You gotta love her
Prepared with notes and hired actors, performance artist Lisa Kron wants to create a dramatic exploration of universal health and illness issues. But Lisa’s production takes a comic detour into more personal territory with the entrance of her affable, chronically ill mother. From an onstage recliner, Ann inserts herself into the rehearsal, and the wheels come loose from Lisa’s tidy plan. Kron’s comedy, hailed by The New York Times as “agonizingly funny,” is a love story that speaks to anyone who’s ever had a parent. (Strong language)
Artistic Team/Cast
Director
Scenic Designer
Costume Designer
Lighting Designer
Music/Sound
Cast List
Lisa Kron
Ann Kron
Ensemble Woman A
Ensemble Woman B
Ensemble Man C
Ensemble Man D
* Member of Actors' Equity Association
Synopsis:
Lisa is an intense downtown New York performance artist who’s made a name for herself for her autobiographical one-woman shows. Standing onstage, she tells the audience right off the bat what to expect from this “play.” Reading from note cards, Lisa proclaims it will be “a multi-character theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness, both in the individual and in a community.” Oh, and she also terms it an “avant-garde, metatheatrical” piece. You stand warned.
She notes that she and her hired actors “will occasionally be using my mother as an example.” It is not, she stresses, a play about her chronically ill mother, Ann—who happens to be snoozing onstage in her La-Z-Boy recliner—or their relationship.
As Lisa tries to focus on universal ideas and keep away from her own life, the personal rises up to bite her. Ann, in her frumpy housedress and slippers, wakes up and refuses to stick to her role as an “example.” She challenges Lisa—nicely—to be honest about her intentions for the play, repeatedly interrupts the narrative to question her daughter’s recollection of events, and in general, annoys her.
While she comes from a long line of sickly relatives, Lisa has become a healthy person. She’s presenting this piece to better understand how “some people are sick and some people are well.” Lisa tells the audience that she’s interested in how Ann, who was unable to heal herself, had the energy in the 1960s to help heal their integrated middle-class community in Lansing, Michigan, in the middle of white flight.
The action shifts between Lisa’s childhood; a Chicago allergy clinic, where Lisa did a stint during her college years; and the present. Lisa has determined that she doesn’t have to follow in her family’s sick footsteps and can find enduring health. But what to do with the guilt at being healthy?
The formal structure of the play starts to fall apart—for Lisa, anyway. The four actors hired by her to portray nurses, doctors, community folks, a childhood nemesis, etc., are gradually won over to Ann’s warmth, generosity and enthusiasm. They soon begin to trust her version of events more than Lisa’s. And Lisa is such an over-controlling pill, especially in how she treats her mother, that the other actors exit the play—and leave Lisa in a final confrontation with Ann.