The wonderful news, though, is that unlike too many metatheatrical attempts to use performance to comment on itself, "Well" deploys its self-references, self-interruptions, and self-transformations with wisdom and grace. Kron the playwright, Kron the actress, and Kron the character all make delightful company, self-aware but never self-absorbed. So the play, while it's clearly autobiographical, is also clearly about more universal questions: what it means to be sick, what it means to be well, what families do to and for each other, and how sometimes in spite of ourselves we find a way to heal.
But this is all sounding way too heavy, and one of the play's many joys is that it carries its messages lightly. It begins simply enough, with Kron's mother (or, more accurately, "Kron's" "mother") dozing in a cluttered living room at stage left. The living room seems to have been plopped on a bare stage like Dorothy's house in Oz, with Mom transported in her La-Z-Boy intact. (This production also arrives from New York more or less intact, with the same costume, set, and lighting designers.)
The other side of the stage is bare, for now, with rigging and lights revealed. Kron walks out, thanks us for coming, and starts to explain what she'll be doing tonight. Her tone is so relaxed, so conversational, that you're not quite sure at first whether this is a pre-show chat from the playwright or the actress starting the show.
That's just the right taste of what's to come: a freewheeling, fourth-wall-breaking, convention-bending piece of theater that reminds us just how profoundly playful a play can be. No sooner has Lisa introduced the work as a "theatrical exploration" of universal issues through specific scenes drawn from life than her mother, Ann, starts interrupting with her own anecdotes, corrections, and versions of Lisa's childhood in Lansing, Mich.
