Thanks to one woman’s long memory, Citadel Theatre—a small company based in Lake Forest—reached into the past and acquired the rights to Fat Lady. Citadel member Madelyn Sergel remembered the play because her mother was part of the original Lifeline Theatre cast in 1987. Citadel’s three-week engagement in March drew attention from McPherson’s old friends, including Jim Bagley, who manages McPherson’s estate.

A former Chicagoan, Bagley flew in from Southern California to see the show. Enthused by what he saw, he encouraged a transfer of the show to Chicago; Fat Lady recently reopened at Victory Gardens Greenhouse (2257 N Lincoln Ave, 773-871-3000), where it runs until June 29.

Like the more assured Marvin’s Room, the semiautobiographical Fat Lady straddles the comedy/drama line in its portrayal of a dysfunctional Midwestern family. Partly inspired by his brother’s fatal motorcycle accident, the play peers into the lives of the O’Neil family as they endure vexing relatives and bumbling neighbors in the hours after a funeral.

It’s quite fitting that Fat Lady has been mounted at Victory Gardens, since the theater sponsored the play’s first staged reading in 1984. “We’re all really happy that it’s being done here,“ says Sandy Shinner, the theater’s associate artistic director. “It’s the work of a young writer, but there’s so much great stuff in it,” she says.

When director Wayne Mell read the script a year ago, he says he was sucked in immediately. “I’d heard of Marvin’s Room, but at the time I read [Fat Lady], I had no idea this was the long-lost Scott McPherson play. I just knew that the satiric humor spoke to me,” Mell says. “Later, I told someone, ‘It’s like finding the lost Honeymooners episodes in the vault.’ ”

Fat Lady boasts a large cast, and six of the principal members carpool from as far away as Gurnee to perform in Lincoln Park. The show, Mell says, “has inspired a very deep passion in us all.”

That McPherson’s words should deeply inspire is no surprise to Shinner. The themes he communicates, she says, “they’re so important in terms of how to live your life.… No matter how dysfunctional the family, they love each other. I don’t think he could’ve written anything else.… You think, ‘What was his next play going to be?’ ” says Shinner, who has two of McPherson’s unfinished one-act plays in a drawer at her home.

Both Shinner and Mell say they’re not sure why Fat Lady has laid fallow all these years. “I feel very lucky that we found it,” says Mell. “He had very strong ideas about loving and life and what you give to people. Those words and those emotions are so powerful. That’s why these plays live on.”

Fat Lady sings through June 29.