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Broadway

 How do you help someone with a severe mental illness? What counts as help, and what is, in fact, just an effort to be controlling?


These seem like unusual questions for a Broadway musical--but they're a part of "Fun Home." At the climax of the show, Alison takes a drive with her dad. She knows something is very wrong--but she feels powerless, paralyzed. She stares out the window at telephone wires--a symbol of interconnectedness. She notices the creek--"partly flowing, partly frozen"--which seems to stand in for the "clogged channel" that connects her with her own father.

As Alison gropes for a topic of conversation, her father does his own flailing. He proposes a trip to a bar--which is inappropriate, because Alison is a college freshman. Dad becomes lost in a reverie--a speech that he delivers to himself, not to his daughter. He offers bullshitty thoughts about a work project--a task that will never be completed.

At the end of the song, we leap to the present: Dad is dead, and Alison is now in her forties, drowning in regret. She tries to reach back into the car: "This conversation can't be our last. Make this moment not the past."

But--amazingly--the writers allow the scene to end. Dad says, "What a fun drive!" ....And the curtain falls.

I love how little resolution there is--which seems like an accurate reflection of real life. But we still have to keep trudging along. Alison doesn't have heroic powers, and she isn't even very courageous; this makes her an extraordinary, and relatable, protagonist, in an extraordinary Broadway show.

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