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The cast of the recent Off Broadway musical “Fun Home” will travel to South Carolina next week to perform scenes from the critically acclaimed show at the College of Charleston, which has been threatened with a state budget cut because the school encouraged freshmen to read Alison Bechdel’s memoir on which the musical is based.

The nine-member cast – which includes the Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris and the Tony nominee Judy Kuhn, as well as three child actors – will join the show’s creators, Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, and Ms. Bechdel at an off-campus theater on Monday night for two concert presentations and question-and-answer discussions, Ms. Kron said in a telephone interview. The event came about during conversations among theater professors at the college and Ms. Kron and others involved with “Fun Home.” Ms. Kron and Ms. Kuhn said in separate interviews that the “Fun Home” team wanted to show support for the college and Ms. Bechdel’s book.

Her memoir, which was published in 2006 to great praise, uses comic book-like panel illustrations to render Ms. Bechdel’s story about her childhood, her coming out as a lesbian, and her relationship with her father, who was a closeted gay man. The same characters and story lines are featured in the musical, which ran at the Public Theater this winter. A transfer of that production to Broadway is in the works for the 2014-15 theater season, though no official plans have been announced. This week the musical was named one of two finalists for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

The College of Charleston, a public university, provided copies of Ms. Bechdel’s memoir to incoming students for the 2013-14 academic year, as part of its annual College Reads! program that tries to encourage campus-wide discussion around a single book each year. The books are not required reading.

But one state representative, Garry Smith, told South Carolina newspapers this winter that he had received a complaint about “Fun Home” from a constituent whose daughter was a freshman at the college. Mr. Smith contacted the college to ask about other options for College Reads!, and said he was told there were none. Mr. Smith then proposed cutting $52,000 – roughly equivalent to the cost of the reading program, he said – from the college’s $20 million appropriation from the state. The budget cut is now moving through the legislature; South Carolina news media coverage indicates some sizable political support for the cut.

Representative Smith did not reply to phone messages left at his office and home seeking comment. In an interview with CNN this spring he said that the College of Charleston “has to be reasonable and sensible to the feelings and beliefs of their students.”

“That was totally ignored here – I was trying to hold the university accountable,” Mr. Smith, a Republican, said. “Their stance is ‘Even if you don’t want to read it, we’ll shove it down your throat.’ It’s not academic freedom – it’s academic totalitarianism.” Mr. Smith has also tweeted that the memoir could be considered “pornography.”

The “Fun Home” performance – as well as the travel and lodging costs for the cast and creators — are being financed largely by the college’s private foundation and a grant, with no state money being used, Todd McNerney, the chairman of the college’s department of theater and dance, said.

“We were interested in producing ‘Fun Home’ ourselves in a few years, and then the idea of the concert presentation came up, and the chance to see the professional cast for an Off Broadway hit is extraordinary,” Mr. McNerney said. “I have no idea about how it will affect the budget situation, one way or another – it’s just an exciting opportunity for our students.”

Ms. Kron said she hoped that the events on Monday would contribute “to a goal of a liberal arts education – to teach you how to sit with ideas that aren’t your own, that may make you uncomfortable, and then evaluate the ideas for yourself.” Ms. Kuhn, meanwhile, said she wanted to support academic freedom at the college as well as Ms. Bechdel.

“There’s great irony in what the state lawmakers are doing,” Ms. Kuhn said. “Alison wrote a book about what intolerance and small-mindedness does to people. So we want to stand up for the school and for people who believed that this book is worth reading.”