THEATER

Circle in the Square
Fun Home

Review: ‘Fun Home’ at the Circle in the Square Theater

“Fun Home” knows where you live. Granted, it’s unlikely that many details of your childhood exactly resemble those of the narrator of this extraordinary musical, which pumps oxygenating fresh air into the cultural recycling center that is Broadway.

Yet this impeccably shaded portrait of a girl and her father, which opened on Sunday night at the Circle in the Square Theater, occupies the place where we all grew up, and will never be able to leave. That’s the shifting landscape where our parents, whether living or dead, will always reign as the most familiar and elusive people we will ever encounter.

Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s fine graphic novel of a memoir, with an incisive book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and heart-gripping music by Jeanine Tesori, “Fun Home” might be described as a universal detective story. Set in three ages of one woman’s life (embodied by three perfectly matched, first-rate actresses), it tries to solve the sort of classic mystery that keeps grown-ups in analysis for decades: Who are these strange people who made me?

The focus of that question here is an especially knotty case. Meet Bruce (Michael Cerveris), who teaches high school English, restores old houses and runs a funeral home in a small Pennsylvania town. As the husband of Helen (Judy Kuhn) and a father of three, Bruce is as divided personally as he is professionally, a fastidious upholder of the perfect-family facade who picks up young men (all played by Joel Perez) on the down low.

Sounds like the stuff of a pulpy Lifetime movie, doesn’t it, or of a choked-up, closure-seeking best seller? But while “Fun Home” is likely to keep you wet-eyed for much of its intermission-free 100 minutes, it is also wryly and compellingly cleareyed — or as cleareyed as hindsight allows, when it’s your own family you’re scrutinizing.

The focus keeps changing in “Fun Home,” directed with vivid precision and haunting emotional ambiguity by Sam Gold, as do the time-stopping frames of the woman whose memory we inhabit. That’s Alison (Beth Malone), a 43-year-old graphic artist who is using her pen to draw her past into perspective. Or trying to. The objects she sees in the rearview mirror are both closer and farther away than they appear.

She has two vital accomplices in this task: the child (Sydney Lucas) and the college student (Emily Skeggs) she once was. These earlier versions of Alison kept journals, trying to make sense of a world that felt slightly off-kilter for many reasons, including her own nascent attraction to other women.

The adult Alison is seen peering over the shoulders (literally) of her former selves, wincing at what she was. She also conjures up the carefully restored, museumlike old house where she lived with her brothers (Zell Steele Morrow and Oscar Williams); the Oberlin College campus, where she fell in love with a fellow student named Joan (a spot-on Roberta Colindrez), and the lonely drawing desk where Alison works to give shape and substance to her ghosts.

I can’t think of a recent musical — or play, for that matter — that has done a better job at finding theatrical expression for the wayward dynamics of remembering. That includes the now-you-see-now-you-don’t-aspect of David Zinn’s inspired in-the-round set, in which furniture materializes through trapdoors, as well as the ruthless clarity and sudden, obscuring dimness of Ben Stanton’s lighting.

But most important is the music, a career high for Ms. Tesori (“Violet,” “Caroline, or Change”), which captures both the nagging persistence of memory and its frustrating insubstantiality, with leitmotifs that tease and shimmer. (John Clancy did the nuanced orchestrations.) The music is woven so intricately into Ms. Kron’s time-juggling script that you’ll find yourself hard pressed to recall what exactly was said and what was sung.

Every member of the cast is fluent in this musical language, blessedly never pushing for effect. Not that there isn’t room for the occasional show-off number. How could it be otherwise when there are children on the stage?

Mr. Morrow, Mr. Williams and Ms. Lucas present a showstopping, casket-riding commercial for Bruce’s funeral home that the Bechdel children whip up while hanging out in the mortuary. They are also invaluable participants in a later sequence that transforms Alison’s clan into a perfectly in-sync, finger-snapping musical group along the lines of the Partridge Family, that most wholesome of 1970s pop bands.

These are the show’s only pastiche numbers, with Ms. Tesori using slick, prepackaged forms to suggest a child’s wistful longings for a tidy, happy existence that real life can never match.

Otherwise, the score stays close to the fragile hearts and minds of its characters as they are.

As befits a work that is both a coming out (on several levels) and a coming-of-age story, “Fun Home” features two exultant hymns of sexual awakening. They are performed with spirit and style by Ms. Skeggs (on Alison’s first night with Joan) and the incomparable Ms. Lucas (in a fabulous ode to a handsome delivery woman glimpsed in a coffee shop). And the always excellent Ms. Kuhn, whose Helen is shaped by a resentment she can barely afford to express, gives full life to a lacerating 11 o’clock ballad of repressed emotions set free.

Much of the music, though, has the interrogative restlessness of thought in pursuit of certainty, and the ambivalent mix of anger and affection that pervades our relationships with our nearest and dearest. There’s a delicate dissonance in the multiple-part songs, which are all the more affecting for their implicit yearning for harmony.

Mr. Cerveris, an unforgettably fierce Sweeney Todd in John Doyle’s 2005 revival, rises to the challenge of the show’s toughest role. Bruce isn’t just a man with a double life, but a character shaped with love and exasperation, recrimination and guilt by Alison’s recollection of him. As played by Mr. Cerveris, he is both irresistible and forbidding, warmly accessible and icily opaque.

“A family tragicomic” is the subtitle of the book by Ms. Bechdel on which this show is based. And it’s hard to strike the right balance in bringing that oxymoronic quality to the stage. I fell hard for “Fun Home” when I first saw it at the Public Theater, and had worried that this rare beauty might be damaged in its relocation.

But this production has only improved, not least because of its having to be reimagined for a theater-in-the-round space. (The Public production was on a proscenium stage.) The audience becomes, more than ever, part of the Bechdel family circle. For better or worse — and for me shows this cathartic are only for the better — we’re home.