GROUNDBREAKING ‘HOME’ “F

Musical dramedy explores a father’s secret, daughter’s struggles

Fun Home” opens with such plain, prosaic musical numbers it’s initially hard to grasp how the Broadway sensation landed 12 Tony nominations and took home five in 2016. The first 15 minutes seem so light and meaningless. But the mundane quickly proves to be a grand setup, a trick to make you think this will be another typically average musical. When the ac- tion bluntly twists toward tension, “Fun Home” reveals itself as a dramatic masterpiece.

At the Boston Opera House through Oct. 29 and based on Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, “Fun Home” begins in humdrum rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s. A loving husband and father is hard at work trying to remodel his historic home with help from his doting wife and cute kids. If you’re unfamiliar with the graphic novel, it’s hard to see where it’s going until the narrator, an adult version of Bechdel, smacks you with the line: “My father and I 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.”

While the adult version of Bechdel narrates, the story is told in a series of flashbacks that bounce between her days as a little girl and her first semester at college. Young Alison and her brothers try to navigate their father’s mercurial, mysterious temperament. College-aged Alison struggles to bond with her father once they learn each other is gay. Adult Alison puzzles over how the pieces of her memory fit together. Billed as a dramedy, “Fun Home” can be silly and funny. Thanks mostly to Abby Corrigan’s gawky, geeky, and often hilarious portrayal of Alison as a freshman at Oberlin College, the show features a few brilliant comedic turns. Alison’s first kiss is a feat of slapstick genius.

But the show gets most of its power from exploiting the pressure put on a man forced to live a double life. Watching Alison’s father, Bruce, played with tenderness and mania by Robert Petkoff, slowly give in to his natural urges knowing they will destroy him is both horrifying and magnetic. He tries to seduce the handyman as his wife practices Chopin in the next room. He takes a high school kid for a ride, offering him a beer to loosen him up.

You will laugh, but “Fun Home” is not fun. It’s a look inside the hell people live when they are forced to subjugate who they are to fit into an intolerant society. It’s a production that is sadly needed in a contemporary America still not wholly committed to the idea that people should be free to be themselves.

FAMILY ‘FUN’: Carly Gold, as young Alison, horses around with her father, Bruce (Robert Petkoff), in ‘Fun Home.’ Alison, who discovers that both she and her troubled father are gay, is played by, seated at top, Abby Corrigan, Kate Shindle and Gold.