On March 4, Deputy Arts Editor Grace Novarr attended the Barnard College Department of Theatre’s production of Fun Home, directed by Lisa Rothe.

The latest Barnard College Department of Theatre production, Lisa Kron’s Fun Home, ran at the Minor Latham Playhouse from March 3 to March 5. The musical, which is an adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s cartoon memoir Fun Home, tells the story of Alison’s complex relationship with her father, using non-chronological storytelling to preserve the centrality of memory. I attended the production on Friday, March 4, at 8 pm. 

The performance was accompanied by an orchestra composed of Barnard and Columbia students as well as professional musicians. The set was designed by Tanya Orellana; costumes were designed by Nicole Wee. Both the set and the costumes strove to replicate a believable domestic atmosphere. The multi-storied house held the orchestra on the top floor, but characters also made their way across the different levels of the stage, using different vantage points to symbolize different temporal perspectives.

In this production, directed by Lisa Rothe, the narrative is framed as the creative effort of the grown-up Big Alison (Erin Hilgartner, CC ’22), who spreads out her drawing materials at the show’s opening before she recedes into her memories of the past. Small Alison (Chloe Roe, BC ’22) and Medium Alison (Cat Herrera, CC ’25) then take over the narrative, respectively representing Alison’s childhood at “the house on Maple Avenue” and the family business, the funeral home, and Alison’s young adulthood as a confused college student beginning to come to terms with her sexuality. Big Alison watches her past flash by, occasionally interjecting with commentary in the form of captions for the cartoon panels she’s drawing. 

Hilgartner’s Big Alison played the role with a convincing kind of frustrated curiosity, making the character’s yearning to untangle her past palpable. Roe, as Small Alison, was simultaneously adorable and headstrong, and Herrerra’s Medium Alison was relatably awkward as a shy and confused college student. 

Fun Home’s two main plot threads concern Alison’s sexuality and her relationship with her father, who, as it turns out, was also gay. After the first main musical number, Big Alison lays the central conflict bare for the audience: “My Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town, and he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I… became a lesbian cartoonist.” This information comes right after the number “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue,” a song displaying the Bechdels’ efforts to present themselves as a picture-perfect suburban family, especially at the urging of the father, Bruce, who was interested in giving tours of his home for the historical society. Knowing right from the beginning, therefore, how the tapestry of domestic bliss is going to unravel, the show encourages the audience not to view the plot as a series of suspenseful twists but rather as a deep dive into how memory reveals and conceals the secrets of the past.

The character of Bruce Bechdel was played with aching earnestness by Tommy Doyle (GS ‘24), who gave a performance that emphasized Bruce’s contradictory desires: to be seen and loved for who he truly is, but also to be seen and recognized as the picture-perfect family man. Bruce’s wife, Helen (Jaeden Riley Juarez, CC ’25), was portrayed as long-suffering and desperately organized and collected. Occasionally, the scenes of domestic conflict felt stilted or clichêd, but this emphasized the nature of such scenes as routine events in the Bechdel household.

The show’s title, Fun Home, is not just a sarcastic reference to the tragic trajectory of the Bechdel family––it’s also the Bechdels’ nickname for the funeral home that they run as their family business. Small Alison and her two siblings, Christian (Izabella Lizarazo, BC ’24) and John (Adelina Correa, CC ’23), help out at the Fun Home, and the musical’s most raucous fun came in the number “Come to the Fun Home,” a jingle-esque commercial parody that the kids devise as an advertisement for their business. Lizarazo, Correa, and Roe were clearly having a great time hamming it up during this number, shaking their hips and clapping their hands. The funeral home ended up being, strangely, a rather inessential part of the plot, functioning more as a symbol of the underlying darkness at the heart of the family than as a relevant structural element. It felt almost like a missed opportunity or a dropped thread when Bruce died at the show’s climax and the family’s experience with funeral preparations wasn’t mentioned as a key aspect of how his daughter dealt with his death.  

Up until the moment of Bruce’s suicide, which looms over the show, the main plotline follows Alison’s journey towards realizing that she herself is gay, which is mirrored by intermittent episodes of Bruce having affairs with men. Alison’s journey to self-discovery likely resonated with many in the audience: having recently arrived at college, she meets an out-and-proud lesbian named Joan (Skylar Hudson, CC ’25) to whom she’s irresistably attracted, and with Joan’s encouragement, is able to acknowledge her own queerness. After the two sleep together for the first time, she sings the funny and heartfelt “Changing My Major,” in which she declares “I’m changing my major to Joan / I’m changing my major to sex with Joan.” Herrera’s performance of this number struck the right balance between humorous and heartbreaking, as she made the character’s shock at her self-discovery feel as terrifying and thrilling as it often feels in real life. 

Flashbacks to Small Alison reveal that Alison’s gayness did not come out of nowhere in college, and one of Big Alison’s central curiosities is how her father’s hidden queerness may have influenced her own identity. In a particularly poignant scene, Bruce yells at Alison, who’s wearing one of his big men’s shirts over her frilly dress, to change back into the feminine outfit, asking her if she wants everybody at the party she’s going to to be talking about how different she is. It’s a moment that reveals a lot about Bruce’s psyche and his need to be considered normal even though he knows he’s not. 

Small Alison, however, is only momentarily deterred from her exploration of gender––her true identification can’t be suppressed. In the show-stopping number “Ring of Keys,” Small Alison sings her heart out to the confident butch who’s just walked into the cafe she’s in, praising “your swagger and your bearing and the just right clothes you’re wearing.” In this production, Roe’s rendition of “Ring of Keys” was just brilliant; she maintained a convincingly childlike tone and expression throughout while channeling the passion that only comes when you experience the awakening of your true self. This number stood out as one of the most powerful moments in the show, reaching a universal truth about what it feels like to be different and to see someone else who affirms your difference by being the same as you, unabashedly so. 

As the play proceeds and the past catches up to the present, Medium Alison, returning from college to visit her parents for what she doesn’t realize is her last time ever seeing her father, is replaced by Big Alison in the final car trip she takes with her father. This was, for me, the moment where the tears started pouring out. Big Alison grows more and more desperate as she grapples with the fact that this is her last memory of her father, and that she can’t change the past and communicate the things she never got to communicate. “Say something, talk to him… at the light, at the light, at the light” she sings in “Telephone Wire,” one of the musical’s most heartbreaking songs. With this number, Hilgartner truly took command, moving (literally) from the stage’s periphery into the center and bringing home the fact that the entire show is essentially adult Alison’s effort to reconcile the impossibility of ever reconnecting with her father with the amount of things she wishes she could say to him. Hilgartner’s performance in general was masterful; she maintained a subtle but distinct presence on stage as her future self sifting through memory, and as her character took control of the narrative at the end, she brought all the right emotional power to the show’s climactic moment.

As Big Alison watches in fascinated horror, Bruce sings his last song, which moves from a contemplation of the new house renovation project he’s taken up to a desperate attempt to grasp for meaning in his life. “Why am I standing here?” he keeps asking himself––it moves from being a metaphor about the stagnation of his life into a terrifyingly literal question as a truck barrels right at him. Doyle gave this final performance with painful passion, and again, I couldn’t stop crying.

The show closed to a quite deserved standing ovation. Ultimately, Barnard’s Fun Home was a powerful production that showcased an incredible amount of talent. As simultaneously a psychological portrait of two confused and lonely individuals and a universal story of self-discovery, Fun Home offered both poignancy and catharsis. 

“Raincoat of Love” via Assistant Director Abigail Duclos