Lisa Kron | |
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Born |
Ann Arbor, Michigan |
May 20, 1961
Elizabeth S. "Lisa" Kron (born May 20, 1961) is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for writing the Lyrics and Book to the musical Fun Home for which she won both the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Fun Home was also awarded the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015.
Kron was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She jokes in one of her plays that her life began on her parents’ trip to Europe: “I was conceived in Venice, you know. (Well, not actually in Venice, but in the nearby town of Mestra where hotels are a lot cheaper.)”
Her mother is Ann Kron, born in 1932. Ann is a former antiques dealer and community activist. In the 1960s she founded the Westside Neighborhood Organization in Lansing, Michigan. In a time when neighborhood segregation was the norm, the WNO helped to bring people from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds together. Ann converted to Judaism when she married Lisa’s father.
Her father is Walter Kron, a retired lawyer born in Germany in 1922. He was born to a Jewish family, and is a Holocaust survivor. In 1937 as the Nazi persecution of the Jews escalated, his parents sent him out of Germany via the Kindertransport program. He went back to Germany after World War II, serving as a US army interrogator of Nazi war criminals. In the 1990s Kron and her father visited Auschwitz, where he believed his parents were murdered by the Nazis in the 1940s. She later found out that her father's parents were actually killed in Chelmno.