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PLAYBILL AT OPENING NIGHT: Well : Chronic Kron
By Harry Haun
04 Apr 2006
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Lisa Kron; Leigh Silverman; Jayne Houdyshell; John Hoffman; Joan Allen; Jerry Stiller; Anne Meara; Sidney Lumet; Liz Callaway; Phyllis Newman; Paul Rudnick; Cherry Jones.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Well —to begin a sentence with a noun—is alive and well and living at the Longacre
Theatre happily-ever-afterish after two years of playing Off-Broadway and on the road
and five years of writing and revising, including a last-ditch overhaul at the finish line.
“Well, we worked very hard on the ending,” admitted Well ’s author-star, opting to lead
with an interjection. By “we,” she (Lisa Kron ) meant her director (Leigh Silverman ),
her surrogate mom and co-star (Jayne Houdyshell ) and a supporting cast of four (Daniel
Breaker, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, John Hoffman and Christina Kirk ). A whole cast
and its director haven’t made their collective Broadway debuts since--well, since Oct. 13,
2005, when Latinologues was launched at the Helen Hayes, but Well betters that record
by two actors. Historians and Heaven only know when/if there was a more massive bow.
Kron’s “theatrical exploration” (her words—I almost said “play,” and perhaps I should, it
being one of the best of the season) focuses, zoom lens-style, on sickness and wellness as
it manifests itself in America, in her childhood neighborhood of Lansing and in her mom.
An established monologist who has dotted Off-Broadway with her autobiographical
one-person shows (2.5 Minute Ride, 101 Humiliating Stories ), Kron begins
business-as-usual, note cards in hand, then nudges the envelope a tad by announcing that
Well will be “a solo show with other people in it.” Big mistake. Even as she speaks, she
has lost the ball. Stretched out in the shadows of Stage Left—there before the audience
files in—laid low on a La-Z-Boy, pretending to be asleep is a facsimile of Mother Kron,
Ann by name and given an Obie-going-for-Tony-winning performance by Houdyshell.
Ann Kron is a former fireball reduced to smoldering embers by “allergies” and imagined
illness that proved equally contagious to her daughter. In her prime, Ann integrated her suburb
just to give Lisa a balanced view of the world; now she can be removed from her easy
chair and TV remote only by an insistent diuretic. Lisa remembers Mama in a muumuu,
half-living in her Lansing living room. But, once she awakes, it’s the monologist to pay.
Lisa is allowed only a few moments at the beginning and end of her own play to solo. As
soon as the aroused Ann gets into the act—like sweetened Bethlehem Steel—interrupting
nicely, sulking when rebuffed, ingratiating herself to the cast and to the audience, taking
beverage and snack requests from any and all as if we’re all friends Lisa brought home
from school. This is heavy-duty deconstruction on the fourth wall, which crumbles like a
piece of cake, and even a major portion of the on-stage set winds up wrecked beyond
repair by The Gang of Four whom Ann has charmingly mobilized to mutiny. Houdyshell
even defects in the now-revised closing moments, returning a bare stage to the “soloist.”
Thursday’s opening-night audience behaved like one, welcoming Lisa in her first official
walk onto a Broadway stage with a protracted ovation. “And you haven’t seen anything
yet,” she lightly chided them. Later she confessed, “It was thrilling, completely thrilling.”
The curtain call was robust and could have gone for seconds but didn’t. The four females in
the cast were given great bouquets of flowers, in keeping with tradition even though the play
(there, I said it) does its damnedest to dash tradition. (For a construct this complicated,
it’s cuter than it has a right to be. Anyone born of woman can relate to its universality.)
Another thing that didn’t happen—and the audience was braced for it: Ann Kron,
in the audience with her hubby, didn’t barrel down the aisle to take her place center stage.
But she did find her seat of honor at the post-party and was holding forth like a mother.
She, too, said it was “thrilling—because when Lisa was small, I remember one day she
said, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up,’ and I said, ‘What do you
mean?’ She said, ‘Well, I would like to go live some place else, but then I think ‘No, I
have to stay here and fight for the city,’ and I said, ‘Lisa you’ll find your own way to
make your life useful'—but I never anticipated this . I feel honored by it, in spite of . . .”
Ann seemed to have made her peace with the poetic license and inexactness that plague
the play and drive her stage persona up the wall. “I was threatening to write my own
version of the play and pass it out at the back of the theatre after every performance—until
Lisa said, ‘Oh, the producers would be so happy.’” The story stops dead in its tracks here.
But she did, in a magnanimous praise-from-Calpurnia gesture, predict stardom for her
second-favorite-but-listing member of the ensemble: “I think Jayne is a marvel, and, if
she doesn’t come out of this a major, major star, there’s something terribly wrong.”
Of course, this was a friend talking. The two—the character and the actress—have been
tight since Well went so well in its world-premiere gig at The Public in spring of 2004.
Houdyshell recalled the cautious circling of each other at first: “We were both nervous
about meeting one another,” she said, amending that to “Better I should say I wasn’t
nervous about meeting Ann. I was nervous about her seeing the play and her seeing
my representing her on stage, but once I learned she really liked what I was doing, it was
okay. I mean, I think her worst fear was that she was going to come into a theatre and sit
there and hear an audience laughing at her and her experience was that she came into the
theatre and discovered an audience laughing with her. After that, we were comfortable.
“Subsequently, we have become really good friends. I actually went to Lansing to be with
her and her husband for about a week and lived in the same house that Lisa grew up in.”
The actress’ “atmosphere soak” enhanced a role she was already crazy about and enlarged
the character to Everywoman possibilities. “One of the things that’s kind of magical
about Ann—the reason people like her—is because she reminds people of their own mother
or some mother they’ve known in their childhood that was the mom who just had an open
heart for everyone. Ann is really an open-hearted, loving human being, and she has a
great sense of fairness and justice and integrity—political integrity, social integrity,
personal integrity. There is just so much about her that I admire. What don’t I like?”
You may wonder the party site that Broadway’s Perle Mesta, Suzanne Tobak, picked for
this mother-and-daughter Punch-and-Judy show. Would you believe the former Times
Square restaurant extension of World Wrestling Entertainment: now, The Hard Rock Cafe.
“Why?” I asked as I passed her on the stairway into the vast black box with blaring rock
music. “Because it’s convenient and new.” Sometimes, she speaks with great lucidity.
The one echo of the play that the party-planners came up with was a La-Z-Boy at the
entranceway where female celebs playfully passed for cheesecake with the photographers.
Passing with flying colors was Joan Allen, in jeans and heels, with a hottie at her side.
She looked a long way from Berkeley Square. (She arrived on the New York scene in a
1983 Steppenwolf import, C.P. Taylor’s And a Nightingale Sang , which won her the
Clarence Derwent Award, the Theatre World Award and the Drama Desk Award. In spite
of a Tony for Burn This! , many think it’s her best work. That, and The Upside of Anger .)
On April 8, Allen returns to her Steppenwolf roots in Chicago for the company’s 30th
anniversary gala. Wolfgang Puck and Spaggo will rustle up the grub, and the alums
anticipated are Terry Kinney, Lois Smith, Laurie Metcalf , directors Frank Galati and
Eric Simonson, John Mahoney, Tim Hopper, John Heard and Austin Pendleton
(who is directing the world premiere of John Kolvenbach ’s Love Song that very night.) Continued...
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