BURLINGTON, VT. — The gender studies students sat in a circle, just beneath a periodic-table poster, and, bashful or bored, ran out of questions before class was over.  So Alison Bechdel pulled out her iPhone, hit play and held it in the air. The voice of an actress rang out, clear and pained — portraying Ms. Bechdel as an undergrad, trying to find the courage to talk honestly with her father during an uncomfortable car ride shortly before he killed himself.  “Say something — talk to him,” she sings, urging herself to initiate a conversation of more than chitchat. “Say something — anything.”  If the students had been silent and sullen, now they were silent and rapt. They had read a graphic-novel memoir by Ms. Bechdel and wondered about that moment of missed connection between father and daughter. They had asked about the tension between revelation and privacy. And they were mystified about a musicalization: How could a story about a woman who comes out as a lesbian, only to have her father declare that he, too, is gay and then end his life, work as a Broadway show? (It opens April 19 at the Circle in the Square Theater.)  These are strange days for Ms. Bechdel, who spent years on the margins of popular culture — the nation’s most prominent lesbian cartoonist — and then found unexpected success with the book “Fun Home,” in which she investigated, using journals, police records and a trove of photographs, the unraveling of her own family, and the construction of her own self-understanding.  The 2006 memoir, which has sold over a quarter-million copies and is now assigned on dozens of college campuses, captured the imagination of leading figures in contemporary theater: the playwright Lisa Kron, the composer Jeanine Tesori and the director Sam Gold. Ms. Bechdel, raised in an emotionally guarded household, finds herself depicted by not just one but three actresses on a Broadway stage.  “I can’t even use the word surreal anymore, it’s so trite; it’s weird,” Ms. Bechdel said during an interview at her home nestled in the Green Mountains outside this college town, where she sketches at a drawing table and writes on a computer, often accompanied by her calico tabby, Donald (a female cat named for a male psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott).  The show, with a subject that is not typical musical fare, is a sort of theatrical Russian doll. A 40-something Alison (Beth Malone) tries to examine, for her cartoons as well as her sense of self, her own experience as an Oberlin student (Emily Skeggs) and as a child (Sydney Lucas).  For the actors and creators, there is a fourth Alison, the one they call T-Rab (The Real Alison Bechdel), the 54-year-old cartoonist who has been both observer and observed as the musical has been developed.  The show is not chronological — the stories of the Alisons, their father (Michael Cerveris) and their mother (Judy Kuhn) are interwoven — and on Broadway it will be staged in the round, suggesting visually that the unfolding events are memories swirling around the cartoonist.  “I do understand that there’s a difference between the play and my life, but it is a very strange and permeable boundary,” Ms. Bechdel said. “It’s some kind of hall-of-mirrors thing. There’s been this strange feedback effect.”  How strange? The actresses have read Ms. Bechdel’s books and watched her video postings, and two have slept in her childhood home (in Beech Creek, Pa., where the play is centered). They examine how she dresses and speaks, noting how her eyes scan when she thinks and how her hands move.  Onstage they sometimes walk in parallel, with the same gait and the same insertion of hands in pockets. Offstage, Ms. Malone and Ms. Skeggs run together — Ms. Malone is training for a marathon while performing eight times a week — and have reached a point where their pace and breathing align.  “We’ve all negotiated physical mannerisms, and the way she says certain things, to try to be the same, but we also have this task of being this person who is growing — we’re all this one person, but at different stages of her life,” said Ms. Skeggs, whose character is called Medium Alison.  Portraying a real person, she said, is “a blessing and a curse,” because, on the one hand, “we get to meet her and see her and talk with her and experience the way she thinks about things,” but, on the other hand, “we have to honor her in a way, so there’s a little bit of pressure to make sure that we’re doing it right.”  Ms. Lucas, who last year became the youngest person to win an Obie Award for her portrayal of Little Alison, expressed similar concerns, saying, “Sometimes I wonder if I’m acting the way she acted.” Ms. Lucas has tried to extract ideas from the book (which she read, at age 9, “with my mom covering up pages that I wasn’t allowed to see”) and by searching for similarities to her own experience.  “I know she definitely hated dresses and stuff like that,” said Ms. Lucas, who is now 11. “I’m actually sort of like Alison, because first of all I have two brothers, and I really love to draw, like she does.”  Few musicals arrive on Broadway with as many thematic challenges, or as much praise, as “Fun Home.”  