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Broadway

 As my kids get older, I think about words; the work of parenting seems to be centered on words. Attaching nouns to verbs. Giving explanations, but also modeling how a sentence is built--so that a child can build her own sentences, with ease, sooner rather than later.


The musical "Fun Home" looks at words--how they can be weapons or tools. In one scene, young Alison pulls out a sketch for her father. She clearly has talent, and she wants some recognition. Her father is mentally ill, and he tends to destroy anything in his path. He begins to lecture Alison on shading and scale; eventually, he becomes flustered, and he suggests that the current draft will be a source of embarrassment. Alison will take the draft to school, and the other kids will laugh at her. It's a brutal scene.

Later in the evening, Alison confronts her mother. She wants to know how Mom has survived decades of emotional terrorism. There is a complicated accusation within this question: "You have been complicit."

In the extraordinary climax of this show, Mom admits that she has been foolish:

Days and days and days--
That's how it happens.
Days, and days, and days--
Made of lunches and car rides
And shirts and socks
And grades and piano--
And no one clocks the day you disappear.

The run-on syntax makes a point: Mom's despair was inconspicuous. It was lost among the dirty socks.

Mom looks more closely at her passivity; she understands that she has wasted her years with a gay, angry man who doesn't love her. 

Days...
Made of bargains I made because I thought, as a wife, I was meant to--
And now my life is....
Shattered and laid bare.

In the beautiful, painful ending of this song, Mom makes clear why she is (bravely) telling her story. She turns to her daughter and says, "Don't you come back here. I didn't raise you--to give away your days--like me."

Judy Kuhn lost the Tony Award--I think because two of her own co-stars were crowded into her category with her. The prize went to Ruthie Ann Miles. It was great fun to see Kuhn, in her fifties, taking control of a Broadway stage; I think she stole the show.



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