House of secrets

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This article was published 16/11/2019 (2463 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Given the title — Fun Home — and the presence of three children in the cast, it may be necessary to offer up a bit of a content warning about this Tony-winning musical. It’s based on the autobiographical 2006 memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, detailing her own coming out as a lesbian and the concurrent understanding that her own father was desperately, tragically closeted about his own sexuality.

Bechdel’s bio makes a surprisingly deft translation to the stage courtesy of Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music), who have fashioned from the material a 95-minute (without intermission), one-act whirlwind of familial tension and charged emotion.

The character of Alison is refracted through three different actors, the mature Alison (Catherine Wreford), the juvenile Small Alison (Isabel Haderer) and the college-age Medium Alison (Mackenzie Kolton). It takes all three to solve the mystery of their father, Bruce (Carson Nattrass), who, we learn early, died by suicide while Alison was still in college.

Family life among the Bechdels is recognizably chaotic, but cultured. Mom Helen (Laura Olafson) is a celebrated amateur actor. Bruce is an English teacher, and also a funeral director in their small Pennsylvania town. He has an obsession for restoring old things, including their Victorian house, depicted here in panels by set designer Amy Keith to reflect the fractured familial dynamics in the foreground.

Bruce is an active participant in Alison’s life, but he has an unpleasant, domineering streak that masks a core dissatisfaction with his life. Over time, it emerges this is a result of his barely repressed homosexuality, as we witness him picking up a male student to give him a ride home or hiring a sexually obliging male assistant for renovation work (all these roles are played by a versatile Nelson Bettencourt).

At the same time, Alison is coming to an understanding of her own lesbianism. It is sung plaintively by Small Alison in the tune Ring of Keys when she observes with wonder a “dyke” making a delivery at a snack bar, and later, more passionately, in the song Changing My Major, wherein Medium Alison celebrates the love and lust attending her first lesbian relationship with college friend Joan (Cassandra Consiglio). Joan takes it as a clue that her father already knows about her lesbianism since he has pointedly sent her a book by Colette.

When Alison comes out via a letter written to her parents, it sets the stage for a fiery reckoning that never quite comes except, as Alison fears, it may have been a factor in Bruce’s eventual suicide.

Performed on the widest possible iteration of the Warehouse stage with a six-piece band led by Rachel Cameron, Fun Home is challenging material, with a circular, non-linear plot and a potentially confusing array of scene changes. Director Sarah Garton Stanley keeps it on track, staging it with an urgent pacing, notwithstanding moments of welcome levity, including a comically cringe-inducing callback to ’70s variety TV shows.

Having three different performers play Alison might dissipate the impact of this character, but Wreford manages to assert dominion over them all, tasked as she is with making sense of the mystery at the play’s centre. (In the smaller role of Alison’s brother John, Wreford’s son, Elliot Ledlow, clearly demonstrates his mom’s joy of performance.)

As the troubled Helen, Olafson — often seen in more broadly comic musical roles — offers up a more subtle shading. Between this role and her work in last year’s Winnipeg Jewish Theatre production of Falsettos, Olafson may now officially be Winnipeg theatre’s primary interpreter of women trapped in damaging marriages to gay men.

Holding the centre though is Nattrass, whose performance as Bruce is simply astonishing. Nattrass has been away from Winnipeg stages for the past few seasons since assuming the artistic director position over at Rainbow Stage.

That makes his portrayal here feel all the more keenly like a triumphant comeback. This is just stellar work. Bruce is a man prone to towering rages over trivialities, a man who strives to feminize his stubbornly butch daughter and a man who makes inappropriate advances to underage boys. He could easily be portrayed as a one-dimensional repressed monster. But Nattrass poignantly locates his character’s uneasy heart in a frozen smile or an anguished scream.

“I still might break a heart or two,” Nattrass sings in the song Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue.

That, he definitely does.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing