The actor, who billed herself as "part dude, part lady With songs! She was a dazzling mix of opposites: delicate and muscular, warmly engaging and spikily articulate, humble and wildly charismatic. Today Malone is taking audiences on another pilgrimage, this time on Broadway with actors portraying her preteen and young-adult selves -- or rather, those of Alison Bechdel, the real-life protagonist of Fun Home.
In the new musical alchemized by writer Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori from Bechdel's memoir-in-cartoons, Malone's character is our narrator and guide, excavating her past for clues to why her father killed himself. Together we witness the growing tension between the openness of her younger incarnations -- filled with wonder as they express and act on their desires -- and the stifled lives of her parents, from whom years of repression have exacted a devastating price. Malone's role is not as flashy as that of Bechdel's father Michael Cerveris, performing a dance of complexity and nuance or her young alter egos Sydney Lucas and Emily Skeggs, each remarkable , but she is Fun Home 's stealth weapon, bringing dry humor and deeply banked emotion to the Alison Bechdel who survives the cauldron of memory.
Malone's own past has given her considerable inspiration to draw from. She shared some of the raw material that made her what she is today. She was born a little bit country. When Malone was 12, she and her mother, a lounge singer who performed in bars and VFW halls all over Denver, went to a Barbara Mandrell concert. Young Beth snuck from their seats "in the nosebleeds" to a spot closer to the action -- and the singer picked her from the crowd. On the lips!!!
I was like, 'What?! I floated home. Her life felt like a movie. That's what coming out was like for me. I got on a train and then I had this bullet and it was my gayness," Malone says.
Out for a last hurrah before her planned marriage to a man, she met a woman named Rochelle "Shelly" Schoppert and fell -- hard.
