Lisa Kron facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Lisa Kron
Kron hosting the Sixth Annual Lilly Awards in 2015
Born	(1961-05-20) May 20, 1961 (age 64) Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
Occupation	Actress, playwright
Spouse(s)	Madeleine George

Lisa Kron (born May 20, 1961) is an American actress and playwright. She is famous for writing the words and story for the musical Fun Home. For this work, she won two big awards: the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Fun Home also won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015 and the 2014 Obie Award for writing musicals.

Early Life and Growing Up

Kron was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She sometimes jokes that her life began when her parents traveled to Europe.

Her mother, Ann Kron, born in 1932, used to sell old items and was a community leader. In the 1960s, she started a group called the Westside Neighborhood Organization in Lansing, Michigan. This group helped bring people from different backgrounds together when neighborhoods were often separated. Ann became Jewish when she married Lisa's father.

Her father, Walter Kron, born in Germany in 1922, was a lawyer who is now retired. He was born into a Jewish family and survived the Holocaust. In 1937, when the Nazi persecution of Jewish people got worse, his parents sent him out of Germany through a program called Kindertransport. After World War II, he went back to Germany and worked for the US army, questioning Nazi war criminals. Years later, Kron and her father visited Auschwitz, a place where many people were killed during the Holocaust.

Lisa Kron has a brother named David Kron, born in 1963. He works as a sound engineer and has a son. He says his sister is "very funny" and "always had her own way of looking at things."

In her play Well, Kron talks about feeling like an outsider in her own family. She, her parents, and her brother David were the only Jewish people in their close family. Her mother's family was Christian, and none of her father's Jewish family survived the Holocaust. She remembers her mother asking her to come home for Christmas, and Lisa would remind her, "We are not Christians."

Kron's family moved to Lansing, Michigan, in 1965. In her play Well, she shares her experiences going to an elementary school there that had mostly African American students. Kron's parents sent her to this school to help mix students from different backgrounds. Lansing started making schools mix students three years later.

Kron became interested in theater when she was young. She says her acting started with plays she performed as a child at her synagogue in Lansing. In junior high, she wanted to be the funniest person everyone knew. She did this by telling funny stories, which was something her whole family enjoyed.

She finished Everett High School as the top student in 1979. In her last year, she took special theater classes. Her theater teacher, Robert L. Burpee, was an early mentor.

She went to Kalamazoo College and studied theater. Her theater professor, Lowry Marshall, helped her get a role with a national touring theater company. She also studied at Chautauqua Professional Actors Studio and in London.

Important Plays and Musicals

Kron's most important works are 2.5 Minute Ride, Well, and Fun Home. The first two are plays about her own life that critics loved. The third is a musical about someone else's life that also got great reviews.

2.5 Minute Ride

This play combines a trip she took with her father, Walter, to Auschwitz (where his parents died during the Holocaust) with her family's yearly trip to an amusement park in Ohio. Kron says that the play mixes humor and serious moments, so you might not always know if you're hearing about Auschwitz or the amusement park. She wants the audience to decide how to feel.

The play shares her father's amazing experiences. Kron also thinks about a poem she saw at Auschwitz, repeating the sad words, "People burn people here." One powerful part of the play is when her father talks about his parents' deaths: "...I don't think I accepted it until a few years ago, in Lansing. It was the winter and it was so cold and I was shivering…And I realized this would only happen to them once. They were old and they stood outside, lined up in the cold and they were of no use to anyone and they were killed..."

Well

Well looks at her mother Ann's experiences with helping the community and dealing with illness. The play uses physical sickness to represent problems in society, like racism. Kron describes Well as "a play that explores health and illness in both a person and a community." Kron says about her mother: "My mother is a fantastically energetic person trapped in an utterly exhausted body…when she has a burst of energy it's awe inspiring. For instance, when we were very young she decided she wanted my brother and me to be raised in a racially integrated neighborhood, and then she set about to create one."

