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Mar. 31--The most daring Broadway offering of the season may not be the musical about human meat pies or the comedy with cat-killing Irishmen or the drama featuring the pretty Hollywood megastar.
The most audacious of all might just be Lisa Kron's "Well," the disarming, good-natured, almost brutally deceptive little piece that had the nerve to contact a mainstream audience at the Longacre Theatre last night with no gore, no hype and - so far - no stars.
That last part should change now that more people can get a look at Jayne Houdyshell, the wonderful not-petite, not-young actress making her Broadway debut in a big cotton housedress and a not-new La-Z-Boy recliner.
Kron plays herself, sort of, in this friendly, intentionally messy and smart 100-minute revelation in self-referential denial. She claims that the lethargic Midwestern woman dozing stage-left is not really meant to be her chronically ill mother. She maintains that details of their lives will merely be used to explore universal issues about why some people and communities are sick and some are well, why some stay sick and some get well.
Although "Well" was embraced at the Public Theater in 2004, it hardly declared itself a Broadway-ready transfer. Kron, a performance artist and founding member of the delightful Five Lesbian Brothers, wasn't hard-selling herself when she called this experiment "a solo with other people in it." But some Broadway producers thought big, and their foresight is refreshing and even inspirational.
There are times in Leigh Silverman's sly and intentionally self-conscious production when actors seem to be pushing too hard to fill the theater, but never mind. "Well" may seem to ramble, but it's extremely well-organized. When it feels contrived, Kron uses the contrivance to blow up the conventions of the one-person show. And if all of this sounds like work instead of pleasure, forget we said it.
The experience is divided into three playing fields, designed by Tony Walton. There is the comically amateurish space where Kron's memories are re-enacted in stylized exaggeration. There's the magic spotlight in which she talks directly to the audience, trying to control lives that refuse to be easily packaged. And there is the slice of her mother's house, in excruciating detail.
This is a woman who believes in "allergies and racial integration," an energetic woman trapped in an "utterly exhausted body," who worked to keep their neighborhood in Lansing, Mich., from deteriorating into a slum. Four other actors mix stagy parody and poignance as people from the neighborhood and patients in a Chicago hospital that specialized in allergies.
Kron imagines mutinies by the actors and shares complaints about playwrights who simplify life into montages and metaphors. She makes knowing asides about the "culture of illness" by which her family has kept time through the years. For all the seemingly casual humor, Kron concludes that the chronically sick are not necessarily well people who are ill, just as Jews are not Christians who happen to be Jewish and blacks are not whites who happen to be black.
Her conclusions are both graceful and awkward, subtle and obvious, elegant and confusing. Like life - and expectations for Broadway shows.
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