`Well takes offbeat look at family life
February 29th, 2008, 8:14 pm Hobbies Ideas
This is not to say that audiences won’t appreciate a
strong student supporting cast, the energetic efforts of
Emily Harpe as the author’s persona and the
extraordinary talent of guest artist Sharon Williams as her
hypo-allergic mother. It’s just that the ride in
mom’s big red recliner gets bumpy and chaotic. Such is
the order of the minds and the jumble of recollections on
display.
In her script, Kalamazoo College alumna Lisa Kron seeks to
explore and answer a question about her mother’s
infirmities: If Lisa could conquer her allergies and escape
life as a semi-invalid propped up in a living room chair,
why couldn’t mom do it too?
Although Kron tenders an answer, she takes the long way home
by telling her story in direct address to the audience
through humorous flashbacks to her neighborhood, school and,
of course, her allergy clinic. These scenes are interrupted
frequently by memories, unruly characters flaunting stage
conventions and mom rising from her recliner to kibitz.
Williams provides us with much more than an eccentric
character in a pink housedress. Her Ann Kron is often a beat
behind the conversation, but always worthy of our attention
physically and vocally, through her limp, her aches and her
kind greetings to guests. While affable, she also can be
meddlesome and thus maddening to Lisa.
The character of Ann Kron is, in short, an enigma that the
writer believes she can’t paraphrase or adequately
capture within the limits of the theater and its
conventions.
There are no guarantees that a work of art, such as a play,
can explain the mystery of a person such as Ann Kron, or the
lasting influence that resonates long after her empty
recliner ceases rocking.
Lisa Kron seems to be telling her audience that she can only
submit memories and fragments of her mother’s life for
our consideration. We must somehow make sense of it all. In
doing so, however, Kron reveals more in the way of truth
than she admits to as her action unravels and her characters
rebel in her final scene.
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