Fun Home

Fun Home (2013) was Kron's first musical and her first work based on someone else's story. It comes from Alison Bechdel's famous graphic novel/memoir called Fun Home. Kron wrote the story and the song lyrics, and Tony-nominated composer Jeanine Tesori wrote the music. The musical is about cartoonist Alison Bechdel growing up in a small town and understanding her family's secrets and her own identity. All of Kron's earlier works were based on her own life. She talked about changing someone else's work into a play in an interview: "The thing about adaptation is you have to re-originate a thing. You can't just say, 'This is a musicalized version of this graphic novel.' It has to have its own originating impulse, so that you feel like the experience you are having is the primary experience. And at the same time, you don't feel like you're watching a different thing, that whatever the effect of the book was, you'll feel like it's represented."

All three of these works have been very popular. 2.5 Minute Ride won an Obie award. Well was named one of the best plays of 2003–2004 and got two Tony Award nominations. Critics have praised Kron's writing, calling her a "vibrant family memoirist."

The first college performance of Well happened in 2008 at Kalamazoo College, where Kron went to school. Kron visited Kalamazoo for a week, and there were special events including performances of her plays.

Kron's play In the Wake first opened in Los Angeles in 2010. It's about a family gathering right after the 2000 presidential election. The main character, Ellen, deals with political problems and changes in her own life.

Career in Theatre

Kron's plays are often funny and touching. They look at life from the point of view of someone who has often felt like an outsider. Her experiences as a Jewish woman in a mostly Christian city or as a lesbian working in theater give her lots of ideas for her plays. Her thoughts are smart but not mean. Critic Ben Brantley says that her humor is "a crucial part of her navigational equipment in finding her way through life's absurd course of non sequiturs."

She describes how she creates her plays in a funny way: "I wish I had more of a technique for constructing these things. I keep banging my head against the wall until it pops through on the other side…"

She moved to New York City in 1984. She worked different jobs while trying to become an actress. Some of her early adventures in New York are in her play 101 Humiliating Stories. Soon, she was performing at the WOW Café, a place for women in performing arts in the East Village, Manhattan.

In 1989, Kron and four other women started a theater company called The Five Lesbian Brothers. The group writes and performs clever, funny plays from a feminist point of view. Their plays have been shown in many famous theaters and they have toured all over the United States. The Brothers have won awards, including the Obie Award.

Kron also acted in Paul Rudnick's 1998 play The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told. She played many different characters, including a memorable wheelchair-bound rabbi.

Kron turned stories about her family into plays about her own life and performed them in New York and London. Her work was very well-received by critics. Her play Well opened on Broadway in 2006 and got great reviews. It was nominated for two Tony Awards. Even though it got good reviews, Well didn't have many audience members and closed in May 2006. It has been performed in other cities since then.

While Kron's musical Fun Home was first being performed, Kron was also acting in another play called Good Person of Szechwan at the same theater. It was unusual for her to be finishing one play as a writer while rehearsing to act in another.

In 2017, Kron received the 27th Annual Kleban Prize for being a very promising musical theater writer. This award included a $100,000 prize.

Personal Life

Kron has lived in New York City since 1984 and works as a full-time actress. She also teaches playwriting part-time at Yale University and New York University. She is married to fellow playwright Madeleine George.

Acting Credits

Selected Theatre Performances

Television and Film Performances

• Cater-Waiter 1996
• Law & Order: "Atonement" 1996 CSU Warren
• Law & Order: "Trophy" 1996 CSU Warren
• Law & Order: "Disciple" 1999 CSU Technician Andrews
• Strong Medicine: "Family History" 2002 Nooch
• Stay 2005 Paramedic #2
• Deception 2008 Receptionist
• Sex and the City 2008 Junior's Waitress

Selected Publications

Plays

• The Five Lesbian Brothers' Guide to Life by the Five Lesbian Brothers, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ISBN: 978-0-684-81384-4
• Oedipus at Palm Springs – a "Five Lesbian Brothers play" with Maureen Angelos, Dominique Dibbell and Peg Healey (2010). Samuel French. ISBN: 978-0-573-69702-9
• 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories, New York : Theatre Communications Group, 2001. ISBN: 978-1-55936-181-1
• Voyage to Lesbos in Five Lesbian Brothers Four Plays, New York : Theatre Communications Group, 2000. ISBN: 1-55936-166-2
• Well, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2006. ISBN: 978-1-55936-253-5

