'Well': A Witty Prescription For a Healthy Family

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 25, 2007; C01

You want to know how good a daughter Lisa Kron is? She writes a show about her and her mother and allows her mother to steal it.

"To allow," however, is a highly suspect verb in the lexicon of "Well," Kron's playfully experimental and highly enjoyable dissection of the values -- and other assorted burdens -- our parents bequeath to us.

The primary pleasure of "Well," which is receiving its regional premiere in Arena Stage's larger Fichandler space, is in the funny-generous portrayal of Ann Kron, a woman of both immense humanitarian energy and peculiarly inscrutable illnesses. In the reclining countenance of Nancy Robinette -- for Ann spends much of "Well" onstage in a La-Z-Boy -- the character's quirky unsinkability is polished to an extraordinary finish.

Robinette's technique is so expertly pared down that the illusion the playwright seeks to create -- that she really has invited her mother onto the stage as a kind of specimen for us to put under the microscope -- takes fully credible form.

Which is absolutely essential to the success of this hall-of-mirrors play, in which the audience is constantly forced to shift perspective, from reenactments of scenes from the playwright's own life, to the interruptions by Robinette's Ann and the other characters, who raise an ever-louder chorus of objections to how Lisa is conducting the evening.

Yes, this sounds like quite the meta-theatrical tease, one that is more easily digested by those familiar with the ironic persuasions of postmodernist drama. It's also helpful to know that Lisa Kron, played here with engaging tartness by Emily Ackerman, is well known in theater circles as a monologuist. (The Tony-nominated playwright portrayed herself in the original off-Broadway and Broadway productions of this work -- and not, it must be noted, as nimbly as Ackerman does.)

Yet it sells both audience and director Kyle Donnelly's witty production short to suggest prerequisites must be fulfilled to appreciate "Well," because at its heart is the wholly accessible notion that in our most profound relationships, there is always more than one side to the story.

"Well" is not perfectly suited to the Fichandler and not necessarily because of the in-the-round configuration, but because the tensions and insecurities it dramatizes are best absorbed up close. (From some parts of the theater, Ann's idiosyncratic living room, designed by Thomas Lynch and tucked into an entryway, looks more like a distant cave.) Donnelly and her fine cast -- a host of supporting roles are divvied up among the versatile Donnetta Lavinia Grays, Susan Lynskey, Scott Drummond and Marc Damon Johnson -- do manage most of the time to populate the space fully with keenly attuned comic performances.

The teasing conceit of "Well" begins almost immediately, as Ackerman's Lisa, clutching a stack of index cards, presents the supposedly academic premise of the piece: "a multi-character theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in the individual and in a community." Her ostensible topic is the mysterious tendency that the Kron family has of contracting maladies that no doctor can diagnose. It's a trait Ann passed on to Lisa, whose time as a patient in a Chicago hospital for allergy sufferers is dramatized in scenes sprinkled throughout the play.

The other intermittent thread concerns the idealistic period in Ann's life when she decided to lead, by example, the integration of a black neighborhood of Lansing, Mich.

In the mind of the character Lisa Kron, this community needs to heal in the same way that the Krons do. But this cerebral thesis only becomes a running joke on Lisa, because she is the last person to realize that this is not what "Well" is about at all.

The real subject is acceptance: a daughter's coming to terms with how she is, and is not, like her mother. The more Lisa insists on adding the distance that comes with over-intellectualizing, the more the other characters -- and the actors playing them -- rebel.

"Will you come out from behind the play and talk to me?" Ann finally asks in exasperation, as her daughter resists giving up on the show as a wedge, as a means of establishing her own artistic and intellectual superiority.

Playwright Lisa has so much fun turning the tables on character Lisa -- a girl bully from Lisa's integrated neighborhood (portrayed terrifically by Grays) keeps popping up against Lisa's will, for instance -- that the play's cleverness can at times obscure what she's getting at. It is only in the final movement, when Lisa does come out from behind the play, that the emotional pitch of "Well" transcends the theater games.

More vitally, the writer has created in Ann Kron such an affectionately whole human being that this conveys a completeness in the play's emotional universe.

From her La-Z-Boy, Robinette's Ann drives Ackerman's Lisa up the wall all evening, doing all those smothering mother-things that make us all a little crazy, from offering strangers too many snacks from the kitchen to pointing out a bit too helpfully when we're not being totally candid with the world.

Don't we all worry about a parent upstaging us? With Robinette's aid, Kron has given her mother one of the most thoughtful gifts a dramatist can come up with: She's made her irresistible.

Make no mistake: Lisa Kron's "Well" is not about her relationship with her mother. It is a "theatrical exploration of a universal experience," her stage representation (Emily Ackerman) repeatedly assures the audience.

Except, of course, that the play is totally about Lisa's mother, Ann (Nancy Robinette) and the daughter's struggle to cope with Mom's years of inactivity due to a mysterious and possibly psychosomatic illness.

The production, currently filling Arena Stage's Fichandler Arena, is "like a solo show with other people in it," as Lisa describes it.

Lisa sets out to examine the concepts of illness and wellness through the experiences of her and her mother, who suffers from "allergies," which are -- according to Ann -- "a highly underrated, sinister force." That force has rendered Ann virtually recliner-ridden and threatened Lisa's own well-being in college, when Lisa was forced to check into a high-profile allergy clinic.

As Lisa describes it, however, Ann had bouts of vivacity, which spurred her to create a movement to integrate the family's Michigan neighborhood. The neighborhood was sick, she said, and Ann made it well, using integrated social activities -- such as costume parties and Fourth of July parades -- as a cornerstone.

The dichotomy between illness and wellness lies at the heart of Kron’s play. It's a messy issue, so Kron and director Kyle Donnelly employ a chaotic structure to tell the story.

Lisa will just begin to tell a story when Ann interrupts to chastise her for not telling it right. A supporting cast plays multiple roles, often stepping out of character to bask in Ann's wisdom. And beware the bully from Lisa's past, who interrupts the action at the most inopportune times.

--Erin Trompeter (Express, September 27, 2007)