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.

Fouettés, Flutters and Fun: The Trocks at 50

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. (Photo: Zoran Jelenic.)

On Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatres, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo — the Trocks — closed their 50th-anniversary tour in Toronto with an evening in which exacting technique and theatrical excess sharpened one another — and the laughter felt earned. From the first moment, it was clear the Trocks were performing with both intelligence and irreverence.

Vertiginous Vortex: Our Little Gang / The Lives of the Vorticists

Reaktion Books/Univeristy of Chicago Press

“Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did and said, during a certain period.” 

Wyndham Lewis

“Vorticism . . . what does this word mean? I do not know.”

Wyndham Lewis

Even art historians with a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of advanced visual art trends such as Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism are often somewhat at a loss to grasp, let alone to cogently explain, the obscure art and literary movement that arose in the second decade of the 20th century in English avant-garde circles known as Vorticism, mostly by the Vorticists themselves. After the opening salvo of radical thinking that exploded in the new years of that newest of all new centuries, with a shared intellectual bomb contained in both Sigmund Freud’s 1899 theories of the unconscious, and Einstein’s 1905 relativity theory, tradition was turned on its head. Among other recent discoveries that seemed to call into question the sanctity of classical values, the domains of art and literature were also about to begin actively reflecting the dominant prevailing mindset of drastic and hyper-accelerated change.