Based on the renowned graphic memoir/novel by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, with a book and spot-on lyrics by Lisa Kron and near-perfect musical writing by Jeanine Tesori, Fun Home richly deserved the five Tonys it won for its Broadway production. Dominion Stage’s presentation does full justice to the remarkable material. Fun Home is so many things in a compact, nonlinear package. It is a father-daughter story, a coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a memory play. It mourns constrained lives while celebrating the possibilities of lives opened. It never fails to be deeply and touchingly emotional while never succumbing to sentimentality. It is a theatrical rarity that intentionally centers the experience not simply of lesbians in general but of butch lesbians in particular. Sydne Lyons as lesbian cartoonist Alison in ‘Fun Home.’ Photo by Heather Regan. The central character is Alison herself, played by Sydne Lyons as an adult in the story’s present, as a college freshman (“Middle Alison”) by Amelia Jacquat, and as a child (“Small Alison”) by Samantha Regan. At her sketching desk, the adult Alison reflects on how she got to be who she is, now that she is about the same age as her father at the time of his death. Beyond the smooth, tight pace of the production, director Sabrina McAllister gives the production highly believable continuity among the phases of Alison’s life as played by three different actors. Alison sees herself as a child, encountering a butch delivery woman. Regan’s rendition of “Ring of Keys” shows Small Alison’s wonderment at recognizing something about herself in the concrete details of this stranger; her swagger, short hair, dungarees, and laced-up boots. At home, Small Alison is made to wear pretty feminine things by her traditional, obsessively detail-oriented father, Bruce (Joshua Redford). Bruce is an English teacher, funeral home director (from which the “Fun” in the title derives), and home restorer. He has made his old Victorian house a showplace of miscellaneous, sometimes ill-matched, slices of 19th-century Americana. It serves as a kind of metaphorical exoskeleton for Bruce’s conflicted life. Small Alison and her siblings do have fun in the funeral home, playing in a casket and singing a mock commercial to the place in “Come to the Fun Home.” As a college student, Middle Alison simultaneously comes out and finds a lover. In “Changing My Major,” Jacquat gives us the exuberant, romantic, nervous feelings of Middle Alison’s identity and sexuality finding their first vibrant expression. It’s a moment of pure delight. TOP: Joshua Redford as Bruce, Amelia Jacquat as Medium Alison, Julianna Cooper as Joan; ABOVE: Maura Lacy as Helen, Miles Hoffman as Christian, Felix Hoffman as John, Samantha Regan as Small Alison, Joshua Redford as Bruce, Sydne Lyons as Alison, Kevin Donlan as Roy, in ‘Fun Home.’ Photos by Heather Regan. The four weeks following this moment change the picture dramatically. Middle Alison writes home about her experience and shortly after finds out something she never suspected: her father is a closeted gay man who regularly picks up younger men on the down low. They try to find common ground (“Telephone Wire”) but never quite connect. Then, as Alison tells the audience at the beginning of the play, Bruce kills himself. Bruce, growing up in the era of the Lavender Scare, found it necessary to hide his sexuality and assume the role of a straight husband and father. In “Edges of the World,” Redford poignantly sings of how, in contrast to his daughter, “it’s harder when you’re older to begin.” For him, it’s like restoring a house in a state of ruin, a crushing burden. And what of Alison’s mother? Bechdel deliberately limited her role in the book; the musical gives her greater expression. In “Days and Days,” Maura Lacy sings searingly of the despair of filling her days with busy work, concealing the reality of a family in which the emotional “chaos never happens if it’s never seen.” The key element of the production’s setting is its use of projections of drawings, many of which reproduce panels from Bechdel’s book. It’s a concept that the original creators of the show considered during the workshop process but did not use in the New York production. Here, in Dominion’s three-quarter-round presentation, it works wonderfully. We see Alison taking notes and making sketches about her lives as a child and college student, which she then transforms into drawings for her memoir/novel, which in turn become, via the projections, part of the audience’s experience of the play. The multilayered presentation of the creative process adds to the fullness of that experience. Kudos to Kim Leone for the set design and David M. Moretti for the graphics and special effects. At the heart of the play is a kind of mystery, centered on the father-daughter relationship. As Alison says, she is like her father and not like her father. She comments, “Caption: My dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town, and he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself. And I became a lesbian cartoonist.” Alison’s journey through that mystery, living with what can never be fully known, is what animates this brilliant character-driven musical. And like the three Allisons at the play’s conclusion, Dominion Stage’s production flies up so high. Running Time: One hour and 40 minutes, with no intermission. Fun Home plays through November 9, 2024, presented by Dominion Stage, performing at Gunston Theater Two, 2700 South Lang Street, Arlington, VA. Tickets are general admission and cost $30 (online coupon code “ALISON5” saves $5) and may be purchased online. The online box office closes at 4:30 pm the day of performance, but a limited number of full-price tickets MAY be available at the door prior to curtain. Come early to secure a seat. The playbill for Fun Home is online here. COVID Policy: Masks are optional. Fun Home Music by Jeanine Tesori Book and Lyrics by Lisa Kron Based on the Graphic Novel by Alison Bechdel