Fun Home, the five-time Tony Award-winning musical opening Tuesday at the CAA Theatre, is based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about her upbringing in a funeral home and her relationship to her troubled father.

It’s structured as a series of interweaving flashbacks, with three actors playing Alison at different stages in her life.

Laura Condlln, who plays 43-year-old Alison, will be familiar to Toronto theatre audiences for her many roles at the Stratford Festival and at Soulpepper, Tarragon and Crow’s Theatres; this is her first time performing in a musical.

Sara Farb, who plays university-aged Medium Alison, spent the last five seasons at Stratford, playing leading roles including Juliet and Anne Frank, and showing off her musical-theatre talents in A Little Night Music.

The smallest Alison, 11-year-old Hannah Levinson, arrived on the Toronto stage with a splash in the hit 2016-17 run of Matilda, in which she alternated playing the title role.

I met all of the Alisons backstage at the CAA Theatre to talk about this unusual performance challenge.

What is it like for you to play Alison knowing that there are two other actors playing the character?

Laura Condlln: Oh. It’s awesome (all laugh). The greatest gift for me is that I watch everything, as Alison investigates memories of herself in her college days and herself as a 9-10-year-old. So the gift for me as an actor is that I arrive every day and I watch these beautiful women do their brilliant work … and as they discover things, that informs what happens to me as the story unfolds.

Did your director (Robert McQueen) direct you to model your performances on each other?

Sara Farb: He never explicitly directed us in that way … (but) it sort of goes without saying that there shouldn’t be a disjointedness between the three representations of the same person. Watching Hannah and Laura, I do try and tailor my performance and mannerisms around what I’ve seen from them, but also recognizing that this is an Alison that exists in a very, very specific point in her life.

Hannah Levinson: I remember Sara and I were talking and I said, “Sometimes I forget that we’re the same person.” ... Robert was talking about how Laura knows both of us. Sara only knows me. I don’t know either of them. So it’s finding those similarities, like Sara was saying, but also those differences in seeing the passage of time.

The title refers to a funeral home that is the family business, but Alison’s father and mother also work as teachers to support the family, is that right?

Farb: This man is stretched so unbelievably thin, not to mention his third avocation, he calls it, which is house restoration. He’s constantly working on this house that they live in and making it museum-like.

Condlln: That’s what puts us in the Petri dish of the show …. why? Why would a man who had such potential, and such a brain, and such a heart … Why did he end up here in this tight, constrained environment doing this for the family, and then get stuck? That’s the big question Alison wants to … the knot she wants to unravel.

And the other part of the knot is his sexuality.

Condlln: There’s so much to this show but at the core of it, for me, is the two generations of gay people who fell on either side of iconic events like the Stonewall riots. So he goes one way and she goes the other.

Sara, can you tell us about the song ‘Changing my Major’?

Farb: ‘Changing my Major’ comes just after Alison’s first sexual encounter with a woman, and right on the heels of coming out to herself, and to the world, and to her parents. And it’s an explosion of terror and excitement and truth and everything just making sense all at once, and it’s this celebration right in the middle of the show.

Condlln: It’s so positive. It’s like heart-burstingly positive. And small Alison has one too, ‘Ring of Keys.’

Levinson: She is in a luncheonette, like a diner. She sees this butch woman with these cool features and it’s an explosion of happiness and joy … All her life, I think, she’s been stalked by a wolf saying no, no, no you can’t do that, you can’t dress like that. Now she sees this person that’s so open and confident and I think it makes her feel free.

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The musical has been celebrated for putting women’s experience, and lesbian experience, front and centre, and for its all-female writing team (Lisa Kron, whose book and lyrics are based on Bechdel’s memoir, and composer Jeanine Tesori). Is that important to you?

Condlln: We are certainly at a time where we must and are making space for all the voices and all the stories and all the storytellers. This is a crystal-clear example of what it means to be in our time and to offer this … It’s not everybody’s coming-out story, it’s not everybody’s family story. But it is so immediately human and accessible, I think. And it does put those things right in the centre in the most beautiful, positive way.

Laura, you’ve cut your hair short for the part. Is there a conscious attempt to make you and Sara look like each other, given that she had cropped hair already?

Condlln: Well. It’s a fierce political thing also, inside the show … there was a thing that happened on the national (American) tour where the costume and hair were modified a little bit … and there was a really big uprising from the gay community saying that they de-butched the character … Mitchell (Marcus, Musical Theatre Company’s artistic director) got in touch with me immediately when I took the part and said, ‘Are you willing?’ and I said ‘of course. It is essential.’

Hannah, I remember your amazing long head of hair in Matilda. Did you get this bob for this show?

Levinson: It felt really good. It definitely got me into the character. We were a few days into rehearsal. I remember I came back the next day, and I felt so much more powerful, and I sort of knew what the character was feeling … I know that it’s just hair. People say it can’t really change you, but I think it can.

What has the best part of this process been, so far?

Condlln: These two. Without a doubt … Everybody is so wonderful. Robert is extraordinarily generous and supportive.

Farb: The question makes me very emotional … you think you’ve seen the best out of a person and then, they surprise you so, so profoundly … I’m sad on my day off. I want to be at work.

Levinson: It’s true.

Condlln: It’s true.

Farb: I want to be surrounded by these people. They’re inspiring and they push me to do my best.