Thursday, 5/29/97 Imagination alive in ‘2.5 minutes’ THEATER:
Introspective one-woman show comes to UCLA Freud Playhouse
By Kristi Nakamura Daily Bruin Contributor Pull the shoulder
straps down tight and be sure that your lap belt is fastened
because it’s going to be a fast-paced "2.5 Minute Ride." Inverting
and blurring the distinctions between humor and tragedy,
performance artist Lisa Kron takes her audience on a wild trip,
swerving through her family history. Kron combines stories as
varied and seemingly unrelated as her trip to Auschwitz with her
father, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor, her brother’s marriage
to the bride he met over the Internet, and the annual Kron family
trip to the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Ohio. These stories and
many more all serve to create the illusion of being strapped onto a
mental roller coaster. Kron will present the Los Angeles premiere
of her solo autobiographical work, "2.5 Minute Ride" at the UCLA
Freud Playhouse this Friday and Saturday. "I think one of the main
themes of the piece is how tragedy and humor are flip sides of the
same coin in life in general so the piece goes back and forth very
rapidly from one to the other," Kron says. "’2.5 Minute Ride’ is
actually describing a specific roller coaster that we go on at
Cedar Point, but it’s also this emotional ride – from this is
funny, now this is sad, now this is funny and sad, and this is sad
but it’s supposed to be funny, you know. It’s a wild ride that
way." Although the stories are all taken from Kron’s experiences,
she says that the show is only superficially about her own family.
"2.5 Minute Ride" is her attempt to use the details of her life to
illustrate something more universal. Kron wants the audience
members to relate and project their own family relationships onto
her stories. Family relationships are the nuts and bolts that hold
this roller coaster together. The stories of "2.5 Minute Ride" are
tied together by the struggles and the experience of relating to
our parents. "It’s about sort of anticipating the death of a parent
and particularly for me, anticipating the death of my father and
coming to grips with his history and the way that it’s affected me
and who I am because of it, what I will be when he is gone, the
sort of debt I feel toward him as a child," Kron says. Kron’s
mother and father influence not only the context of the story, but
also the way it is told. "The piece deals a lot with (my father’s)
very dry sense of humor and it has many examples of it," says Kron.
"My whole family is funny and both my parents are really great
storytellers." Both of Kron’s parents saw the premiere of "2.5
Minute Ride" at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. Since then,
the piece has been taken apart and completely reconfigured.
Currently, it is being billed as "a work in progress." "I had a
pretty good run (in La Jolla), but there were things I was
dissatisfied with about it so I decided I wanted to take the whole
thing apart and put it back together again," Kron says. "It was
sort of risky, but we wanted to make it better." Although the piece
is still being polished, Kron is confident that "2.5 Minute Ride"
is very close to being a finished piece. She says that although it
has progressed very far and the audience would not be able to tell
the difference, she is still not ready to have it reviewed. Aside
from "2.5 Minute Ride," Kron is a charter member of the 6-year-old
theater company, The Five Lesbian Brothers, whose play "The
Secretaries" won an Obie and Bessie Award and was produced in 1994
by the New York Theater Workshop. Kron is also a recently announced
recipient of the CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts for theater.
Despite all of her accomplishments and her 13 years of experience
as a solo performer, "2.5 Minute Ride" has proven to be a new and
challenging experience for Kron. "This is going to sound so stupid,
but I had this shocking experience when I was writing it in La
Jolla, like, all of a sudden I had given away too much, feeling
kind of exposed by it. I think I always sort of thought that by
making the decisions about which stories I would tell, I was really
controlling what I was communicating about myself," Kron confesses
in her endearing, confidential way. While Kron plans on taking a
much more extensive tour next year, for now "2.5 Minute Ride" can
only be seen on the two-stop "mini-tour" that includes UCLA.
Although the tour is short, Kron is eager to perform outside of New
York City again and test the reconfigured "2.5 Minute Ride." "I’ve
been doing solo autobiographical performance for many years now and
… this show does feel much more vulnerable," Kron admits. "This
show puts me in the position of having to say all these words that
have to do with the inevitability of my father’s death … I
certainly felt those feelings very deeply, that’s how I was able to
write them, but revisiting them on a nightly basis is a little bit
dizzying for me." THEATER: Lisa Kron’s "2.5 Minute Ride" premieres
on Friday and Saturday, May 30 and 31 at 8 p. m. at the UCLA Freud
Playhouse. Tickets are $22; $9 for UCLA students. For more
information call (310) 825-2101. Lisa Kron performs her one-woman
show "2.5 Minute Ride" on Friday and Saturday at the UCLA Freud
Playhouse.