Lisa Kron Comes Back To The Theater Offensive, This Time To Party

In 2013 Lisa Kron, the Tony-winning book writer of the current Broadway hit "Fun Home," was being interviewed by a young LGBT journalist. At that time Kron was doing double-duty - working on that musical's Broadway opening and appearing in the Public Theater production of Bertolt Brecht's "Good Person of Szechwan," and, she recalls recently, the journalist asked her what was it like to act in a play "in a way that suggested I had never been on the stage before."

The question caught her off-guard. "I was really taken aback by it. I had taken years to establish the idea that I was a writer as well as performer, but it was as if he didn't know I was ever a performer."

What's ironic is that back in 1990s Kron never imagined she'd be a writer. At that time she was a member of the New York-based performance troupe The Five Lesbian Brothers, whose satiric comedies deftly challenged lesbian stereotypes. They grew out of the fertile feminist culture nurtured at the WOW Caf�, the women's theater collective in NYC's East Village that was founded in 1980, which also nurtured such talents as Peggy Shaw, Holly Hughes and the performance group Split Britches.

A remarkable achievement

For more than a decade, Kron and her fellow Lesbian Brothers wrote and performed plays at WOW and in LGBT theaters throughout the country, which included the Theater Offensive where they made frequent visits, even developing one of their plays there. They came to Boston at the invitation of Theater Offensive's founder and artistic director Abe Rybeck. "I think Abe initiated the contact, but we must have started bringing our shows there 20 years ago," Kron recalls. "We toured there; we developed a show there; we did residency time there. And when I was in Boston doing my show 'Well' at the Huntington, I was around for one of the Theater Offensive galas, so I am acquainted with the excellent parties that Theater Offensive can throw."

This week Kron will be at the center of such an event when she and her Five Lesbian Brother colleagues are honored with the Out on the EDGE Award at climACTS, the Theater Offensive's annual fund raising gala that takes place on Thursday, April 28 at Icon Nightclub from 6 until 11 pm. At the event there will be a performance by Cuban-American performance artist Octavio Campos and an ensemble of sexy dancers and performers. Also, there will be a Live Auction with emcee David Brown and music supplied by DJ Brent Covington, DJ for FUZZ at the Alley Bar and Boyfriends. Funds raised will support The Theater Offensive's LGBT arts programming.

In addition to appreciating Rybeck's party-throwing skills, she's quick to acknowledge the accomplishments the Theater Offensive has achieved since their humble beginnings some 27 years ago. "It is so interesting, there are very few theater companies like the Theater Offensive now," Kron recalls. "Back in the '80s and '90s there was a big circuit of queer performance arts venues across the country, but very few of those places are still around. Just a handful of them.

"It's really remarkable how Abe and his cohorts at Theater Offensive have been able to maintain, not just to say alive, but to maintain a kind of cutting-edge excitement. It shows bravery and an unquenchable spirit of adventure that they have in play there. It's very, very unusual. It is difficult to keep alive the kind-of intuitive adventurous that people start out with. I don't what the magic potion is that has allowed Abe and the to maintain that, but it is very unusual."

Learning to be a lesbian

Where Kron found her magic potion was at the WOW Caf�, a creative environment where she told the New York Times she "learned to be a lesbian."

"I have been thinking about my experiences at the WOW Caf� a lot lately, both in terms of what happened with 'Fun Home' and the publication of the book edited by Holly Hughes 'Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Caf�' about the first 10 years of the WOW Caf�. It was there that the Five Lesbian Brothers met and came together."

It was at WOW that Kron realized that art outside the mainstream wasn't just possible, but preferable. "An alternative paradigm" she says that didn't ask for permission from the mainstream for acceptance, but rather allowed them "complete autonomy and authority to describe the world from the place where they stand." Kron learned she shouldn't doubt herself or beg for permission from the dominant society to create her art. "When I said 'learn to be a lesbian,' what I learned is that I found the place where I had the authority to make art. That's what the people at WOW were doing."

Yet she saw herself primarily as a performer back then. "I just didn't think of myself of having any capacity to write. There was nothing that particularly interested me. The first time I wrote things was with the Brothers and I was not the only one that did -- everybody wrote, everybody contributed to that work. Like many performers who became writers, I was trying to create material that I could perform. The moment I think I crossed over from being someone who was making work to perform to being a 'writer' was the moment that I realized that this very unpleasant feeling of writing was not something that was ever going away. That is how it felt to write. Discomfort is a part of writing - it's how it feels."

Finding her voice

What Kron wrote about was her own life and her family. Two of her most lauded works concern her parents: "2.5 Mile Ride" follows Kron and her dad (who died this past year) that juxtaposed a trip she took with her father to Auschwitz where his parents were killed with her family's annual trip to an Ohio amusement park. The other is "Well" which concerns her mother, a social activist described as "a fantastically energetic person trapped in an exhausted body" whose considerable accomplishments achieving social justice in the Michigan city where Kron grew up are mitigated by her health issues.

"Well" came to Broadway after its off-Broadway run, bringing Kron a pair of Tony nominations for the play and her performance (she played herself); but it was with "Fun Home," the musical she wrote with composer Jeanine Tesori from Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, for which she took home the award. And, she did so with a memorable acceptance speech. In it she describes Broadway a house with many rooms, most of which are left empty and unexplored. But with that season it was if all the rooms of the house were explored in a great creative burst.

"Wouldn't it be so great if after this season we didn't all just go back into the living room?" She asked. "This has been the most successful season in Broadway history because all of us have been going into all of these amazing rooms in our house where we live together that we haven't been in before. You guys, are house is so big. Please let's not just go back into the living room."

"When I talked about the different rooms I was talking bout the work all the women I worked with at the WOW Cafe and all the queer performance artists who are working far from Broadway right now, and theaters all across the country who are creating all kinds of adventurous work. They have help create a frame of reference that allows audience to enter into the story of 'Fun House' in a very direct way."

A stroke of luck