Taking on the role of Lisa Kron in “Well”

We are in rehearsals right now for our production of Well. It is the most challenging role I’ve ever taken on and I was thrilled to speak with Lisa Kron via FaceTime last week. She had some advice for my portrayal of her: “When the play begins, you believe you are totally in control of everything.” Of course as the story of Well evolves, it becomes painfully obvious she’s basically hanging on for dearlife! I love this role, because it gives me a chance to stretch every creative muscle I possess. Lisa Kron is sensitive, funny, spontaneous – she’s a writer/director and experiencing epiphanies, then catharsis, in real-time with the audience.

Here’s more information about our Pepperdine production. I hope you come to see it! 

Well

By: Lisa Kron | Directed by: Bradley Griffin

Lisa Kron (Tony-winner for the book of Fun Home) is a funny, touching, challenging, and beautiful writer. While much of her other work deals directly with her sexual identity, this play doesn’t focus specifically on the LGBTQ+ community. Well plays with the conventions of Kron’s early work as a solo performer, but in this play, the other characters in the piece keep interrupting Kron’s attempts to be an “edgy performance artist.” The play blurs the line between fiction and reality, both in terms of what we are watching and in terms of what the performers onstage are experiencing. The script calls for the actors to use their own names, further blurring this reality/artifice line. In essence, Well is a comedic memory play about the narrator’s experience of growing up with a mother who suffered from an ailment that kept her from being active. Like other memory plays, you come to realize that you can’t always trust what the narrator – or anyone else – is telling you, so you have to piece it together.

The message of the play begins to coalesce when you hear the parallels that “Lisa” is drawing between the false dichotomies of sickness and health, black and white, gay and straight. One is not simply the inverse of the other. The last speech of the play comes from a speech that Lisa’s mother delivered to the Neighborhood Association, and it defines “integration” as “weaving into the whole even the parts that are uncomfortable or don’t seem to fit. Even the parts that are complicated and painful.”

January 22 – 26, 2019

Venue: Lindhurst Theatre

Here’s a link to tickets: https://pepperdinearts.ticketforce.com/orderticketsarea.asp?p=621&a=8&src=default