Triple trek

Lisa Kron's 2.5 Minute Ride
is three journeys in one

by Gary Susman

Lisa Kron lives in Manhattan's East Village, on the same street as such theatrical landmarks as the WOW Cafe Theatre (a lesbian collective where she got her start as a solo performer), LaMama ETC, and the New York Theatre Workshop (birthplace of Rent and current venue of Brides of the Moon, a play written and performed by Kron's troupe, The Five Lesbian Brothers). She lives with her partner, fellow Brother Peg Healey, in a building covered with such postgraduate graffiti as "Certitude does not exist, in a well-appointed apartment with a radio in every room."

That Kron is picking up on a lot of different frequencies is apparent in her new solo show, 2.5 Minute Ride, which American Repertory Theatre's New Stages brings to Boston January 6 through 18. Kron's monologue weaves three autobiographical stories: her pilgrimage to Auschwitz with her Holocaust-survivor father, her family's annual trip to an Ohio amusement park, and her brother's wedding to a woman he met on the Internet.

The 36-year-old Kron integrates the many facets of her identity to present a tragicomic perspective that she hopes is resonant to all audiences. "All those things -- a lesbian, a Jew, a midwesterner who lives in New York -- give me a sense of being an outside observer," she says. "With autobiographical solo performance, your goal should be to use the details of your life to illuminate some larger picture, something universal, something the audience can find in their own lives."

Kron enjoys the challenge of juggling her personal solo work with the more broadly satirical work of the Brothers. (The quintet also recently published The Five Lesbian Brothers' Guide to Life, which Kron calls a Preppy Handbook for lesbians.) "What my work and the Brothers' work have in common is the feeling that comedy and tragedy are flip sides of the same coin. They always examine some kind of idiosyncratic human behavior, which revolves around sadness, fear, humiliation, jealousy. Whatever those baser, darker human emotions are, we examine the behaviors that make those feelings manifest, and then we find what's funny about that. To us, that's the richest place to find humor."

Even in her Holocaust account, Kron dares to include her humorous take on her family's quirks. "That duality forms the basic mechanism of the show," she says. "I take the events of the Holocaust very seriously in the show. I don't make light of them at all. I hope I honor it more by desentimentalizing it."

Kron says her father did not acknowledge to himself until years later that his parents had surely died in the camps. "When I was a kid, my father was still waiting for his parents to come back. This emotional journey of his was still active when I was alive. This was so shocking to me. I thought there had been a resolution. And there's that feeling sometimes when we talk about the Holocaust, that this was really, really terrible, but it's done. I'm sometimes not sure that that really serves us very well because it seals it off and allows us to have a powerful but very proscribed emotion. I think it's messier than that, and it continues, both in the lives of the survivors who are still affected by it and in the lives of their children.

"I thought, `How do I get to something real about this?' What was so amazing to me about Anne Frank's diary was that they didn't know what was going to happen to them. How do you capture that again, so that you're not playing the drama of the end when you're in the middle? So I guess, by dealing with very specific human behaviors, going back and forth between my family and their idiosyncrasies, and this visit back into history with my father, I tried to get to that place where there were just a bunch of people about to get caught in this most horrible 20th-century event, but still just people going through their lives, not icons in a grand drama."

With 2.5 Minute Ride, Kron believes she has completed a cycle. "This is by far the most sophisticated solo work that I've done. My last work, 101 Humiliating Stories [presented by the ART two years ago] -- I really loved that show. It was a big milestone for me. And this show takes that several steps further. Maybe this is too poetical a way to put it, but sometimes I feel like I became a solo performer to do this show, so that I could tell this story about my father and the effect his history had on me."

(2.5 Minute Ride runs January 21 through 25 at the Trinity Rep Downstairs Theater. Call 351-4242 for tickets.)