The Pickup's Culture coverage is brought to you by Tulsa Artists' Coalition Gallery, 40 Years of Empowering Tulsa Artists. Visit TAC Gallery to see American Highway Revisited by VC Torneden and Melinda Harvey Green, June 5 – 27, 2026.
Eclipse Theatre Collective x Theatre Tulsa: Fun Home
Theatre Tulsa Studios
June 4, 2026
Fun Home came at a critical moment in my life. It was fall of 2016, my sophomore year of college and a little more than a year after the musical won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical. After taking a seminar on postmodern musical films the previous spring, I made a point to listen to the soundtracks of other contemporary musicals and then queued up the Fun Home score for my six-hour drive from Tulsa to St. Louis for Thanksgiving break.
I wasn’t expecting to hear something that would feel so … personal. Like Alison Bechdel, who’s both the main character of the musical and the author of the graphic novel and memoir it’s based on, I wasn’t entirely comfortable sharing my interior emotional world in those years (or even writing about it, as my diaries would show). But I didn’t really understand why I was bawling when “Telephone Wire” played through the winding stretch of I-44 between Springfield and Rolla. I just knew Jeanine Tesori’s music and Lisa Kron’s lyrics had tapped into a locked-away part of my psyche and gently asked (as in a line from another of the musical’s songs) “Do you hear my heart saying hi?”
So when Eclipse Theatre Collective announced it was bringing Fun Home back to Tulsa, it quickly rose to the top of my “must see” list for the season. On its own, the material is strong, and under the specific direction of Meagan Mulgrew and Jordan Andrews’ musical prowess, this production of Fun Home soars.
Fun Home is a one-act musical in which Bechdel (famously the creator of the Bechdel Test) revisits memories from her youth and first year of college during the ‘70s and ‘80s in an attempt to compose her graphic novel/memoir. These memories swirl across time and place, circulating around her discovery of her sexuality, questions pertaining to her father Bruce’s sexuality, and the air-tight, stifled household she grew up in. Much of this strain is attributed to Bruce, who tries to keep up appearances that he is the patriarch of a normal American family, as symbolized through a pristinely curated, museum-like house that he renovated with high-quality antique items. Throughout the musical, as we see different versions of Alison from youth to adulthood, this “fun home” facade cracks and crumbles until he reaches a breaking point.