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NEW YORK -- At a time when people with little perceptible talent, intelligence or charm gain fame and even fortune by publicly humiliating and overexposing themselves, it may seem petty to pick on Lisa Kron.
After all, the creator and star of Well (** out of four), which opened Thursday at Broadway's Longacre Theatre, is an accomplished writer and performer with several acclaimed solo efforts under her belt. Well, which earned praise during an off-Broadway run, finds Kron working with five other gifted actors. Four juggle different roles, while Jayne Houdyshell plays Kron's mom, Ann. Kron plays herself.
"This play is not about my mother and me," Kron tells us at the start, with palpable irony. Her description of Well as "a multi-character theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in the individual and in a community," though similarly cheeky, is closer to the truth.
It's also a very long 90 minutes, during which Kron examines her mother's seeming hypochondria -- as well as Ann's more energetic and altruistic impulses -- and her own struggles, from childhood on.
Along the way, Kron and the cast repeatedly, whimsically tug at that virtual fourth wall separating them from the audience.
And what, exactly, do we learn in the end? That Kron loves her mom, which is nice. That life is complicated, and that our perceptions and memories are by nature subjective. So subjective, in fact, that two people who experience the same thing can actually recall it or choose to present in completely different ways!
Not only that, but -- get this -- not all folks who escape staid lives in search of more adventurous, creatively self-fulfilling ones are necessarily wiser or more progressive in their thinking than the people they leave behind.
To her credit, Kron is too savvy to try to pass these obvious truths off as revelations. Well is served with, and by, generous doses of self-deprecating humor. Kron mocks her own navel-gazing tendencies and bemoans the challenges of what she calls, hyperbolically, an "avant-garde meta-theatrical" exercise.
Ultimately, though, this makes the play's indulgences only more glaring. The boobs on reality TV are too dense to grasp the depths of their narcissism. Kron has a sharp mind and a generous heart, and enough wry self-awareness to recognize the intrinsic vanity of a project that uses elaborate deconstruction of one's personal issues as a basis for exploring greater quandaries. Eve Ensler she ain't.
Even the script suggests that Kron is on to herself. "She's more used to her one-woman shows," Houdyshell's droll Ann says of her daughter at one point.
Perhaps Mother knows best in this case.
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