McClain Funeral Home

Now getting its regional debut in an inventively thrilling Zoetic Stage production at Miami’s Arsht Center, this look back at writer-cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s life is both amusing and deeply unsettling. The questions the piece explores are resonant and sometimes painful, one being: How do you raise children in a tempestuous marriage built on a public lie?Book writer-lyricist Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori, who won 2015 Tonys for “Fun Home,” examine Bechdel’s childhood in the 1970s and her college coming out through the grown artist’s eyes. The character of Alison (Anna Lise Jensen) is always onstage, sometimes upstage at her drawing table observing the action, other times moving in and out of these replayed memories.She watches as her preteen self, Small Alison (Alexa Lasanta), plays airplane with her impossibly exacting dad Bruce (Nicholas Richberg). She remembers conspiring with her brothers Christian (Nate Poses) and John (Brayden Labgold-Carroll) to concoct a peppy faux commercial for the family funeral home, which the kids call the “Fun Home” (a resounding bit of irony, that).Kimmi Johnson, Anna Lise Jensen and Alexa Lasanta play writer-cartoonist Alison Bechdel at different ages in Zoetic Stage’s “Fun Home” at the Arsht Center. JUSTIN NAMON Grown Alison thinks about the joy of her first lesbian love affair, when 19-year-old Medium Alison (Kimmi Johnson) found and resoundingly fell for her Oberlin College classmate Joan (Hannah Benitez). Watching, the adult artist regards her younger, giddily awkward self with a mixture of embarrassment and affection.And throughout the examination of her past, Alison recalls the intense clashes between her father and her mother Helen (Jeni Hacker). Bruce – part-time funeral director, high school English teacher, passionate restorer of the family’s Gothic Revival home in small-town Pennsylvania – is a gay man whose private rebellions against the straightjacket of his chosen traditional life grew increasingly risky. Determined to shield her children from the truth, trying to ignore Bruce’s affairs wit... (Miami Herald)