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Learn Something New
- Daisy Mae
- Apr 1, 2016
- 2 min read
Fun Home Hosts U.N. Ambassadors to Highlight the Power of LGBT Stories
''Tuesday night at the Circle in the Square theater in New York City, the Broadway musical Fun Home, winner of last year’s Tony award for best musical, hosted a performance for a group of U.N. ambassadors, led by Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. After the show, the ambassadors—from countries including Australia, Vietnam, Croatia, Russia, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, Namibia, and Gabon, to name a few—sat down for a talk with the cast and the show’s creators, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. Actress Cynthia Nixon hosted the post-performance conversation, which focused on ways to advocate for LGBT voices around the world.
Fun Home, which is based on a best-selling memoir by Alison Bechdel, tells the story of Bechdel’s unusual childhood, growing up in a funeral home, and her coming out in college. Soon afterward, she discovers that her father is also gay. Months later, Bechdel’s father commits suicide by walking in front of a truck. The show features the adult Bechdel, now a successful cartoonist, looking back at her life via her drawings and using flashbacks to her college-age and 8-year-old selves to reflect upon the past, as she grapples with the mystery of her father’s death as well as her own guilt and conflicted feelings about her dad.
Morbid as that may sound, Fun Home delivers a powerful, even joyful experience, mostly because Kron and Tesori know how to mine the material not just for laughs, but also for hard-earned truths about love, acceptance, and compassion. The show cuts deep and is often disquieting, but succeeds because it is so honest and human. Its very specificity is what allows it to feel so universal...''
by Eric Sasson
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