Lisa Kron has been a playwright for roughly 30 years, and in 2015 she received two Tony Awards for the musical Fun Home. We were able to sit down with her to discuss a bit of her growing up in Lansing, the creative process of writing a musical and Fun Home. Fun Home is part of the Wharton Center's 2016-2017 line-up.
Jon Szerlag: With your musical, Our Home, showing in Lansing where you grew up, how does it feel? Have you had other plays shown here before?
Lisa Kron: This is my first musical. I am very excited for it to come here, an the community has been really supportive, a lot of people who I know in Lansing have come to New York to support me. All of my shows over the years. I really appreciate. My family cardiologist ... always followed my career. My friend from elementary school ... who works at the Lansing Public Library, she created my Wikipedia page and also put a Fun Home display in the window of the library.
My dad was involved in all of the (Lansing synagogues), and all of those communities have been really supportive and neighbors from the west side that I grew up with, I feel like I have continued to have relationships with all of those people and it has been very moving for me. People over the years have followed what I have been doing, and coming to NY to see the shows. That is a lot of traveling for a lot of people, so I am very excited for it to bring this show here.
I loved growing up here, and growing up on the west side, that was the work my parents did in that neighborhood and the city of Lansing was the backdrop for my childhood. I think all artists have a kind of an esthetic landscape, a touchstone place that is this sort of center of their artistic imagination, and mine was made here in Lansing.
Szerlag: With this being your first musical, can you tell me a bit about the process, was it different...
Kron: It took about 7 years to write, musicals take a long time. I worked on it with Jeanine Tesori Who is a veteran in music theater, music composer and an extraordinary artist and collaborator. Both of us brought different strengths to the project. There was something about the nature of the book that I felt I understood something about what the book was doing, and I had some sense of how that could be made into a drama, dramatized. And Jeanine brings a wealth of experience and mastery of the musical theater form. So, in terms of how to use music to tell this story. She brought that to the table, and then it was just a frankly, quite, well painstaking process of trial and error to figure out how to do it.
You don’t know from the beginning what you are making. It is complicated and you have to take it one step and a time and if you do not love the challenge of that process then you probably wont do it, it's not worth it. Its problem solving a day at a time. You go down blind alleys and realize that was wrong, and then back track and then try something else, try something else and try something else. But, when you make something that lifts off the ground, that connects and has that kind of emotional launch, it is very thrilling. And that is what you are looking for.
Its interesting, musical is about parents and children. And there are a couple scenes where father sin particular, and I have heard it many times, there is that opening and a scene that happens later that fathers are like, "Oh... oh... oh! that is me!" In a very intense way. Its great and gratifying when people find those connections.
Szerlag: You said you felt a connection with the book. When writing (the musical) did you see yourself (in the character)?
Kron: I would say no, but sort of in a way, I would say yes and no. The way that Alison talks, the adult Alison talks like me, more so than the way the real Alison talks. That is true, but I think more...I have written plays in which I have used autobiographical material about my family in it, in kind of this essayistic way to think about memory, to think about the difference in ways we remember things and the way they actually happened. To think about the difference between the story of something and the actual events. I could see in Alison's book those are things that she was also looking at. Part of the dynamic of the book was her exploiting the tension between those things. Lived events and the stories that are told about them.
I recognized that as a primary dynamic of what she had done. And then, because I had made theater out of things that explored in similar ways, similar explorations, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I felt that I could see what she was doing, and had experience and knew something about to dramatize, to make drama out of that. That was really the work of my own career up to my point.
I was uniquely positioned to make drama out of that part of it.
Szerlag: You won two awards, and then numerous other awards in the past. Writing is one thing, and then adding music, lyrics... were there any challenges with that?
Kron: Yes, that was totally one of the challenges. I think the thing it took me a long time to figure out, I was so lucky to work with Jeanine, she was a great collaborator. She is so patient. I felt that I had, probably had, I understood how words lie in music rhythmically. It seems ridiculous, but I had written a lot of parody lyrics. And I was in musical theater when I was younger. So, I felt like I would have some sort of affinity for doing it, but what I didn’t understand, was that lyrics are not dialogue. They operate very differently. It took me a long time to figure out, and I think I will be trying to figure it out for the rest of my life actually, that musicals are not naturalistic. And I think the downfall of a lot of musicals is when songs tell you exactly what they are. They are written as expositions, or as dialogue. Around the time we started Fun Home, I got elected to the Council of the Dramatist Guild, the organization that represents playwrights in the United States, and if there are any playwrights who are reading this, they should join the dramatist guild, One of the benefits of being on the Dramatist Guild, is you et to become a Tony (Award) voter.
So you get tickets to every Broadway show. It is a really nice perk of the job. That meant I got to see every new musical that was on Broadway, and in the beginning I thought "This is a musical, it might be bad, but it’s a musical and people will be singing and dancing." It will be interesting.
