FUN HOME Partners with StoryCorps to Preserve Audience's Experiences in Celebration of First Year on Broadway

Producers have announced that Fun Home, the groundbreaking, Tony Award-winning Best Musical, has launched a partnership with the national nonprofit oral history project StoryCorps, on the occasion of the show's one-year anniversary on Broadway. The collaboration, which serves StoryCorps' mission to honor the lives of everyday Americans by recording and preserving conversations between them, encourages Fun Home fans to use StoryCorps' free mobile app to record their stories about their own families and/or experiences seeing the show. All tagged stories will be streamable on-demand at StoryCorps.me/, in addition to being preserved in the StoryCorps archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

All stories submitted during the month of April will be entered to win an exclusive contest, and one grand prize winner will be randomly selected to receive two tickets to Fun Home, plus one night at a hotel in Times Square, as well as the chance to officially record their own story in the permanent StoryCorps recording booth in New York City. Official rules and regulations can be found here: www.funhomebroadway.com/StoryCorps.

Users can listen to stories recorded by members of the Fun Home cast and creative team, including Jeanine Tesori, Lisa Kron, Sam Gold, Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn, Beth Malone, and Sydney Lucas here: https://storycorps.me/user/fun-home/.

This collaboration between StoryCorps and Fun Home arose after StoryCorps' 2015 gala, hosted by Mo Rocca, which celebrated StoryCorps OutLoud, a multi-year initiative dedicated to recording and preserving the stories of LGBTQ people across America, and honored Fun Home and Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry.

The partnership will continue across the country once Fun Home begins its National Tour in Cleveland in October 2016.

Founded in 2003 by MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay, the nonprofit organization StoryCorps has given a quarter of a million Americans the chance to record interviews about their lives, pass wisdom from one generation to the next, and leave a legacy for the future. It is the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered.

Recording a StoryCorps interview couldn't be easier: You invite a loved one, or anyone else you chose, to one of the StoryCorps recording sites. There you're met by a trained facilitator who greets you and explains the interview process. You're then brought into a quiet recording room and seated across from your interview partner, each of you in front of a microphone. The facilitator hits "record," and you share a forty-minute conversation. At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview, and a digital file goes to the Library of Congress, where it will be preserved for generations to come. Someday your great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to meet your grandfather, your mother, your best friend, or whomever it is you chose to honor with a StoryCorps interview.

With the 2015 TED Prize awarded to Dave Isay, StoryCorps has also launched an app that puts the StoryCorps experience entirely in the hands of users and enables anyone, anywhere to record meaningful conversations with another person. Uploaded interviews are preserved at the Library of Congress and on the website StoryCorps.me.

StoryCorps shares edited excerpts of the stories we record through popular weekly NPR broadcasts, animated shorts, digital platforms, and best-selling books. These powerful stories illustrate our shared humanity and show how much more we share in common than divides us.

StoryCorps has launched a series of national recording initiatives including:

· OutLoud, which documents the powerful, varied experiences of LGBTQ people across America, with a focus on lives lived before Stonewall;

· The September 11th Initiative, helping families memorialize the stories of lives lost on September 11, 2001, in partnership with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center;

· The Griot Initiative, now the largest collection of African American voices ever gathered, in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture;

· The Historias Initiative, the largest collection of Latino stories ever gathered; and

· The Military Voices Initiative, honoring the stories of post-9/11 service members, veterans and their families.

StoryCorps also has a growing presence in classrooms, with programs that include StoryCorpsU (SCU), a yearlong curriculum for high schools that uses StoryCorps content and teaches the StoryCorps interviewing technique to help students discover the power of their own voice.

StoryCorps is working to grow into an enduring national institution that celebrates the dignity, power, and grace that can be heard in the stories we find all around us, and helps us recognize that every life and every story matter equally. In the coming years StoryCorps hopes to touch the lives of every American family.

Photo by Joan Marcus

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