‘Fun Home’ elicits laughs, sighs of recognition Alison Bechdel memoir comes to life on stage

By PATRICK FOLLIARD

With its nod to domestic turmoil and the pangs of youth, “Fun Home” is the kind of tragicomic show that elicits both laughs and sighs of recognition, especially if you’re queer.

Initially a 2006 bestselling graphic memoir by lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, “Fun Home” was successfully adapted for stage by Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and went on to win the 2015 Tony Award for Best Adapted Musical and a place in theater history as lesbian main character. It’s now playing at Studio Theatre.

When we meet 43-year-old Alison (out actor Andrea Prestinario), she’s a together graphic artist poised to take a deep dive into the past. With the help of her girlhood diary and several decades worth of sketches, the lesbian protagonist looks back on her unorthodox childhood in small town Pennsylvania and some seminal years at Oberlin College in scenes acted by Alison’s younger selves, nineyear-old Small Alison and college age Medium Alison (Quinn Titcomb and Maya Jacobson, respectively).

Coming out and relationships are key, but Alison’s investigation centers on what made her closeted gay father Bruce tick and ultimately self-destruct.

out actor Bobby Smith, Bruce is a manic amalgam of charm, nerves, and asperity who eventually ends his tortured existence by stepping into the path of an oncoming truck.

But while alive, he never sits still. Whether restoring houses, teaching English, or running the family business, a funeral home affectionately called Fun Home by the family, er) and three young children in a never-ending rota of work. And when he’s not embalming deceased townsfolk, polishing antiques, or reading James Joyce, Bruce is hitting on young men, lots of them. Increasingly, his peccadillos are becoming the worst kept secret in town.

Studio’s artistic director David Muse helms this intimately staged production with great aplomb. As the story unfolds in an order of its own, Alison remains onstage observing her parents, her selves, her agreeable brothers (Teddy Schechter, August Scott pealing actor who assays two objects of young handyman, and guileless Mark, a high school junior. band secreted behind an upstage scrim, Tesori and Kron’s varied score, rife with revelation and zing, moves Bechdel’s story along while giving the players their moment to shine.

Sometimes the stage gets a little crowded, but it works.

At a local diner with her father, dressaverse Small Alison stops dead in her Butch” pushing a cart of packages. In sings effectively with awe and approval: “Your swagger and your bearing/And the just right clothes you’re wearing/Your short hair and your dungarees.”

As a freshman at Oberlin, Jacobson’s Medium Alison is awkwardly gay curious and a little rudderless, but once she Brant), a progressive out coed, she gains a new laser like focus on identity and goals. She hilariously sings, “I’m changing my major to sex with Joan/With a minor in kissing Joan.”

With a gorgeous operatic soprano, Pitcher sings “Days and Days,” a revelation of family secrets and a warning from mother to daughter not to waste her life. Near show’s end, Smith and Prestinario as gay father and daughter explore similarities with “Telephone Wire,” and Bruce dramatically delivers his soul-baring solo “Edges of the World.”

On a lighter note, the score playfully includes songs reminiscent of music from Alison’s childhood — think Jackson 5 and those TV families Partridge and Brady.

Despite being the Bechdel’s own sad story, “Fun Home” rings universal and true. Studio’s lovingly done production delivers the message without hesitation.