Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home Musical Chosen for Sundance

Sundance Institute announced the eight projects—selected from nearly 900 submissions—to participate in the 2012 Theatre Lab, July 9-29 at the Sundance Resort, and two of them address LGBT themes.

Fun Home is Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s musical adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alison Bechdel which is about the family business, the Bechdel Funeral Home, and charts Bechdel’s quest to come to terms with her father’s life and death by painstakingly reconstructing their shared but unspoken bond.  “My father and I grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself and I became a lesbian cartoonist,” Bechdel writes. Sam Gold is directing.

Hands by Ken Greller is set in a suburban Baltimore diner and charts the friendship between Alex and Ray over 22 years. As Alex begins the process of gender transition, Ray treads the dangerous waters of a potentially misguided spiritual revelation. The friends grow further apart until their only commonality is a shared disconnect over the town they’re from and can’t seem to escape. The director has not been announced yet.

Under the supervision of Philip Himberg, producing artistic director, and associate director Christopher Hibma, the Lab is the centerpiece of the Theatre Program’s year-round work and is designed to support emerging and established artists and to create a place where their original work can be effectively mentored and challenged.

“The eight projects we’ve selected for 2012 are diverse in every sense,” Himberg says. “We have had the pleasure of discovering the work of writers not known to us prior to this submission process. Our slate includes an NYU undergraduate student, as well as seasoned Sundance Institute alumni that we are welcoming home. Artists hail from Hawaii, New York, Chicago, Nigeria and Tanzania. We look forward to working with these artists to realize their visions for the unique and indelible worlds they seek to create on stage.”

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