Fun Home

"In memory everything happens to music." Or so narrator Tom Wingfield says in the opening of Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie." An augmented version of this statement lives on stage at Circle in the Square eight times a week in "Fun Home," composer Jeanine Tesori and playwright Lisa Kron's superlative adaptation of lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel's graphic autobiography.

Based upon her memoir of her years growing up in a painstakingly restored 19th century house and family-run funeral home in central Pennsylvania, "Fun Home" is Bechdel's story about her own coming out in college while learning of her father's closeted sexuality prior to his apparent suicide.

On stage, it is told by the current day Bechdel as she struggles to put her past on the page in what will end up the award-winning graphic novel "Fun Home." Like its source material, the musical is a loving exploration of the complex and undeniable bond between parent and child, even under patently dysfunctional circumstances.

The genius of "Fun Home" lies with its creators Tesori and Kron's masterfully faithful adaptation of Bechdel's memoir that creates three versions of Bechdel. There's "Small Alison" (the spot-on Sydney Lucas), a ten-year-old tomboy at odds with her father's aesthete sensibilities; "Medium Alison" (the delightfully awkward Emily Skeggs) a rebellious college freshman awakening to her identity as a lesbian; and our narrator Alison at 43 (Beth Malone in a superb act of heavy-lifting), a woman trying to make sense of it all as she pieces together aggregate moments from her past. In splitting personae across decades, Kron and Tesori have created a memory play equal to "The Glass Menagerie" and Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa."

"I want to know what's true, dig deep into who and what and why and when, until now gives way to then." Malone's Alison sings.

And dig deep she does, exploring her parents' Helen and Bruce's doomed marriage, her first sexual encounter with her college girlfriend Joan (the impossibly sexy Roberta Colindrez), and the numerous men whose trysts with her father (all played to vintage 1970's hunky perfection by Joel Perez) went unnoticed by her as a child, but not by her mother (Judy Kuhn in the role of her illustrious career).

At the center of the drama is Bechdel's closeted father Bruce, a complex character in a class with Williams' Amanda Wingfield and O'Neill's Mary Tyrone. Almost peerlessly brought to life by Michael Cerveris, Bruce is a potential powder keg of emotions, trapped in the impeccably restored antique cage of his own making by the lies he's told his family and (more so) the one's he's told to himself.

Director Sam Gold deftly maneuvers his cast of nine around the Circle in the Square's stage without even a hint of self-consciousness that more than often plagues musicals staged in the round. Utilizing the traps of David Zinn's pop-up set (that throughout the evening skillfully conveys numerous locales from a college dorm to the Bechdel's antique festooned museum-like abode), Gold creates voids of space at the moments before Bruce's suicide that are evocative of open graves. The result is as chilling as it's heartbreaking.

Perhaps the most remarkable moment occurs in the middle of "Fun Home" when Small Alison see's a female delivery person described by her older self as an "old school butch." Unable to process the emotion stirred in her by the woman she sings:

"Your swagger and your bearing and the just right clothes you're wearing.

Your short hair and your dungarees and your lace-up boots.
And your keys. Oh, your ring of keys. I know you."

With its honest depiction of a masculine woman who isn't the butt of a joke, this is a watershed moment in a medium that is traditionally a straight boys' club or dominated by a gay male mafia. Through the strains of Tesori's sweeping melody is the not so subtle sound of a glass ceiling shattering. It is but one of the countless extraordinary moments in this very extraordinary show.