Review: Well at the Vortex Theatre

Lisa Kron’s Well is less a play, and more of a staging of well-shaken brain. A shabby living room from a decade ago has been transplanted to the Vortex Theatre into a void where Ann Kron, the playwright's mother, will watch as her daughter attempts to dramatically stage their lives (sort of like filming a documentary to show your Grandfather at his birthday). All the while, she steps in and out of the void as a way of conversing with Mom without having to actually talk to Mom. It's a perfect play for the holiday season, and the tension of too much family time.

Director Norman Blumensaadt navigates the material through real and imagined space, character breaks, and audience acknowledgement. He ensures that the play never feels gimmicky. After only a few minutes, Ann is trying to get drinks for the audience and disagreeing with Lisa about how the play has oversimplified the facts of a community meeting she led. In that moment, Ann's character knocks that fourth wall down almost immediately, and for good, and then asks to meet the actors themselves; a series of difficult concepts and interactions that play out effortlessly.

According to the play, Ann Kron helped lead a community in Lansing, Michigan to racial and socioeconomic integration in the 1960s. Yet, to the consternation of her daughter, the woman who played a huge role in such great change has for the past 20 or so years been confined to a recliner.

Jennifer Underwood plays a sincere Ann Kron. Her relaxed style comforts the audience with small gestures, like lobbing little bags of snacks into the crowd, calling out, "Aren't they cute?" Yet her sweetness never betrays her intense sense of purpose and of right and wrong. Her steadfastness works as a root structure for both the Kron women and their beginnings. But her daughter Lisa (Sarah Seaton) struggles with how they have ended up so far apart; her in good health (despite a past illness) and her mother with barely the energy to leave her chair. Seaton does a good job resisting the chaotic revolt of the play as it turns against her-but the funny ensemble constantly risks overpowering her and taking the audience with them.

The other actor-characters have fallen in love with Ann Kron, and even physically fawn over her, poring over her simple living room, which is filled with the snow globe collection, and boxes of kitsch, and news clippings about allergies that seem to hold her in her recliner in the heavier moments. And yet they seem to misunderstand her. When one actor tells her she is funny, she replies, "Well I don't know why that's funny, but okay." Ann is always the same, in the same recliner, in front of the same television, but the actor's perception of her within the play are constantly changing. The ensemble troupe performs both the characters well but really jump into the role of, well, themselves (actors), especially Jan Phillips as Joy, who is earnestly engaged by Lisa’s mother in a fast friendship.

The minimal set helps to remind us that everyone and everything in the play is Lisa. The characters playing in the void represent the safe process of compartmentalizing her memories and explaining them away, while the very actors that play them tug oppositely with their challenges to her vision, her purpose, and her resolve. In the end, there is only Lisa and her mother's words; a speech from one of her finest moments, addressing her neighborhood. And here in writing and in performance they become one, again, if only for a minute, before the lights dim.