I have only just returned from an extraordinary theater-going experience in, of all places, Pottstown, PA, and its culturally port-in-a-storm Steel River Playhouse's production of 'Fun Home'.
This isn't a fun show (the title refers to the funeral home run by the show family's father), as I'm sure everyone who shuffled down the stairs from the surprisingly spacious 92-seat black box theater (the smaller of two in the building) was murmuring to their companions.
'Fun Home' is bubbly, but the bubbles are opaque and leathery-tasting. Its mood is dark and darker. Its music is strident and pleading, almost clutching. Its dance is feverish and foolish. Its story is one of those, "I hate this, but please don't stop!" affairs.
But, its performances are truly breath-robbing, every single shadowy memory-creature torn alive from the pages of its graphic novel origins and thrown to the stage floor of the here-and-now, under the close scrutiny of a-body-in-every-seat, and celebrated by those bodies' laughter and applause and shock and sadness, all in a scant hour-forty.
Plot, if we must, but briefly: A middle-aged woman, Alison, who somewhat fitfully calls herself a lesbian recalls and recounts and searingly relives her life in three of its most pivotal stages, as a pre-teen, a late-teen and her present-day self as a graphic novelist trying to depict the arc of her personal struggles as the daughter of a male-to-male predator--- her Dad, Bruce--- and her haunted, helpless, somewhat hapless mother and Bruce's enabling wife, Helen.
The precocious, curious, frustrated pre-teen Alison, routinely confused by her dad's mercurial shifts between playful encouragement and bitter repression, timidly blossoms into a sexually muzzled college-aged Alison, desperately ambivalent toward her own identity crisis, and finally sculpts herself into the manic, deeply pained forty-something artist whose pen is bleeding from wounds too gaping for words alone, painting instead a confessional in darkly colored illustrations, faintly melodic music, plaintive lyrics, and whirlish dance.
I've kept details at a minimum so as not to dilute the impact of the live performance of this play. 
I'll add only that the orchestration is clean and pure and contributed immeasurably to the quality of the production, literally seeming never to miss a beat of what my ear told me were very challenging musical exercises. These aren't songs by Meredith Willson. You're not going to hum them in the car. But, they're not going to let you forget what they were trying to make you understand nor let you fail to appreciate how skillfully they were being told.
I've already written that every performance was effectively affecting, beginning with a highly sympathetic Laura Watson as Adult Alison.
However, I must take a few words more to describe a truly courageous and painstaking performance of the dad, Bruce, by an utterly convincing Rob Tilley. Mr. Tilley is not a physically inspiring man, but he worked the stage with the ferocity of a drill sergeant and, when needed, with the grace and cooing of a lightly fluttering dove; he made me feel Bruce's torment and share his guilt and welcome his self-execution. I can't remember the last time I experienced that in a theater.
I generally dislike performances by any child I didn't parent, but Reese Grove gallantly held me on the cusp of credibility, and with the stage presence and voice of a far more mature singer.
I wish I'd been able better to hear the lyrics of the show's closing song by the three Alisons, including the believably fragile Shealyn Parker as the late-teen. Hearing was, at times, challenging, probably because of where I was sitting in relation to the fine and insistent orchestra.
Finally, I must sincerely applaud the staging of this show. Arena staging, with the playing area being a rectangle surrounded on three or four sides by folding chairs on risers, is seriously challenging. Who faces where and why and when' Where do we put the furniture, the props' How do we enter and exit' So many questions to answer without compromising this highly sensitive material or without distracting the audience.
And yet director Leena Devlin somehow worked it all out delicately and persuasively!
One important quibble, here, at the end of this review: After several decades of work in child welfare, I am acutely sensitive to anything that blurs the distinction between child predation and sexual preference. The characterization of Bruce, as written, is dangerously close to misrepresenting that distinction. Homosexuality and pedophilia are not related in any way. Bruce is, as drawn, a pedophile of teen-age boys. While it is suggested by Helen, his wife, that Bruce has had sexual affairs with adults, we witness only his persistent victimization of under-age males. I'd like to hope that we in the arts community can more clearly distinguish these sorts of characterizations. I don't believe the playwright allowed much space for that.
"Fun Home, a musical from the mind of Alison Bechdel" plays through February 16, 2020 at Steel River Playhouse, 245 E. High Street, Pottstown, PA 19464.For tickets, please call box office (610) 970-1199 or visit http://www.steelriver-playhouse.org/