Lisa Kron had decades of theatre-making experience under her belt when she took on the challenge of adapting Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home. In 1989, she co-founded the groundbreaking theatre troupe The Five Lesbian Brothers, which performed at WOW Café Theatre in Manhattan’s East Village before finding success on the larger stages of The Public Theater and New York Theatre Workshop. The plays Kron and her four collaborators created were often off-the-wall, centering lesbian stories with tongue firmly in cheek. One such play was Brides of the Moon, a sci-fi spoof that saw four “foxy” female astronauts stranded on the dark side of Uranus only to be rescued by a housewife and her microwave oven. Its world premiere production at New York Theatre Workshop in 1997 was directed by none other than current Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith. (It was also reviewed, not particularly kindly, in the New York Times by Peter Marks.)
But it wasn’t just madcap camp that interested Kron. She was also adept at writing about family—mostly her own. Her play Well, which premiered at The Public Theater before transferring to Broadway in 2006, tells the story of her mother’s struggle with chronic illness. Prior to that, she wrote the solo show 2.5 Minute Ride which she describes as “a roller coaster ride through the Kron family album.” She weaves together two journeys she took with her elderly father—one to Auschwitz, where his parents died after he escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager; the other to the Cedar Point amusement park, where he insisted on riding extreme roller coasters despite his near-blindness, diabetes, and heart condition.
As an always-out actor and writer, she was also already skilled at writing about the lesbian experience. Though Kron often conveyed a lesbian experience by portraying herself in her autobiographical efforts, In The Wake (The Public, 2010) centered a fictional woman’s life as the turmoils in her personal life mirrored those of the early aughts—9/11, the invasion of Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina occur alongside the dissolution of her relationship, a lesbian affair, and a series of ardent but misguided activist efforts.
With such lush areas of professional focus, Kron seemed like the perfect choice to adapt Bechdel’s book about a young lesbian’s coming of age—or at least her friend thought so when she presented Kron with Fun Home and the suggestion she create a musical from Bechdel’s graphic memoir. The only problem was she had never written a musical before. And she couldn’t write music.
That’s where Jeanine Tesori came in. Tesori made her name as a composer with Broadway credits including Thoroughly Modern Millie, Violet, and Caroline, Or Change. She had a strong history of centering women’s stories and unheard voices in the projects she chose to take on. She told The Curran[t], “My heart is mostly with the invisible story. Those stories that aren’t usually told and that you have to work harder to get to reveal something about these people who are not on center stage.” Kron felt she was the perfect fit, so she approached Tesori with Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel about growing up as a young lesbian with a closeted gay father. Tesori took the book, mulled it over, and eventually came back to Kron saying she didn’t think she could picture it as a musical. “And that’s why I want to do it,” she finished.
Thus began the arduous five-year adaptation process. In an interview with The Public, Kron described the process as “nothing but problems.” Jeanine Tesori told The Interval, “We tried to write the traditional opening number for Fun Home for three years, and it didn’t work and it didn’t work and it didn’t work.” But then it did. After a myriad of readings and workshops, Fun Home opened Off Broadway at The Public in 2013—while Kron was simultaneously acting on a different stage at The Public in a productions of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. Fun Home transferred to Broadway two years later. It was a critical smash, garnering 12 Tony nominations and winning five. Kron and Tesori made history as the first all-female team to win for Best Score.
After the Broadway production closed in September 2016, the national tour kicked off just a month later, much to the delight of the writing duo. Tesori told Woman and Hollywood, “I love New York City. I live here, but New York City is but one part of America, and when a work goes out to meet other people I think it’s at its strongest, because it meets people where they are.” Though Kron and Tesori’s career trajectories have differed wildly, they overlap in a desire to illuminate the stories we don’t often get to hear. They share the distinction of creating the first musical to put a butch lesbian character in the lead role, allowing those across the country to come face to face with an experience they may have never seen before or an experience that they deeply share that they are seeing mirrored back at them for the first time. “That is the point of theatre,” Kron told The Curran[t]. “To make us visible to each other.”
—Jen Gushue