One of the most wonderful moments in Well, Lisa Kron's emotionally fulfilling metatheatrical triple play — about how to be physically healthy within yourself, how to be emotionally healthy with your mother, and how these intertwine — comes when you wonder if Broadway audiences, used to far blander fare, will get what the playwright and her gifted 31-year-old director, Leigh Silverman, are doing. I hope so. The play, which ran to acclaim at the Public Theater in spring 2004, has only grown more enamoring and affecting over time. Well should be prescribed to everyone.
Dressed in costume designer Miranda Hoffman's chic black pantsuit, Kron announces that the play is a "theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in an individual and a community." The brilliant Jayne Houdyshell plays Ann Kron, her mother, who is on stage with her; the audience is acknowledged, too. Ann is chronically ill — in a pitch-perfect flat Midwestern accent, she blames it on "the allergies" — and she's always been sickly, it seems, even during an amazing moment in Lisa's youth when her mother led the fight to racially integrate their Lansing, Mich., neighborhood. Lisa similarly suffered in college, but after a long-term visit to an allergy clinic, she got better. Yet how could that have happened when her mother stayed the same?
Ann Kron's plight isn't far-fetched. For years, the mother of a dear friend of mine was housebound due to allergies; I remember seeing the same clippings boxes pulled from drawers and shelves that Ann accesses on Tony Walton's well-designed (pardon the pun) set. The point here, however, isn't neuroscience. It's how Lisa Kron, working off personal memory and with gut-busting honesty, theatrically reimagines that hard-boiled crucible: the mother-daughter dynamic.
In the play that Kron has "written," she aids herself by presenting childhood flashbacks (in which she plays herself), scenes from her mother's grass-roots efforts, and still other scenes from the allergy clinic. Actors John Hoffman, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Daniel Breaker, and Christina Kirk play all the other roles, including the actors in the "play." Kirk is a hoot as Joy, an expressionless sad sack who was Lisa's woebegone roommate at the clinic. Ekulona epitomizes everyone's worst nightmare as a 9-year-old bully who tormented Lisa as a girl.
Except the bully isn't, as a frightened Lisa immediately notes, in her play. Indeed, there have been quite a few cracks in what the actor-playwright has tried to pass off as a fine-as-clockwork dramaturgical construct. Her mother's endless interruptions to fix inaccuracies in Lisa's flashbacks or to offer the audience drinks, for example, are already impeding the flow of the "exploration." The other actors' mounting fascination with Ann, in addition to telling Lisa they don't understand what she's doing, only adds insult to injury. All hell breaks loose: An upstage flat collapses, onstage lights are fooled with, and a set piece seems to be missing. Lisa, in a desperate moment, tries to haul it on stage and restore order.
But there is order — just not the order the actor-playwright has tried to impose on what she cannot understand. It is the order that comes from accepting how things are, not how they ought to be. What's so great about Well — aside from how the story of Lansing's racial integration is married with personal memoir — is its dramaturgical corollary: a clear belief that walls shouldn't exist between action and audience. And that is why I wonder whether Broadway theatregoers will understand what a gift Well is. There are a few moments when the play seems lost, unformed, even nebulous. But just because Lisa Kron is playing herself as a woman who may not know where her exploration will lead doesn't mean that Lisa Kron, the actor-playwright, doesn't know what she's doing. This is postmodern Pirandello, polished with sure-handed craftsmanship. Broadway should welcome such talent within its fold.
Presented by Elizabeth Ireland McCann, Scott Rudin, Boyett Ostar Productions, True Love Productions, Terry Allen Kramer, Roger Berlind, Carole Shorenstein Hays, John Dias, and Joey Parnes in association with Larry Hirschhorn, the Public Theater, and the American Conservatory Theatre
at the Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St., NYC.
Opened March 30 for an open run. Tue. and Wed., 7 p.m.; Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 239-6200 or www.telecharge.com.
Casting by Jay Binder, CSA, and Jack Bowdan, CSA.