What I quickly realized is that musicals - the musical - is a much less forgiving form than a play. The singing and dancing actually, they can be flat so fast if it is not tied into the musical mechanism. And it can be quite rigorous. It can look quite unusual like Fun Home does, but every musical needs to be pulled along by this primal emotional connections. A singular pursuit of a primal, emotional connection.
And the way the songs open up out of that. Jeanine always says that it is this, "Tension and release. Tension and release." The tension of the scene has to build, and then the only way forward is to sing it. But even that being said, I am still marveling at how strange musicals are. They are all strange. The greatest musicals are all strange. They don’t feel strange, they feel so natural, they feel like breathing. But, music is strange. People sing as if they were a train in the music. Oklahoma... is strange.....the way those songs operate are not naturalistic. And the more non naturalistic they are, the more we get lifted and carried along by them.
That was really the biggest thing I had to start to learn. And I am going to be learning it for the rest of my life.
Szerlag: To be honest, I can't even fathom trying to write a musical
Kron: They are mysterious. They are very, very odd.
Szerlag: With Fun Home, do you have a favorite song.
Kron: That is pretty funny. Everyone one always has a different one (for their favorite), but I guess I am partial to Telephone Wires, and I also really like the opening. Jeanine and I probably wrote seven different openings for this show. It was a very hard one for that show. It took us a very long time to figure out what it was supposed to be. I mean, famously, the openings to musicals are very difficult for people to write. Usually they write many, many of them before they get the one, and we certainly did.
Those two rise to the top of my list.
Szerlag: Are their any reasons for those to make the top of your list?
Kron: Its funny, when I write dialogue, when I write plays I can't even have a memory of writing it. Sometimes, if I am in workshop, I will write and write and write and write, and then I go to rehearsal and the actors read them, and I'm like, God, I don’t even remember it even though I wrote it two hours ago.
But lyrics are so painstaking, I have a, I mean every lyric in Fun Home I have a visceral memory of exactly where I was when I wrote it. I remember being in the dining room of Jeanine's apartment working on Telephone Wire, which is not generally where we worked, and I think there was something about, you know we all get to songs in a slightly different way, but I remember very well, she and I moving forward in the construction fo that song and realizing what could happen. How these lyrics could be utilized and that song would progress. I would hand a lot of writing to Jeanine and she would write and write and write and she would sort of structure it into a song or skeleton that would become a song. And I remember seeing those pieces of writing start to take shape into a song.
There are little bits, we were always going back to Allyson's books, always going back to it to see what the story is in the book. But there is much in Fun Home that came from Jeanine's internal landscape and my internal landscape.
In Telephone Wire, I grew up in Lansing and my grandmother lived in Northville, and every weekend we would drive back and forth to Northville, and I have a very visceral memory of being a little kid and driving back late at night from Northville and looking at the telephone wires loop and loop into this physical sensation of the way they would dip and dip in a rhythmical pattern. That was definitely what I was picturing, thinking of her sitting in that car just staring out the window, that it was me as a little kid sitting there staring at those telephone wires that was in my mind when I was working on that. At one point I was like are there even telephone wires in Fun Home, and I had to go back to check and there were (Laughs).
Szerlag: What can people expect when they come and see Fun Home
Kron: The best show they have ever seen (Laugh). I think what they can expect is to be in really good hands. I think they will be, they don’t have to do anything but show up, and the show will lift them up into an emotional journey. It is probably going to be much funnier than they will expect it to be. It is quite funny. I think people's experience at this show, is that there is a delightful experience to it. It picks you up and carries you to a lot of places that are funny, quite moving and never quite where you expect but always a place you are interested in being engaged in that place. At the end, it will take you apart a little bit, but then it will put you back together.
We were just talking about this on the way over here, there is something you see in people walking out of the theater. There is a look in their eyes, that they have been someplace. They have been someplace that is still moving around inside of them in a way that has felt quite meaningful to them
Szerlag: Fun Home has received, well, frankly, rave reviews. Did you expect that?
Kron: You hope for that, but no. You never ever, ever, ever know. I remember when at the Public, there was this moment when one of our producers at the Public Theater was saying, this was early, early on, and Jeanine said stop it. We don’t know how it is going to be. There is just no way to ever know.
Conversely, it went, I have been making theater for 30 years, and you learn … when you start out you have this dream that there is this piece you are going to make. That you are going to get picked up and its going to be celebrated and all these good things are going to happen. Well, then at some point you realize that just doesn't happen. You can do pretty well and there are always going to be people that are not going to like it. But the experience with Fun Home... this is the dream.
I told myself this never happens. And then this. It did happen with Fun Home It was quite surprising. You know, the day after we opened at the Public Theater, Jeanine, the director (Sam Gold) and I went out and Sam was saying - and I think this is how people who work in theater a long time thing - "This is very rare what has happened with Fun Home." And you have to enjoy it because it is not going to happen again.
Szerlag: In one review/article I saw, Russian dignitaries came to see it...
Kron: Yes. Samantha Power from the U.N. brought 17 U.N. delegates to come down and see it. That was amazing. That was really great.
Szerlag: Well, thank you so much for taking the time and sitting down with me.
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