News And Blogs

Throughout Fun Home, onstage through April 1, 2017 at the Ahmanson Theatre, books serve as markers of different stages in graphic memoir author Alison Bechdel’s life. A book from her dad offers a hint that he might know she’s a lesbian; a bookstore is where she realizes she’s gay. In the graphic memoir especially, books are a means for Bechde...

The 'Fun Home' Reading List

This month, we’re proud to have productions at three theatres—plus a bonus live art theatrical experience—that demonstrate our commitment to diversity in every sense of the word.

Civil Rights, Memoirs, and a World Premiere Playwright

In 1985, Fun Home graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel changed film criticism—or at least feminist film criticism—as we now know it when two of the characters in her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For tried to go to the movies. In the strip, titled “The Rule,” one woman explains to another her movie-going rule—the three basic req...

Putting 2017 Oscar Nominees to the ‘Fun Home’ Memoirist’s Bechdel Test

Would you believe that the first graphic memoir published in America was titled Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary? The 1972 tale of how Roman Catholicism shaped the life of author Justin Green, Binky Brown is seen as the start of a rich tradition of using comics to explore personal histories. Three decades and a half later, in 2006, Alison Bec...

Eight Graphic Memoirs for Fans of ‘Fun Home’

Few things in this world are more certain than young love. Whether it is fueled by raging hormones, the fates themselves, or the mind of a plotting dramatist, it is safe to say that—no matter what your age—stories of cupid’s first strike are irresistible. And both Good Grief, which plays the Kirk Douglas Theatre February 26 – March 26, 2017...

First Love, Rendered in the Stars and on our Stages

This month, Center Theatre Group brings you two productions that broke new ground artistically and in terms of representing different aspects of the American experience onstage.

The Return of an L.A. Classic and a Very Fun Home