You Could Be There: Erin Markey’s Deleted Scenes from Fun Home

Erin Markey is a New York-based performance artist, writer, comedian, actress, musician and all-around inspiration. I flipped out so hard when I heard that she was performing something called Deleted Scenes from Fun Home that she had to tell me to cool my jets. (You’ll see.) This week, in the middle of doing a thousand different things including prepping for this show, Erin took the time to answer a few questions.

Cathy de la Cruz: When and how did you come up with the idea for Deleted Scenes from Fun Home?

Erin Markey: A couple of months ago I accidentally became pretty obsessed with the Fun Home score, which is not generally how I behave with most Broadway scores. I was most personally scandalized by “I’m Changing My Major to Joan” and I played it at really humiliating volume levels in a car with the windows open (passenger seat). I couldn’t stop. I felt compulsively drawn in and for largely unnameable or unknowable reasons, I was activated in a strange way that I had no control over.

The fact that I was having this sensation was a huge revelation to me—or really, a prior absence of these feelings was the revelation. The fact that the story of a butch lesbian was being supported on a Broadway budget level was a huge part of it. The money. Or maybe it was the fact that Alison as a character and as a woman was not operating in the traditional economies of desire and that there was a huge budget for that. Or maybe it was the very particular sound of conservatory-trained voices (and all the gender/access stuff that sound comes with) singing some actual thoughts I’ve had in the context of a Broadway musical, which is a pretty standardized form (though Fun Home took some major liberties) that I generally don’t feel compelled to deeply emotionally connect to as an artist, or so I thought.

I think my body felt/feels like in order to be taken seriously as a performer, a par-for-the-course precursor to being a “woman” is that I have to trick people (penis brains—and to some extent I’ll include myself in that category) into thinking I’m simultaneously unattainable and conventionally hot. Even though I don’t have a deeply grounded confidence/interest in that truth. Plus, it’s not what I would choose to think about if I lived in a vacuum or a butthole. This always hovers around and mingles with the primary ideas I’m thinking about that have nothing to do with that. And thus, a whole complicated matrix of into-it/over-it/scared-of-it internal responses to that rule are always unconsciously engaged. Fun Home felt like it got to be less about that. The absence of that was surprisingly terrifying. I’m used to queer women (including me) making shows that aren’t necessarily about that mode of being *taken seriously* but usually it’s done on a budget of a donated case of Brooklyn Lager. Not that that doesn’t feel like nine million dollars on the right day.

When I listened to Fun Home (over and over) and then saw Fun Home, there was no way for me to process the show on a level of just liking it or not liking it. I could not afford myself that kind of calm or democracy. I could really only watch myself because I was being kind of intense. I felt mirrored by the three versions of Alison and Bruce (her dad) and angry that this basic acknowledgement of a kind of person (Alison) never happened before on Broadway and fascinated that there was this flashlight exposing the contents in a hole inside of my brain and annoyed at/empowered by the PR and the emphasis on “universality” and generally just hang-jaw.

So basically, I made a show that is dealing with those feelings. Millie Jackson is involved.

CD: Does Alison Bechdel (author of the graphic novel Fun Home on which the play is based) know about your show? Does it matter?

EM: I have no idea if she knows! She doesn’t know me, but we have friends in common and it’s possible somebody mentioned it. I mean, she’s a genius—I couldn’t put the Fun Home graphic novel down. I also loved Are You My Mother?

Let me also just say that I am a huge fan of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori. Holly Hughes was my professor/mentor in undergrad and she introduced me to Lisa Kron’s work with the Five Lesbian Brothers and I was totally sold right there and then. After I exhausted every aspect of the score of Fun Home for myself, I started listening to Tesori’s Caroline, or Change and I couldn’t stop listening to that either—specifically the song “Lot’s Wife.”

CD: Is this the first time you and director Elena Heyman have collaborated? What has that experience been like?

EM: It is our first time collaborating, yeah. We met at a party at a Mexican restaurant after Sibyl Kempson’s latest show at Abrons Arts Center. I immediately started TMI-ing Elena about a huge gender/sexuality consciousness shift in my brain/body and she was beyond down to indulge me. And then we started talking about the book The Secret Language of Birthdays and suddenly we were collaborating because her birthday is “The Day of Psychological Leverage” and my birthday is “The Day of the Cryptic Secret.”

Working with her has been a lot of vaguely Mexican summer salads and screenshots of other people’s Facebook status updates.

CD: FYI I was born on “The Day of Intensity”…. Is Deleted Scenes from Fun Home for fans of Fun Home or for people who wanted more from Fun Home The Musical? Today I saw a random guy on the street on the Upper West Side wearing a Fun Home t-shirt and I was both excited and confused.

EM: It’s a show for people who give a shit about the ridiculousness of feelings and why they might need to be taken seriously. Or, maybe more to the point, it’s the fog machine the Fun Home set designer didn’t use or that lives inside one of those holes in the floor that appear at the end. Be careful, Michael Cerveris!

CD: What should anyone whose never seen one of your shows know, or is it better they not know anything?

EM: I have a fat mouth and even fatter eyes.

CD: Is this a one-night only event? Will you perform the piece again?

EM: Cool your jets, girl. I’ll probably do it againish series-style but the title and/or the content might change based on where my emotional consciousness decides to lay an egg.

CD: Is there anything else that WEIRD SISTER readers should know about you or your upcoming shows?

EM: I’m a double Leo with an Aries Moon and I have aspirations of becoming wealthier than I currently am. My real personality is on Instagram which is @oneninehundredcake.

Deleted Scenes from Fun Home takes place at 9:30pm on Friday, June 19th at the Duplex Cabaret Theatre in NYC.