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I’ve been a fan of Alison Bechdel’s work since I first encountered the early “Dykes to Watch Out For” cartoons, syndicated in a local SF Bay Area gay newspaper in the mid-80s. I was a newly-out lesbian myself and was finding myself hopelessly unconnected with the “women’s community” (as we called it back then), despite living in that hotbed of gay & lesbian culture. But Bechdel’s cartoons gave me a sense of being part of it all even as an outsider. Though DtWOF was based on Bechdel’s own milieu in St. Paul, the characters she depicted had a sense of universality. I recognized them (while simultaneously realizing I wouldn't fit in with their world either).

Fun Home--the autobiographical graphic novel on which the musical is based--was a much more intense and introspective work. (Though the DtWOF collections were, of course, also largely autobiographical.) It differed also in being created as a unitary work, rather than being an ongoing narrative in episodic strips. The story chronicles Bechdel’s childhood and her coming out at college, but most especially her relationship with her father, a troubled, closeted gay man whose life was crumbling around him and who took his own life several months after she came out to her family.

A graphic novel may seem an odd venue for autobiography (though hardly unprecedented), and an even odder inspiration for a musical, but it works surprisingly well as a medium for turning private family drama into Art. This isn’t a musical in the “walk out of the theater humming the songs” style, but much more in the style of opera, where the musical presentation is a way of turning ordinary interactions into universal stylized ritual.

The show is running at the Circle in the Square theater--a theater in the round--and the staging was specifically adapted for this venue so successfully one might think it had always intended to play that way. Sets appear and disappear by elevators through the stage floor so seamlessly it feels like a cinematic dissolve, but even more than that, the stage mechanics become part of the dramatic action, where furniture descends in a metaphor for loss, and during the emotionally fraught song portraying the father’s final breakdown, the stage traps are left open as he staggers through “Edges of the World” and finally falls metaphorically (although not literally!) into the abyss.

The non-linearity of the memoir is represented to excellent effect by the presence of three Alisons--the child, the college student, and the memoirist--often present on stage simultaneously and interacting musically as memory, self, and commenter. While all the performances are solid, for me the runaway star of the show is Sydney Lucas, playing the youngest iteration, who not only holds her own in the ensemble pieces but sings several key solos. (The program notes that when she won an Obie for the off-Broadway version of the musical, she was the youngest ever recipient of that award at ten years old, and given how impressive her resume is already, I suspect she has quite a career ahead of her.)

The characters of the two child-siblings (they don't appear in older iterations) are the least prominent, but it felt like the mother's character was also comparatively effaced. My impression of this is, no doubt, a combination of the focus of the story being on the father, plus the fact that I'm currently reading Bechdel's second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? which explores the title character in much more depth.

The orchestration is light--primarily strings and keyboard--and felt almost invisible, but in a good way. The songs vary between exposition (Alison's coming-out epiphany "I'm Changing my Major to Joan"), atmospheric (the children's mock-advertising jingle for their father's funeral home business, "Come to the Fun Home", performed with an open coffin as stage, which lays out the normalization of an atypical upbringing), and structural ("Welcome to our House on Maple Avenue", which initially frames the father's house-proud passion for home renovation and decoration, hinting through a somewhat stereotypical filter at his sexuality, but then is reprised in a bitter, ironic tone by the mother toward the end of the show).

While the details of Alison Bechdel’s family history--and the artistic career that gave her the opportunity to bring it to us--are unique, a great deal of the charm of the musical lies in its portrayal of a lesbian everywoman. The childhood gender non-conformity, the later-recalled crushes on women, the self-awakening in college and painfully awkward coming out process, and the frustration of trying to share such a vital truth of one’s identity with a family that wants to make your inner journey all about them instead. Fun Home has exactly that balance of particularity and universality that makes for great art, though it will have a special meaning for lesbians of A Certain Age for whom, like me, it captures certain essential truths of our era, whether we shared those specific truths or not.