LISA KRON
Perhaps there’s no better way to say it: Lisa Kron is blowing up. She’s best known for “Fun Home,” her first musical, based on Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic novel. (Last year, she won both the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical.) But success is not new to Kron. She’s been involved with the theater, both as an actor and playwright, since the 1980s, receiving critical acclaim along the way. As a theater student in college, she grappled with self-doubt. Faced with blatant sexism and typecasting in those productions, she tried to cope with the repercussions on her future career. “Theater had exploded into my consciousness as the most compelling, powerful thing I could imagine,” she says. “But it was becoming clear to me that this power to affect, to transform, was in someone else’s hands…” Luckily, her mindset changed one night in 1985, when she saw a performance of Split Britches. “I understand now that my life pivoted on that night… The Split Britches Company taught me the most important lesson I ever learned about theater: It is ours. We who make theater may be shut out of institutions, but we work in an art form that gives us total unfettered imaginative power to recreate the world on our own terms.” –SLO
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