde), and its ubiquitous director, Alex Timbers. (Timbers’s résumé includes Peter and the Starcatcher, American Utopia, Beetlejuice, Moulin Rouge! and most recently Just in Time.) It was outrageously, sometimes sublimely, funny.

The main source of the parody, like that of Little Shop of Horrors, is several generations of horror pictures. But when Meredith Parker (Kerry Butler), the wife of the local vet, adopts Bat Boy (Taylor Trensch) and teaches him how to speak and read, it reaches outward to include The Miracle Worker and other triumph-of-the-spirit pictures like The Wild Child and My Left Foot. Bat Boy turns out to be a prodigy who ingests information, and Trensch starts to dress in preppy outfits and sport an English accent. Trensch, who played the reporter in Floyd Collins last season, gave an amazingly loose-limbed, acrobatic physical performance. He latched himself onto every surface he could find, especially if it was raised or suspended and he could hang upside down from it; he was so twisty and in such continual motion that it felt as if his body were all protuberances. The entire cast that gathered around him was dynamic and raucously funny but especially Butler, Gabi Carrubba as her daughter Shelley, Christopher Sieber (of Death Becomes Her) as her husband, Andrew Durand (of Dead Outlaw) as Rick, the leader of a family of bullies and Tom McGowan as the sheriff. It was a delectable detail of the casting that Butler had been the original Shelley. One of the two musical highlights in the production was her second-act duet with Carrubba,”Three Bedroom House.” The other was Trensch’s plea to the Hope Falls community, “Let Me Walk Among You.”

The development of the plot hinges on a revival meeting held by a visiting preacher named Reverend Hightower that has something to do with this one-time mining town’s efforts to pull itself out of the depression it sank into when the mine was depleted. Now it’s trying to reinvent itself as a cattle town, with a pregnant cow named Gertie as its symbol. I got lost in this ridiculous narrative, which retooled the original storyline. (As I recall, that version wasn’t much better.) But it showcased the fine voices of Evan Harrington as Gertie’s owner in the first act and Jacob Ming-Trent as Hightower in the second act. When Shelley ran off with Bat Boy, a third powerhouse singer, Alex Newell (of Shucked), materialized as the God Pan, in a hilarious costume featuring a golden bodice like a shield. (Jennifer Moeller designed the costumes.)

The fall Encores! shows seem to have bigger budgets than the trio of spring entries, and Bat Boy benefitted from it. The show looked wonderful. The band, impressive as always (Andrew Resnick was the music director), was offstage to provide more space for Timbers and the choreographer, Connor Gallagher, working with energy and inventiveness, to move the large company around; stalactites hung from the flies. David Korins designed the set and the marvelous Justin Townsend, whose work in Just in Time was the most gorgeous lighting design of the last Broadway season, brought his playful wit (see his other last-season show, Death Becomes Her) to the production. And the eleventh-hour revelation was delivered via animated shadow puppetry – a final visual coup. Bat Boy was a win all around.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.