Lisa Kron

Lisa Kron is an American actress and playwright born on May 20, 1961, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is best known for writing the book and lyrics for the musical Fun Home, which earned her two Tony Awards in 2015: Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score Written for the Theatre. Fun Home also received the Tony Award for Best Musical that year and the 2014 Obie Award for writing for musical theater.

Kron grew up in a household shaped by distinct and contrasting histories. Her father, Walter Kron, was born in Germany in 1922 into a Jewish family. As Nazi persecution intensified, his parents sent him out of Germany in 1937 through the Kindertransport program. He later returned to Germany after World War II as a U.S. Army interrogator of Nazi war criminals. Kron's parents were eventually killed at Chelmno, though Kron initially believed they had died at Auschwitz, where she and her father traveled together in the 1990s. Her mother, Ann Kron, born in 1932, converted to Judaism upon marrying Walter and became a community activist who founded the Westside Neighborhood Organization in Lansing, Michigan, in the 1960s, working to bring together residents across racial and socioeconomic lines. Kron's family relocated to Lansing in 1965, and her parents enrolled her in a predominantly African American elementary school as part of a personal effort to support integration, three years before the city mandated it.

Kron developed an early interest in theater through Purim plays at her synagogue in Lansing and storytelling within her family. She graduated as valedictorian from Everett High School in 1979, having attended special theater classes at the Lansing School District's Academic Interest Center, where teacher Robert L. Burpee served as a mentor. She went on to major in theater at Kalamazoo College, where professor Lowry Marshall helped her secure a role with a national touring theater company. She continued her training at Chautauqua Professional Actors Studio and the British European Studies Group in London.

Her major works as a playwright include the autobiographical pieces 2.5 Minute Ride and Well, as well as the biographical musical Fun Home. 2.5 Minute Ride, directed by Mark Brokaw, interweaves her trip to Auschwitz with her father and her family's annual visits to an amusement park in Ohio, and won an Obie Award. Well, which explores her mother's social activism and chronic illness, was anthologized in Best Plays of 2003–2004, cited among the year's best plays by the New York Times, and received two Tony Award nominations. Kron starred in Well during its Broadway run in 2006.

Fun Home, which opened on Broadway in 2013, marked Kron's first musical and her first work adapted from another artist's material. The source was Alison Bechdel's graphic novel and memoir of the same name, which follows Bechdel's experience growing up in small-town Pennsylvania as the not-yet-out lesbian daughter of a closeted gay man. Kron wrote the book and lyrics, while composer Jeanine Tesori, who received a Tony nomination, wrote the score. Kron also appeared in Fun Home on Broadway. The first college production of Well was staged at Kalamazoo College in the winter of 2008, featuring students alongside local professional actress Sharon Williams, and Kron traveled to her alma mater for the production's run.