Dykes to Watch Out For... When You're on Broadway

As Broadway productions go, a story about a budding lesbian whose family owns a funeral home and whose closeted gay dad commits suicide seems a bit dark for the matinee crowd. But those who caught the sold-out run of "Fun Home" at The Public Theater last fall will attest that it's set to become one of the feel-good musicals of the year.

"This is mind-blowing," said Alison Bechdel in a recent interview with EDGE, as she was driving home to Vermont. "It just feels kind of historic. It's very exciting to see this happening."

A finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, "Fun Home" is based on lesbian cartoonist Bechdel's graphic novel of the same name, in which she comes to terms with her father's homosexuality and suicide, and her own lesbianism. The stage adaptation was created by Obie Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron of the subversive queer collective group "The Five Lesbian Brothers," with music by four-time Tony Award nominee Jeanine Tesori.

Although Bechdel didn't have final say in how the show was written, she said that Kron and Tesori listened to her input extensively and took her notes into account, changing the pages and songs almost every day of rehearsal. Bechdel said she was "delighted" with the end result.

Actress Beth Malone plays grown-up Alison, who serves as a sort of narrator for the action. Although the openly lesbian actress (who confessed to childhood crushes on Marlo Thomas and Kristy McNichol) wasn't a reader of Bechdel's long-running syndicated comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she does recall unwittingly hanging one of the writer's cartoons on her wall during her undergraduate days in Greeley, Colorado.

Bechdel's widespread media presence gave Malone tons of material to study, from photos to Web blogs to video, which helped her prepare for the role. But nothing prepared her for meeting Bechdel face-to-face.

"The first time we met was an intense moment," said Malone during a break in her rehearsal as the title role in the new version of the Broadway classic "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" in Denver. "It was like the mirror game you do in Acting 101: we looked each other up and down, and I turned purple."

Innovatively, the play uses three actors in the role of Alison: the young Alison, Sydney Lucas; the college-age Alison, Alexandra Socha; and the grown-up Alison, Beth Malone. Bechdel's onstage family comprises Broadway stalwarts Michael Cerveris as father Bruce Bechdel, Judy Kuhn as the mother Helen, along with newcomers Griffin Birney and Noah Hinsdale as Alison's brothers.

"I wish I really had three versions of myself; I would get a lot more done," said Bechdel, laughing. "But it was such a brilliant solution to the problem of how to talk about it. The book jumps around in time a lot, so I wasn't sure how that would work onstage. This idea works so well, especially with having the adult Alison onstage telling the story."

Malone said that watching the two other versions of Alison helped provide her character's physicality. Although Malone's head shot looks nothing like the character she ends up inhabiting, the end result is uncanny -- so much that her agents have struggled to get her into other auditions.

"People think I'm this character now because there's been so much media imagery of me as her," said Malone. "But as a gay actress, I want to be able to go out for all kinds of roles. Any gay actress playing opposite men will tell you: it's always a little tricky to keep that idea open and alive. They didn't want to see me for the role of Molly Brown. I had to fight my way into that room. But I have this character in my pocket. I'm a musical theater actress; that's been my job for my whole life."

Although Malone calls her role a "once-in-a-lifetime chance" and the play "a work of beautiful perfection," she wants to keep taking on challenging roles after the end of the run in September. She hates the idea of the "butch lesbian joke" in shows and is pleased that "Fun Home" reclaims that in a way that's not a punch line to a joke.

"That is so misogynistic, and I was so sick and tired of it," said Malone. "But this time, we have the keys to the car. And that's what I like."

Both Malone and Bechdel were thrilled that "Fun Home" is going to be seen by such a large number of people on Broadway. Bechdel said that she'd like the show to run for a long time, so that everyone in the universe could see it.

Bechdel sometimes even wishes her parents could be in the audience (her mother died five months before the show opened Off-Broadway at The Public in 2013) but then also acknowledges that without her father's death, there would be no story. And her mother, said Bechdel, felt as though it were "her version of events" rather than "the real story," which she acknowledged could have changed her telling, making "Fun Home" something other than what it is: a frank, humorous and sometimes dark look into the life of a regular family that happens to include gay and lesbian members.

"It was my mission all along to try and show that queer people are human," said Bechdel, who gained inadvertent fame with a 30-year-old cartoon that became known as "The Bechdel Test," a way to determine gender bias on film or the page. "And now, we will get to see a lot of different kinds of people in to see a story of a lesbian everyperson, struggling along in life."

Malone was also anticipating the chance to share this story so widely, and to inhabit the role for the next six months. But she is wise enough to recognize that maintaining the purity of expression during a long commercial run will be a challenge.

"It's on the head of a pin, the alchemy of this particular piece of theater," said Malone. "When it's perfect -- and there are nights when you feel the show was perfect -- it is on a razor's edge. It's a dangerous feeling, because performing costs you something... or should cost you something if you're doing it right. It's a sort of a wormhole, because we tell you at the beginning what the end will be, and every moment of enjoyment has that dread hanging over it. Audiences are going to be transformed, but you don't want to do that to yourself eight shows a week."

Bechdel herself said that although she has seen the show in several iterations, watching it again and again is challenging. Instead, she spent part of last year in Italy, creating work after winning a prestigious MacArthur "Genius Grant." She admitted that she was tickled to be considered a "genius," but often worried that the phone would ring to tell her that they had made a mistake.

"I'm trying to get used to it," said Bechdel, "But it's pretty amazing, and I'm very happy about it. My trip to Italy last summer was wonderful. I've never done an artist's residency before and had the chance to work somewhere outside of my own basement."

In parting, EDGE jokingly asked Malone if she worried that her starring role in "Fun Home" would turn her into a lesbian icon, or one of those assholes who throws coffee in her assistant's face because it's not hot enough.

"Yes, I'm worried about that," said Malone. "I'm already turning into an asshole. People are comparing me to Jodie Foster, girls throw pussy at me while I'm walking down the street. My wife is very, very concerned."