Bringing "Fun Home" to the Stage Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, has presented his share of complicated new musicals. But "Fun Home," he said, was in a class by itself. "They went through more iterations and drafts than I think I've ever seen a musical go through," he said recently, still basking in the acclaim showered on the show, which opened Oct. 22 and has been extended three times, now through Dec. 29. At the heart of that was how willing Lisa and Jeanine were to keep trying till they got it right. Lisa Kron, who wrote the book and lyrics, and Jeanine Tesori, the composer, certainly set themselves a daunting task: bringing Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir onto the stage. Not only did they have to figure out how to make cartoons with captions into a fully-realized piece of theater, but they also had to deal with thorny subject matter in song - like a lesbian's sexual awakening and her gay father's suicide. "It was nothing but problems," Ms. Kron said in a recent interview at the Public with Ms. Tesori, who added, "Just starting to talk about it reminds me of being overwhelmed." Although Ms. Tesori was experienced (she wrote "Shrek the Musical" and "Caroline, or Change"), Ms. Kron had never written a musical before. And Sam Gold, the director, hadn't overseen a fully staged musical since his graduate days at Juilliard. "Fun Home" had a relatively long five-year gestation period and the creators said they used every minute of it - making major changes right up until they were contractually obligated to stop. The process took the writers from the Ojai Playwrights Conference in California to the Sundance Institute's Theater Lab in Florida and included three versions at the Public: a reading in 2011, a scaled-down fall 2012 performance in its lab program, and a workshop this May. "It was clear they were creating something that was finding its own form," said Mike Isaacson, a commercial producer who - with his colleague Kristin Caskey and Barbara Whitman - helped finance "Fun Home" after seeing the reading. Enhancement money for nonprofit productions has become commonplace; the producers wouldn't say how much they had invested, nor whether they would aim to move the show to Broadway, as has been speculated. For the creators, the main challenge was finding a way to extract a cohesive, comprehensible narrative from Ms. Bechdel's expansive, impressionistic memoir, which reflects on her coming out and the suicide of her father, a funeral director, who stepped in front of a truck soon after she disclosed her sexuality to the family. Initially, the show was organized around Ms. Bechdel's drawing - the book's illustrations were displayed throughout the show and her studio was faithfully recreated onstage. Then the creators determined that this didn't work, so the studio was pared down to just a writing desk on rollers. The only drawing appears at the end. "We needed to find a theatrical analogy to the way Alison was telling her story," Mr. Gold said. And if we were using her drawings, we weren't telling her story through theater. There was a level of remove - we were telling the story about her making the book - whereas the show is our version of the book. In the show, a 43-year-old Alison recalls events in her narration to the audience, even as younger Alisons - ages 19 and 8, played by different actors - portray those experiences, sometimes in lighthearted song. They include a child's early fascination with a masculine-looking waitress ("Ring of Keys") and her first relationship with a woman in college, with its signature lyric, "I'm changing my major to Joan." In figuring out the narrative flow, the writers used visual aids, like pinning index cards, maps and charts to the wall. "We were the Staples poster children," Ms. Tesori said, referring to the office supply store. "The structure was really hard to get - to go back and forth in time all the time," added Judy Kuhn, who has played Alison's mother since the reading. It has an emotional chronology that's different from the time chronology. The creators also did their research, consulting Stephen Sondheim's two volumes on writing music and lyrics; the librettos for "A Chorus Line" and "The Who's Tommy"; and plays in which actors directly address the audience, like "Our Town" and "The Glass Menagerie." Although the musical has an undercurrent of sadness, the writers believed that moments of levity and relief - like a showstopping song in which the kids play in the funeral home coffins - were crucial. "Party is right next to pain," Ms. Tesori said. It allows you to feel something in a deeper way because you can go up and then down. A major conundrum was how to portray Alison's father, Bruce, who was close to his daughter but could also be cold and remote. "He's so volatile and can easily fall into a scary place where you don't like him," said Philip Himberg, the artistic director of the Sundance theater program. They had to find the vulnerability of that man inside the anger and volatility. In one of many enthusiastic reviews the show received, Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised Ms. Tesori's musical handling of "the divided self of Bruce, with melodies that change moods - from crisp, fatherly propriety to growling, guttural lust - subtly and disturbingly." Even after the Public committed to a full production, the creative team's work continued. Revisions came every day during previews, which meant the actors had to perform new material every night. Mr. Gold said he and the writers made "large adjustments" until they had to freeze the show and call it finished, "trying to get it right all the way to the end." Ultimately, it was the people in the seats at the Public's Newman Theater who helped determine what worked and what didn't. Ms. Tesori said she watched them - rather than the performance - during previews. "The audience comes in, and you begin your final rehearsal period," she said. You just chip away and chip away, and suddenly it's blooming.