THE FUN HOUSE

About the Book

The Fun House by Tom Bissinger is a rollicking tale of coming of age in the sixties and seventies. Based on the childhood thrills he experiences at the fun house at Playland in San Francisco, Tom comes to understand that making fun houses and exploring those of others would become the defining quest of his life. He’s brought up in privilege, and like his father who had at one time performed on Broadway, Tom’s drawn to the theater. After boarding school and his immersion into a repertory theater company while attending Stanford, he lives in Paris then enlists in the army then moves to New York, and we are at the birth of the sixties, erupting like a bombshell, and Tom is there to celebrate and be open to the Golden Age of New York theater while simultaneously weaving the momentous events of that era into his story: assassinations, civil rights marches, and the Vietnam War. Sexual experimentation and drugs follow Tom as he ricochets through love affairs, directs plays, and marches in Selma. He moves to Philadelphia in 1969 to become the artistic director of the Theatre of Living Arts. In 1970, Tom abandons the legitimate theater and reinvents himself on Philly’s South Street. Tom paints emotionally vivid portraits of neighborhood characters who hang out in Tom’s new fun house: eccentric old-timers, newly minted hippies, artists, dopers, and a murderer. In 1977, Tom, his wife, Kristen, and their two-year-old travel for nine months as nomads: they live with Samoan families, spend two months on a fifty-foot trimaran in Fiji, live at Papunya Aborigine settlement in Australia, fall into a drug smuggler’s den in Bali, and end up in an ashram in Sri Lanka before returning home as the book ends.

About the Author

Tom Bissinger grew up in San Francisco, attended Phillips Academy and Stanford University, and after military service, moved to New York, where in the 1960s, he directed plays Off- and Off-Off-Broadway as well as in theaters throughout the United States and Europe. He began writing plays and short fiction in the 1970s when he moved to the Pennsylvania countryside. His plays include the tragic comedy The Big Kephresh, Descartes’ Blues (a play about the life and loves of Rene Descartes), and his latest (coauthored with Dance Wareham) The Bus, which was performed on a forty-foot bus. He has held a variety of jobs in teaching, publishing, and performing. His book Da Capo: Selected Writings 1967–2004, edited by Philip Beitchman, PhD, was published in 2008. Since 1987, Bissinger has studied with Joseph Rael, an American Indian visionary. Bissinger is married with two children and many grandchildren.