As any Harry Potter or Hunger Games fan can tell you, reading the book is not the same as watching the movie. Even though you receive the same information, you don’t experience or understand it in the same way as you would seeing it on a screen, and vice versa. Similarly, reading someone’s memoir as a graphic novel differs from seeing the same story put up on stage; the form makes a difference. In my last blog, I discussed auto/biographical theatre and how life narratives are produced through theatre as a form. Here my discussion about autobiographical theatre continues with a focus on how Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy translated into an award winning Broadway musical and through this illustrate how form affects the telling of life narratives.

Bechdel’s graphic memoir, much like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, is narrated by an older version of Bechdel looking in retrospection at her childhood, primarily discovering her sexuality and her relationship with her father, a closeted gay English teacher. Form, in this case, is important to Fun Home. Writing a graphic memoir allows Bechdel to portray her childhood struggles with identity and family both through the eyes of herself as a child and her current perspective as an adult, knowing what she knows.

Robyn Warhol, in “The Space Between: A Narrative Approach to Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home,'” points to the presence of three layers of narrative within the memoir. One belongs to the “voice-over narration” (5) or text boxes, one to the speech bubbles through which characters speak, and one to the illustrations (5). These narrative layers seem to allow for different layers of memory, too, with the older, comic artist Alison existing primarily on the first layer, narrating the experiences of her past from her current point of you, while we see the Alison of the past in the other two. This layering is unique to the comic genre; the specific interplay between words and pictures exists in this form alone, and allows for certain nuances in the telling of life narratives (Warhol 5). So how do we see these nuances translated on to the stage, and what difference does it make?

In the musical version of Bechdel’s graphic memoir, there are three actors playing Alison: one as a child, one college-aged, and one middle aged. The middle aged Alison perhaps most closely resembles the first layer I mentioned earlier, but even then the limits of the form of musical theatre change how the story is told. In an article comparing the graphic memoir with the musical, Lisa Kron, one of the writers of the musical, acknowledges the changes that had to be made in order to put Bechdel’s story on stage; the musical could not be from the perspective of an older Bechdel because, according to Kron, audiences come to “watch people moving through the passage of time, not looking back and talking about it” (qtd. in Thomas). In the same article, Bechdel acknowledges that accuracy was not as big a priority in the musical version of Fun Home as it was in the graphic memoir, so some creative license was taken in how the story was depicted.