T. Charles Erikson Photo
Gambini.
For Danilo Gambini, a third-year student at the Yale School of Drama, directing Fun Home — a musical that broke new ground in having a lesbian protagonist — takes him back to the moment when he saw new possibilities in musical theater, possibilities that become realities this week at Yale University Theatre.
Fun Home runs Dec. 14 to 20.
When Gambini first saw Fun Home — the Tony-winning musical with lyrics and book by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel — in 2015, he didn’t know much about it. Gambini was visiting New York from his native Brazil and trying to cram in as much theater viewing as possible. Early in the show, he was thinking, “this isn’t for me.” Then the character called Big Alison revealed that she’s a lesbian and that her father was a closeted gay man who took his own life.
Gambini was amazed to find such topics in a Broadway musical. Growing up, Gambini had not seen a gay character portrayed in a favorable light until the show Dawson’s Creek.
As the audience filed past him when the show ended, Gambini sat down in his standing-room space, in tears, trying to digest what he’d just seen. He found the show’s depiction of Alison’s story “jarring and touching” in a personal way. The power of Fun Home, he saw, was in the way music creates “deeper connections” with a show’s material. Already a performer, Gambini applied three times to the Yale School of Drama’s director’s program. His goal: “to learn how to do American musical theater.”
Fun Home features “three sources of information: first is the real life story of Bechdel; second is the graphic novel she made of her own experience; third is the musical itself, which compresses and stylizes the material into a strange memory play,” Gambini said. There are also three storylines. The character of Alison is divided among three actors: “Small Alison,” a nine-year-old uncomfortable with her father’s efforts to make her conform to his idea of femininity; “Medium Alison,” a young woman in college who comes out as gay to win her girlfriend Joan; and “Big Alison,” a successful cartoonist in her 40s who is learning to tell her own story.
{media_2}Key to the play’s effect, Gambini stressed, is that we understand that “Big Alison is not a narrator” in the traditional sense of having mastered the story she tells. “She is living the story through the telling,” he said. And that means that each event in the story comes as something of a revelation. An important scene for Gambini is when Small Alison sees a delivery woman “whose ring of keys is a clue to gender performativity.”
Two third-year actors at the Yale School of Drama, Doireann Mac Mahon and Eli Pauley, play Medium Alison and Big Alison, respectively. Both have experience in musical theater, though neither have had much previous opportunity at the School to show their musical abilities. Both worked with Gambini previously in Noah Diaz’s Rock Egg Spoon at the Langston Hughes Festival of new plays last year in New York. Both have also stepped outside their concentrations this fall to present work at the Yale Cabaret. Pauley made her directorial debut with a gripping version of Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, and Mac Mahon played the main character in the first public production of her topical play How to Relearn Yourself. Both find in Fun Home a unique challenge in enacting the same character at different stages of development.
For Pauley, Big Alison’s isolation is “a tricky task. She doesn’t speak to other characters, and has no interaction with others.” She speaks and sings as if overheard by the audience, which Pauley sees as Shakespearean.
“She’s passive but active,” Pauley said, since she’s the one who, looking on at the many vignettes that comprise the show, is being changed by her view of her past. For Mac Mahon, the challenge of Middle Alison is not being changed by the show’s outcome. She is “frozen at the high point of her life,” finding a lover and celebrating her sexuality. Her visit home, with Joan, could be a moment of rapport with her parents, but Middle Alison “can’t know” what will eventually happen in her father’s life. At a key moment of the play, Middle Alison transitions to Big Alison, “preserving Middle Alison’s innocence,” in Mac Mahon’s view.
Gambini, who also choreographs the show, is determined to preserve the energy of the show he saw in New York. The musical has “no loose ends, no excess,” he said, “it’s lean, polished, tight,” consisting of 26 scenes with many transitions. The Yale show incorporates a very detailed scenic design with 128 props to be orchestrated by stage manager Edmond O’Neal and a powerful musical score directed by Jill Brunelle.
To underscore the “memory play” idea, Gambini said his team, led by scenic designer Jimmy Stubbs, have constructed a two-story “memory palace,” a “flexible, cubist” space able to shapeshift to encompass the different times and places of the story. The children in the show — Small Alison and her two younger brothers — are enacted by puppets, designed by Anatar Gagne-Marmol, a recent MFA from UConn. Gambini prefers the use of puppets to having Drama School actors play children. Small Alison is voiced by Taylor Hoffman, a veteran of musical theater not enrolled at the School of Drama, with two YSD students, J. Aiden Martinez and Lori Ortega-Murphy, handling the puppetry. The roles of the parents are played by JJ McGlone as Bruce and Zoe Mann as Helen. McGlone and Mann, both third-year actors, teamed at the Cabaret recently when Mann directed McGlone’s first play, a playfully sinister exploration of queerness and witches called Burn Book. Joan is played by second-year actor Madeline Seidman and third-year actor Dario Ladani Sanchez plays all male characters except Bruce.
In interweaving the story of Alison’s gradual understanding of herself with the many moments of tension and confusion in the family’s life, Fun Home, Gambini said, “can be childlike but not childish.” The “power of representation” in the show, he said, “is to see what you should or could be.”
Fun Home runs at the Yale University Theater, Dec. 14 to Dec. 20. Visit the Yale School of Drama’s website for tickets and more information.