The show started to slide into the surreal when a fifth-grader jumped out from the wings to taunt the surprised playwright. In a play that was already deliberately self-reflexive, there was a reminder that even the writer's careful editing couldn't suppress the messy side of her own life. As Lisa Kron, the main character of her own play, explains to the audience at the beginning, this will be a theatrical "exploration" of themes of health and wellness, integration and cultural difference.
In Well, Lisa Kron departs from her usual one-woman format to stage a multi-cast set of vignettes portraying incidents from her childhood in a racially integrated neighborhood and her young-adulthood struggling with an undefinable illness that she recovered from but that her mother could not. Kron's character on stage thinks she has constructed a neat collection of moments and characters to portray, but her mother, ensconced in an armchair on the right half of the stage, frequently interferes with the process by correcting her generalizations, asking why she has chosen to omit revealing details or telling a more edifying story with no cast to enact it but her own compelling voice.
Well is a good choice for Theatre Hopkins, which operates in the small, black-box space of Swirnow, allowing the audience to fully enjoy the destruction of the fourth wall in a seemingly casual, off-the-cuff performance. Lisa Hodsoll, playing Lisa Kron, introduces the play with a monologue that blends seamlessly into the opening scene as the lights fade. This intimacy with the audience encourages interaction, so that when Lisa turns to the viewers and asks for backup on a point, several members actually called back.
Hodsoll opens the performance with a self-conscious demeanor that illustrates her character's fixation with explaining her own play as it progresses, as if afraid that even with her clear-cut tableaux, the audience will still miss the point she's trying to drive home about the triumph of integration and the ability to become well. Hodsoll's self-deprecating, nervous manner sets the tone for the chaos that is to come when Kron's own cast leaves her to talk to her mother, and when unplanned characters, such as the teasing fifth-grader, barge uninvited into the show. Another of these characters is the little black girl who keeps resurfacing from Kron's memory and intruding on her play, taunting her for being the only white girl in their school.
Kron wishes the little girl would just go away. At first, it seems she is just embarrassed by this memory of childhood humiliation. But later, it becomes clear that she is nervous that this incident will reflect badly on the theme she is trying to build about how her mother created a perfectly unified, multi-racial community during her childhood. But Lisa Kron's mother, who is also present on stage for most of the performance, cuts in to correct her daughter's portrayal as well, explaining that the process of "healing" their community was imperfect and rife with tensions, racial and otherwise.
At times, the amount of self-referencing can be head-spinning, especially with the added complication that in this performance, Lisa Kron does not portray herself, as she did when the play was originally conceived and performed in New York. Hodsoll holds the role together admirably, a feat considering the schizophrenic nature of the part.
The construct, especially the aspect of Kron's conflict with her mother over the nature of her storytelling, can be uncomfortable. Much of this is likely deliberate, but it is sometimes alienating to the audience, especially when the volume rises. At moments, the play trips over its own self-regard, pausing too long while the cast discusses where to pick up next or while Kron strides the stage bemoaning the derailment of her careful plan. Recalling a story of childhood mortification, Kron declares that she thought to herself as a child, "Adulthood must surely be better than this." But during the play, it doesn't appear that Kron has quite reached adulthood yet, despite years of therapy and creative exploration.
At these times, it's Ann Kron who grounds the play again. Played convincingly by an unprepossessing Gail Anderson, Ann Kron gathers the audience's attention once more with a plain, quiet story of neighborhood struggle that puts Lisa Kron's utopic vision of their neighborhood association into perspective and adds a sense of humanity that Lisa's fantasized history had left out. Ann Kron also pulls down her daughter's high-soaring political fancies into a bed of no-frills common sense. When Lisa struggles to cover up the racially charged aspects of her childhood friendships, her mother reminds her that being different will inevitably come with tension and awkwardness and that Lisa herself sought that difference and made herself an outsider. At another time, when Ann is distributing news clippings to the distracted cast, she describes an article she read about the presence of formaldehyde residue on retail goods. One cast member chimes in that she had always thought her dizziness and nausea in malls was a visceral reaction to the rampant consumerism of her culture, but Ann tells her that she's simply allergic to the material used to preserve fabrics during shipping.
It is this continual, gentle remonstrance that punctures the play's condescension and makes it a much more ambiguous statement. Even when the entire construct of the play falls away by the end, Ann Kron's words hang in the air despite Lisa's struggle to repaint her life. In this way, the closing monologue, Ann's words read by a reluctant and disappointed Lisa, has a lingering power that rounds off this rambling, surprising work of avant-garde theater.
Well runs through March 1 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.
