Lisa Kron1997

A writer and enactor of solo performance pieces as well as a founding member of the collaborative theater company, The Five Lesbian Brothers, Kron characterizes her own work as "straightforward, reportorial and intimate." Grappling with the social, cultural and gender politics of autobiography, Kron makes pieces which are observant, focused on the quotidian and very, very funny. Her performance style engages the "authentic" and the theatrical; conversations with the audience are real and constructed. Interested in opposites, in the way humor resides in sadness and vice versa, she peers at the places where homo sapiens stumble, where they are derailed by 'awkwardness, grandiosity, pretentiousness, vanity...'

"I am an out lesbian performer yet my shows are never about being gay. They are about feeling like an outsider -- a Jew, a midwesterner living in New York, a person who is always dressed inappropriately. My father once told me that he wanted my brother and me to be raised as Jews because he wanted us to be different. My parents believed there was value in being an outsider; you would become more of a human being, capable of truer empathy if you were not raised in the myopic world of the majority. I suppose that's what I try to do in my shows: guide my audience into sharing that outside perspective."