THE KEYS OF KNOWLEDGE

What can I say about a show that offers one moment of delight after another while holding the anguish of parental narcissism, the joy of discovering one’s own identity, and the power of creative expression to transform grief? One thing I can say is this: anyone within commuting distance of downtown Boston should immediately secure tickets to the Huntington Theatre’s staging of Fun Home. It’s an experience that earns every bit of your effort to get there.

Sarah Bockel

Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) created this adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s eponymous best-selling graphic memoir for The Public Theater in 2013. A year later it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and in 2015 it won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Ten years on, director Logan Ellis delivers a staging that feels both rooted in the original and freshly immediate—truly one of the finest musical productions this estimable company has ever offered.

The show opens with Alison (Sarah Bockel) at her drawing table. She is trying to come to terms with her closeted father’s suicide just a few months after her coming out to him and her mother. Now the same age (43) as her father at the time of his death, she is grappling with how to tell his story—and her own. “I don’t trust memory,” she says. But the drawing table remains onstage throughout the production, sometimes fading into the background, a reminder that the musical is Alison’s act of sorting through her life with her father and her growing understanding of herself.

Sarah Bockel and Nick Duckart

Suddenly, Small Alison, about nine or ten years old, pops out from under the drawing table. Thirteen-year-old Lyla Randall has a raspy, complex voice that still sounds unmistakably young, and she brings sparkle and energy to the little girl in small-town Pennsylvania who is trying to make sense of her family and herself. She adores her father, Bruce Bechdel, played by Nick Duckart with a finely tuned mix of yearning, tension, and tenderness.

Young Alison, like any child, is trying to make sense of the world and her place in it. In “Ring of Keys,” she experiences the first spark of recognition when she sees a delivery woman with short hair, dungarees, lace-up boots, and a heavy ring of keys—a butch figure whose confidence and self-possession awaken something new and thrilling in her.

Lyla Randall

We always know exactly where we are in time, even as the production moves between scenes from Small Alison’s childhood and Medium Alison’s college years. Medium Alison, newly away from home and beginning to name her sexuality, is entirely distinct from her younger self yet clearly connected to her. Maya Jacobson is wonderful as a tentative and eager young lesbian so smitten with her first lover, Joan (Sushma Saha), that she decides to “change her major” to “sex with Joan,” while adult cartoonist Alison looks on in horrified recognition. Don’t we all?

Sushma Saha and Maya Jacobson

Bruce is a high school English teacher and the director of the Bechdel Funeral Home (the source of the abbreviated Fun Home). The Bechdel household, despite Bruce’s undercurrent of frustration, really is a “fun home” at times. Small Alison plays with her brothers, Christian and John (Odin Vega and Caleb Levin), as they race around the funeral home, climb in and out of caskets, and dream up the hilarious jingle for the family business, “Come to the Fun Home.” Taavon Gamble’s movement direction gives these scenes the uninhibited physicality of kids at a dance party. In “Raincoat of Love,” the family slips into a brightly colored fantasy of ’70s-style TV spectacle, complete with iridescent raincoats (Celeste Jennings, costume design). Like any family, the Bechdel clan has its struggles and its secrets, yet in this number we see the love that eventually gives Alison the strength and the tools she needs to sort through her complex relationship with her father.

Caleb Levin, Odin Vega, and Lyla Randall

Adult Alison moves through these scenes as a kind of onstage narrator, taking in the action while voicing her questions about her father—his closeted life, his inability to acknowledge their shared queerness, and the memories she is trying to pin down in her visual frames. Bruce’s obsession with home renovation finds expression in Tanya Orellana’s sets of antique furniture and a large stained glass window as well as a college dorm room. The design is impressively flexible while still conveying the weight of the family home. Tesori’s score is superb, and Jessie Rosso’s music direction brings it to the fore. The Huntington’s orchestra “pit,” mounted high above the stage and fully visible, is a tribute to the importance of the music.

Mr. Ellis notes how dramatically the political and social landscape has changed since Fun Home’s debut. In 2013, support and acceptance for gay rights was on the upswing; today, book bannings and rollbacks of civil-rights protections seek to erase queer and trans people from public life. In this climate, producing—and watching—Fun Home becomes both a political statement and an act of joyful defiance.

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photos by Marc J Franklin

Fun Home
Huntington Theatre Company
The Huntington, 264 Huntington Ave. in Boston
1 hour 45 minutes, no intermission
ends on December 14, 2025
for tickets (from $29), call 617.266.0800 or visit Huntington

for more shows, visit Theatre in Boston

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Lynne Weiss is a member of the Boston Theater Critics Association. Her work has also appeared in Literary Ladies Guide and in The Common, Black Warrior Review, and the Ploughshares Blog. She has an MFA from UMass Amherst and has received residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A lifelong social justice activist, she is at work on a novel set in 1930s Cornwall. Her reviews, travel tales, and progressively optimistic opinions are on her substack.