FUN HOME is at the Arden until June 17th

Beech Creek, PA is just over 200 miles from the Arden, a good 3.5-hour drive from Philadelphia into the middle of nowhere: a very small town 30 miles northeast of State College; 100 miles north-northwest of Harrisburg; and 100 miles due west of Wilkes-Barre. These markers are laid out in “Maps,” a clear standout from the Arden Theater Company’s production of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel of the same name, the Lisa Kron-penned and Jeanine Tesori-scored Tony-winner which broke molds by starring an out lesbian.

“Make this part look rugged, mmm mmmmm / Allegheny Plateau, this dark shaped strip, bum bum bumm,” sings Ben Dibble as Bruce Bechdel, father to the protagonist, also queer but deeply closeted, shows his daughter how he’d draw a map of their family’s physical presence. “Paint the long ridges and valleys below, mmm hmmm / Our town is this dot, quick dashes mark the property ends / Beach Creek, a rope that turns and bends.” It’s one of those moments where Bruce takes a keen interest in his daughter’s development but grows impatient as Alison makes an earnest attempt to establish her own identity, her way of doing things (even if it’s a fourth grade assignment).

Their distinctly divergent ways of managing their respective queernesses is the fascinating through-line of Terry Nolen’s directions of Fun Home. There are three Alisons - small (Kate Bove, an outstanding young talent), medium (even more powerfully brought to life by Izzy Castaldi), and Alison the adult (nailed here by Mary Tuomanen) - and they each struggle to make sense of their father, an erratic, demanding, and enigmatic English teacher, funeral director, and home restorer. Kim Carson plays a nuanced, complex and tortured wife Helen to Bruce, even as he cheats on her with men and engages in risky sexual behavior with minors.

The tragedy of it all is that Bruce need not be malgined as an evil, intentionally-abusive, or ill-intentioned spouse or parent: It’s a time-tested tradition for LGBTQ individuals to see no hope for themselves as an out queer and steer their lives into marriages, parenting, and home lives that crack and fissure under the weight of buried queerness. Helen holds on to memories of their early courtship - long walks in Munich, where Bruce served in WWII (and met his first not-so-secret lover), beers with friends where they mused of the places they’d go. Especially in a place like Beech Creek, PA, gay men of a certain age dwelled in loneliness, double lives, fraught cruising, and clandestine secret sex.

This makes Alison’s jump out of the closet in her first year of college (“Changing My Major” is fantastic) all the more difficult to consume for her father. Four months after Alison leaves for Oberlin College, he steps in front of a huge truck on I-150, a route that adult Alison notes is the same highway that goes from Christopher Street to San Francisco. There are tons of coy allusions to Bruce’s knowledge of his daughter’s queerness, though, like his sending her a book at college by iconic lesbian novelist, Colette. In "Clueless in New York," Bruce takes Alison and her brothers to the Frick Collection, for a Broadway show, and sneaks out at night to go cruising during Fleet Week while she peruses a Baryshnikov photography book ("Be careful with it," he commands). Little details smack of Bruce's double life - his hunt for his bronzer stick before a showing, his hiring of virile young men as part-time gardeners and handymen. You can almost imagine the confusion Bruce felt when his daughter became so early, so quickly comfortable in her gay skin. Alison can attend Gay Union meetings. Bruce came of age when, as a middle-aged man, his attempt at sexual contact with a teenager got him a judge-issued assignment to a psychiatrist to curb his gay inclinations.

This weighs heavily on an adult Alison, who looks back on her last few moments with her gay father with honest interest, with regret and despair. Tuomanen nails a gut-wrenching “Telephone Wire,” a cross-dimensional conversation with her then-still-alive father on a car ride that maybe could’ve changed their lives. I’ve had several difficult conversations with my parents on car rides. Of course, “Ring of Keys” has wrung out of Fun Home a neat little representative single - a young baby lesbian enamored by a classic butch in a diner while her dad reads the newspaper. But, as it turns out, there’s way more to the story than baby Alison spying dungarees, short hair, and lace-up boots and feeling something. Something scary and exciting, something Bruce felt, too, but never got the chance to be honest about it. Dynamic performances abound and Nolen and Co. manage to pack it into a neat, powerful, compact 100-minute performance. If anything, more than just enjoying a magnificent cultural moment (in which a lesbian-and-gay-dad story wins a Tony), it was a moment I enjoyed of communing with my elders and thanking them for having the courage to live their lives as fully as possible.

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