For Lisa Kron, the Tony Award-winning co-creator of “Fun Home,’’ it all goes back to the beginning.

Kron and her troupe The Five Lesbian Brothers were an integral part of the cutting-edge theater scene at the now-legendary WOW Cafe Theatre, a feminist collective in New York’s East Village. “We weren’t begging the mainstream world to acknowledge us,’’ says Kron. “It was an extremely lucky thing for me to be surrounded by artists who took for granted that they had the authority to create their own imaginative construction of the world.’’

That same artistic authority informed “Fun Home,’’ winner of the 2015 Tony Award for best musical. Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori made history by becoming the first female writing team to win a Tony for musical score (Kron also won for best book). Adapted from Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir about a lesbian cartoonist coming to terms with her closeted gay father, “Fun Home’’ did not happen in a vacuum. Kron notes that LGBT artists “have slowly built, over decades and decades and decades, this cultural scaffolding that allows [‘Fun Home’], among other things, . . . a critical mass, and now these things are visible.’’

Boston’s The Theater Offensive, founded by Abe Rybeck in 1989 and still going strong, also helped haul and build that scaffolding. The Five Lesbian Brothers appeared regularly with TTO during the 1990s, performing original plays that satirized — and took ownership of — lesbian stereotypes. These included “Voyage to Lesbos,’’ “Brave Smiles,’’ “The Secretaries,’’ “Brides of the Moon,’’ and “Oedipus at Palm Springs,’’ a show the troupe developed with The Theater Offensive in 2005 before taking it on the road.

So it will be a family reunion when The Five Lesbian Brothers are honored with the Out on the Edge Award at The Theater Offensive’s signature fund-raiser Thursday. Kron will attend with three of her Brothers — Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, and Dominique Dibbell. This year’s benefit is called “ClimACTS! Underground’’ and takes place from 6-11 p.m. at Icon nightclub, 100 Warrenton St. (For tickets, go to www.thetheateroffensive.org.)

Rybeck remembers the thrill of seeing The Five Lesbian Brothers at WOW in the ’80s. “Lisa is the toast of Broadway, but she wasn’t handed a Broadway career,’’ he says. “The work was genuinely underground at WOW. It was a little space with zero budget and these creative women doing radical work that was ignored by the mainstream.’’

Rybeck says he can’t overstate the rousing impact of seeing The Five Lesbian Brothers in the 1980s when AIDS was decimating the LGBT community. “It was a genuine crisis, and they responded with unparalleled crazy humor that had us rolling on the floor laughing,’’ he says. “It empowered us to go back out and face this stuff.’’

Besides frequent appearances with The Five Lesbian Brothers, Kron brought two of her autobiographical solo shows to Boston. She reprised her Tony-nominated role in “Well,’’ about Kron and her mother, at the Huntington Theatre Company in 2007; at the American Repertory Theater in 1998, she performed “2.5 Minute Ride,’’ which recounted the trip she took to Auschwitz with her 74-year-old father, a Holocaust survivor.

“Fun Home,’’ too, offered an outside observer meditation on family history and memory. It was Kron who approached Tesori about turning Bechdel’s memoir into a musical.

“I knew “Caroline, or Change’’ very well. I didn’t know Jeanine but I just felt [“Caroline’’] had the right mix of accessibility and emotional and intellectual complexity,’’ says Kron.

Not that the road to Broadway was easy. Skeptics wondered if mainstream audiences would identify with an unabashed butch lesbian central character. Kron answered with a quick lesson in theater history.

“How many of us are Jewish salesmen? How many are founding fathers or puppets or green monsters? Shows are never about people exactly like us,’’ she says. “But they were asking that question even when we were selling out on Broadway. That’s what made winning the Tony so important. Without it, that narrative continues and we would not have gotten the national tour, which is so valuable to the life of the show.’’

Upending and subverting stereotypes in tiny theaters around the county gave Kron and The Five Lesbian Brothers the “assumption of authority to present our own sense of the world,’’ she says. It just happened to reach a wider audience with “Fun Home.’’

“Audiences would say, and they meant it in the most complimentary way, ‘This story is so much bigger than that of a lesbian.’ And I’d say to myself, ‘This story is exactly the size of a story about a lesbian,’?’’ Kron says. “The reason you’re saying this is that your idea of who is fully human, and the kinds of people visible to you, has just expanded.’’

Loren King can be reached at loren.king@comcast.net.