The subject matter, obviously, is a complication in a Broadway market dominated by lighter material. The show’s producers, Kristin Caskey, Mike Isaacson and Barbara Whitman, who raised $5.2 million to finance the Broadway transfer, are emphasizing the father-daughter relationship and journey of self-discovery, rather than the sexuality, the suicide or the fact that Alison’s father ran a funeral home (“Fun Home” was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the business).  The children create moments of jollity (one fantasy number echoes the Partridge Family), even in a home with pain and sadness. So the show’s marketing campaign suggests family — its logo features the frame of a house, with a Bechdel father-daughter silhouette in a window — and retro colors and typography inspired by board games of the ’60s and ’70s.  Pedigree is a plus: Last year, Ms. Bechdel won a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and the musical was a finalist for a Pulitzer; its premiere, at the Public Theater in 2013, was greeted rapturously by critics — Ben Brantley in The New York Times called the show a “beautiful heartbreaker” — and it swept the Off Broadway awards season.  Ms. Bechdel initially came to public attention as the author of “Dykes to Watch Out For,” a comic strip widely published in gay newspapers. Now, with the popularity of graphic novels, the ubiquity of gender and sexuality studies programs, and her MacArthur grant, she is much in demand as a public speaker, and has an at-large professorship at the University of Vermont, where she periodically speaks to classes about her book and her life. (“All the things I did for fun in college, like coming out and drawing cartoons, are now official things you can major in,” she said.)  But, to her chagrin, she is best known for a concept she says a friend actually came up with. Three decades ago, she wrote a comic strip, based on a conversation with that friend, in which a character declared that she wouldn’t see a movie unless it featured two women having a conversation about something other than a man. That criterion has become known as the Bechdel Test, an informal shortcut for evaluating gender bias in popular culture.  In the home studio where she wrote the memoir, Ms. Bechdel compares herself to a hermit crab, pulling research material into her lair, a space piled high with books (“Little Women,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “Stuart Little,” “Jane Fonda’s Workout Book”), cartoon anthologies (Charles Addams, Roz Chast) and a lifetime of daybooks and photo albums and steel pens, plus a box labeled “sharp objects.”  “She’s notoriously clinical about researching her own story,” said Ms. Malone, who was performing in “Breakup Notebook,” a lesbian pop-rock musical in Asbury Park, N.J., when she was discovered by a vacationing Ms. Kron.  “She is a curious human being, and she’s curious about herself most of all,” Ms. Malone said of Ms. Bechdel. “Even her look is all about telling the truth — no ornamentation, nothing pretty. She hates lies — lies and embellishments are what got her dad killed.”  Ms. Bechdel has no formal role in creating the musical, but checks in often, answers questions by email and offers the periodic note. She asked them to change one sentence, to make clear that her father, a fastidious home restorer and antiques collector, had used real William Morris wallpaper, and not an imitation.  Mr. Gold, in turn, visited her in Vermont, where she lives with her partner, Holly Rae Taylor. Ms. Bechdel has the diaries she has kept since she was a child, starting with notes on a burial vault company calendar, as well as her mother’s Steinway and some of her father’s floral paintings.  And much of the cast has been to Beech Creek, where the funeral home had become a day care center and the Bechdel home a bed-and-breakfast; Ms. Bechdel cooked them dinner in what had been her mother’s kitchen.  She also accompanied the cast to South Carolina, for a performance to protest that State Legislature’s decision to cut funding to the College of Charleston because it included “Fun Home” on a reading list, offending lawmakers who objected to the book’s positive portrayal of lesbianism.  Ms. Bechdel listens repeatedly to the cast recording from the Public production, as well as to recordings of songs cut during the play’s long development process — and these days finds herself singing lyrics written for characters bearing her name, accompanied by actresses playing her.  It took her two decades after her father’s death — years of repressed emotions, therapy and searching for a way to tell the story — before she felt ready to write “Fun Home.” That experience, she says, helped her empathize more with her parents.  Now, having watched the theater makers take her life apart and reassemble it as a musical, she is able more fully to see herself as others do, not just as a storyteller but also as a subject.  “The first time I saw it, at a staged reading, I was so overwhelmed I could barely speak,” she said. “Now I’ve been living with the play for five years.”  A few days ago, she texted Ms. Malone: “I feel like I have learned something about myself watching you.”  A version of this article appears in print on April 12, 2015, on page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: This Is Your Life, Onstage. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Alison Bechdel — creator of the graphic-novel memoir that’s the basis of the musical “Fun Home” — watches as the production moves from Off Broadway to Broadway.