Lisa Kron - Biography

Biography

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 Walter Kron.

Her father is Walter Kron, a retired lawyer born in Germany in 1922. He is Jewish and 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 his parents were murdered by the Nazis in the 1940s. She later found out that her fathers parents were actually killed in Chelmno.

Her brother is David Kron, born in 1964. He is a sound engineer and is married with a son. He says of his sister: "She is very funny, with a very sharp wit...And she always had her own way of looking at things."

In her play Well Kron says that she felt like an outsider even in her own family because she, her parents and her brother David were the only Jews. Her maternal family is Christian and none of her Jewish paternal family survived the Holocaust. Her play 2.5 Minute Ride describes this contradiction as she recalls her mother asking her to come home for the holidays: “...she asks me every year, 'Are you going to make it home for Christmas this year?' And I say ‘ I don’t come home for Christmas Mom. I have never come home for Christmas. We are not Christians. Stop trying to trick me!"

Kron’s family moved to Lansing, Michigan in 1965. One of the main story lines in her play Well recounts her experiences attending a predominantly African American elementary school in that city. Kron’s parents sent her to the school in an effort to help integrate it. Lansing began mandatory racial integration in its schools three years later.

Kron became interested in theatre at an early age. She traces her acting roots to the Purim plays that she performed as a child at her synagogue in Lansing. In junior high she was determined to be the funniest girl that people knew. “Her avenue for that was telling humorous stories, something that everyone in her family did…”

She graduated from Everett High School (Michigan) as a valedictorian in 1979. In her senior year she attended special theater classes at Lansing School District's Academic Interest Center. An early mentor was her theater teacher at the Center, the late Robert L. Burpee.

She attended Kalamazoo College, where she majored in theatre. At Kalamazoo College theater professor Lowry Marshall mentored her and helped her land a role with a national touring theater company.

She furthered her studies at Chautauqua Professional Actors Studio and the British European Studies Group in London.