Clipping from The Lansing State Journal, September 24, 1971 [Enlarge in New Window]

Lisa Kron: Well

Lisa Kron has an uncanny ability to capture transformative moments onstage. As a performer, she can lead an audience effortlessly to an unexpected realization. As a woman grappling with her own history, she turns life's most emotionally wrenching moments into comedic triumphs. In recent years, the New York-based playwright and monologist has won awards from coast to coast, for both her solo pieces and her work with the influential comedy troupe Five Lesbian Brothers. She is currently developing her first multi-character play, Well, a masterful mix of family stories and political dialogue, viewed through the prism of a mysterious illness.

As with 2.5 Minute Ride, Kron's 1997 Obie- and Dramalogue Award-winning solo show, Well uses autobiography as a vehicle for examining a series of issues and questions. "That it's autobiographical is not the point," Kron notes. "It's just the material I know how to make things out of." Well weaves scenes from Kron's childhood in Lansing, Michigan, where her Jewish mother was a neighborhood activist for racial integration, with characters who challenge Kron's own political views. Interspersed throughout Well are stories of an unexplained illness that both Kron and her mother suffer from intermittently.

Kron jokes that Well is not as far a leap from her monologues as it may seem, describing the play as "a solo show with other people in it." While Kron is the central performer, Well's additional characters complicate and undermine her point of view, with entertaining and provocative results. "I'm on stage, so I'm controlling the story," she explains, "but there are other people who yank the story out of my hands at certain points." In one section Kron is forced into a debate with a member of the Christian right, a character Kron calls "The Angry White Male"; later, the death of an African American character, planted as an audience member, forces both Kron and her rival to confront their own ideas about race and culture.

Such moments of crisis are part of what makes Kron so captivating onstage. As a performer, she allows herself to be utterly vulnerable in front of an audience, without ever losing her sense of humor. Even better, she knows how to use that ability to take her work beyond the usual confines of theater. "I look out sometimes and see people in the audience" she says, "and I think 'I'm going to take you somewhere you didn't even expect.' " At a pivotal point in 2.5 Minute Ride, Kron appears to realize that she has conflated two events in the piece: a trip to an amusement park with her ailing father, and a trip to Auschwitz, where her grandparents were killed. For a moment it seems as if Kron the performer is breaking down. "I endeavor to really look at these experiences and really be lost," she explains. The result is that the audience not only shares the humor of her stories, but also viscerally experiences her confusion, loss, and wisdom.

Kron grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and came to New York to study acting in 1984. Soon after, she became a fixture in the city's burgeoning performance art and experimental theater scene, and co-founded Five Lesbian Brothers in 1989. Through the late '80s and early '90s, Kron was in front of audiences non-stop, developing routines through live improvisation and honing her comedic and storytelling skills to a fine point.

Though she now develops her work through writing rather than in performance, she never leaves the audience out of her process. "I don't know how to write a play that doesn't acknowledge we're all here in the theater together," Kron says. With that guiding philosophy, Kron takes audiences on a ride that is at once unforgettable, haunting, and hilarious.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Performance > Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | African American Themes | The Human Animal | Politics | Science & Technology | New York | 2000