Anthologies

• Brave Smiles by the Five Lesbian Brothers, The Actor's Book of Gay and Lesbian Plays, Eric Lane and Nina Shengold, eds. New York: Penguin, 1995 ISBN: 978-0-14-024552-3
• Cast Out: Queer Lives In Theater Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press 2006 ISBN: 978-0-472-09933-7
• Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century New York: Theatre Communications Group 2000 ISBN: 1-55936-155-7
• Out Of Character: Rants, Raves, And Monologues From Today's Top Performance Artists New York : Bantam Books 1997 ISBN: 0-553-37485-0, ISBN: 978-0-553-37485-8
• 2.5 Minute Ride in Talk to Me: Monologue Plays New York : Vintage Books 2004 ISBN: 978-1-4000-7615-4
• Voyage to Lesbos in Five Lesbian Brothers Four Plays New York : Theatre Communications Group, 2000 ISBN: 1-55936-166-2
• Well in The Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2003-2004 New York : Limelight Editions, c2005. ISBN: 978-0-87910-315-6

Articles

"Lithe I'm Not. And Trained I'm Not. But I Danced." The New York Times, December 12, 1999.

Audiobooks

2.5 Minute Ride [ABRIDGED] (Audio CD) New Millennium Audio; Abridged edition 2001 ISBN: 978-1-931056-25-0

Awards and Fellowships

For 2.5 Minute Ride

• Los Angeles Dramalogue Award
• Obie Award
• 2000 GLAAD Media Award

For Well

• Listed among the year's best plays by the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Newark Star Ledger, Backstage and the Advocate
• Part of the 2004 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab

For Fun Home

• 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Fun Home
• 2014 Obie Award for Fun Home
• 2015 Tony Award for Best Original Score (shared with Jeanine Tesori, making them the first female writing team to win that award)
• 2015 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical

Other Awards

• 1993 New York Dance and Performance Award Bessie Awards with The Five Lesbian Brothers
• 1994 Robert Chesley Gay and Lesbian Playwriting Award
• 1994 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in playwriting
• 1995 Obie Award for The Secretaries with The Five Lesbian Brothers
• 1997 Cal Arts/Alpert Award
• 2000 Creative Capital Foundation Grant
• 2000 NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights
• 2000 NEA/TCG playwriting fellowship
• 2003 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, Kalamazoo College
• 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts grant
• 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2007 The Lucille Lortel Foundation Playwrighting Fellowship
• 2008 Chosen to participate in the 2008 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab
• 2008 Lark Play Development Center Fellowship
• 2011 Lilly Award for In the Wake
• 2017 Edward Kleban Prize for most promising musical theatre librettist

Awards Nominated For

For 101 Humiliating Stories

• Drama Desk nomination in solo performance

For 2.5 Minute Ride

• Outer Critics Circle Award
• L.A. Drama-Logue Award
• Drama Desk nomination in solo performance
• Outer Critics Circle nomination in solo performance
• 1999 New York Press Award for Best Autobiographical Solo Show

For Well

• Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play
• Tony Award for Best Best Featured Actress in a Play
• 2004 Drama League Nomination
• 2004 Outer Critics Circle Best Play nomination

Other Nominations

• 1994 Nomination for Drama Desk Award in Solo Performance

Quotes

"Bizarre Murder!! Lesbian Forces Blind Holocaust Victim on Roller Coaster!" - 2.5 Minute Ride And 101 Humiliating Stories

"…Judaism, you know, is viewed in the Midwest as kind of an accessory that you wear on top of your Christianity." - Well

"I come from a family with a deep distrust of the body. I believe my family would have their bodies surgically removed from their heads if they could figure out a way to still get to the mall." - "Lithe I'm Not. And Trained I'm Not. But I Danced."

Images for kids

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  Kron hosting the Sixth Annual Lilly Awards in 2015