Lisa Kron

The art of challenging audiences while making them laugh is something Lisa Kron knows about. As a founder of the multi-award-winning theater collective, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Kron has spent the past 15 years doing just that in a score of shows at small downtown theaters such as the WOW Cafe, Dixon Place, PS 122 and New York Theatre Workshop. She became more widely known after winning an Obie Award for her 1999 autobiographical solo show, 2.5 Minute Ride. Until now. This season, Kron has ventured north of 14th Street to stake a claim on the Great White Way with Well, her unconventionally structured "solo show with other people in it." An exploration of her relationship with her invalid mother, Well premiered at the Public Theater in 2004, earning rave reviews and enjoying a sold-out run. Another avalanche of positive reviews followed its opening at Broadway's Longacre Theatre on March 30. Turning that energy into lines at the box office, however, has been an uphill—and uptown—battle. This week, producers of Well began advertising "Last Weeks" in hopes of building a sense of urgency for ticket buyers. In a conversation with Broadway.com, Kron spoke frankly about the challenges of connecting with Broadway theatergoers, as well as the six-year process of creating Well. She also confided her personal feelings about what it means to tell her story to a large, mainstream audience.

Your award-winning solo show 2.5 Minute Ride focused on your relationship with your father. Is Well your "mother play"? And did you consciously deal with these relationships in separate plays?
No. Believe it or not, it's never really been my intention to write plays about my family. [Laughs.] But I think I do have two parents who have moved through the world in fairly unusual, original way, and by using them, I've been able to explore issues. Ultimately, I'm interested in doing theater of ideas that's also entertaining. My parents have proven to be a useful vehicle for doing that; the shows can be very accessible and very human because of the complicated humanity of both my parents. It's been my goal to use them to make the audience shift their perspective, because I always want people to walk out of the theater and view things a little differently. With both shows [2.5 Minute Ride and Well] the audience is drawn in with a particular set of assumptions and then the show turns and those assumptions are challenged, sort of insidiously.

So how do you see yourself as an onstage character?
In Well, even though I immediately reveal myself to be a suspect narrator—and sort of clueless about what I'm actually setting in motion—it's also true that there's a lot of easy judgment about who this woman in the La-Z-Boy is [the character of Ann Kron, played by Jayne Houdyshell], which gets turned around.

How did Well develop? Was it a monologue that grew into a play with other actors? Or was always intended as a play with a full company?
Pretty early on I started to add other characters. When I did 2.5 Minute Ride, I felt I dealt successfully with what I had perceived as the problems with the solo form. I mean, the main problem with the solo form, if your goal is to do it as a play, is: Where's the action?

Yeah, the difficulty is that you're relating information that's already happened. So on a very basic level, you—the playwright and performer—have already concluded it emotionally.
That's right. And so the action of the play is not the content of the story; the action of the play is the telling of the story. That's why I think my plays always deal with the veracity of memory and the singularity of perspective, because I make myself a character who has an agenda in telling a certain set of stories, and as those stories are being told my agenda is knocked off track. The character of me ends up telling things that are not what she intended when she walked on stage, which is always what happens in a play. It's just that I do it playing this character as myself, and speaking in what looks like real time, to the audience.

I was dazzled by the dramaturgy of the play-within-a-play structure of Well.
So much of the fruition of that is because of [director] Leigh Silverman and [dramaturge] John Dias. Very early on Leigh said, "Jayne [Houdyshell] is going to have to break character." Leigh knew that that was going to have to be the completion [of Well]—from the meta-theatrical to the meta-theatricality. Then we worked for the next six years on making that moment happen. On the most basic level, we had to be clear about what was happening, but also not let it feel like a trick or a betrayal to the audience. The moment should feel like something that was actually taking the play forward; a culmination of both the themes and the emotions of the play.

Did you change the script much for Broadway?
When we left San Francisco [A.C.T. in February 2005] we did another workshop and I wrote a whole new ending, which is what's published. It felt so clearly like the right thing. Then we put it up in rehearsal, and it wasn't working, it wasn't working, it wasn't working! That was shocking because the writing was good and moving and solid and beautiful. But it just did not work. So once we got into previews [at the Longacre] it became very difficult for me because every night I had to be able to play what was already written. On Sunday nights, John and Leigh and I would go out and they would say, "This is what's happening now and this is what has to happen.'" They would write out a rough draft of the bones of what had to happen, and then I would put it into the characters' voices.

Sounds like a constant process: the honing, the crafting...
Yeah, even the producers said, "You're gonna have to take at least seven minutes off it. But we don't have the slightest idea where." [Laughs.]

But you did! And how has your experience been performing Well to an uptown crowd?
They totally stay with the ride. But in some ways the meta-theatricality is baffling to them. When things start to fall apart [halfway through the play, the set literally appears to break down, mirroring the action of Kron's character] they're like "...huh. I never saw a play like this." But it's so interesting, they totally go with that ending, which we never thought would happen.

As an actor, as a writer, was Broadway your goal?
Never!

Did you ever think Well would end up there?
It never occurred to me. I mean, I wasn't against it. [Laughs.] It's funny, because when [producer] Liz McCann optioned the play, there was a discussion with my agent about how the length of a run on Broadway would determine how much money it made in regional productions and so on. I was sitting there laughing at the notion that this was a conversation I would ever find myself in! You know, that Well or anything I wrote might be a cash cow. It just never entered my mind. 'Cause I was always like, "Okay, I'll get this grant and write this play and hopefully get to tour it and hopefully find more grant money to write another play and..."

... and that'll get me a residency at such-and-such arts center in Arkansas.
Exactly. And though we [actors] are making more money than we made at the Public, we're all making minimum. So if by some glorious circumstance the play recoups, yeah, we'll make a lot of money [laughs]. But it's not happening now.

Of course, nearly every play that gets produced—on or off-Broadway—struggles to find an audience. But Well has been struggling more than most. What do you think has been the main difficulty?
People come see this play, they have a profoundly personal experience with it, and they bring people back. By the hand, they drag people back. It's really a matter of whether we can stay open long enough for that to happen. The show has been tremendously difficult to market. After six years, people still ask, "What's the play about?" And I don't know how to answer that question. You can't describe it. When people see it, they go, "Wow, wow, wow, I never imagined that. I don't know how to describe it. I have six people who have to see this play." Also, it's all women. It's probably one of the most female plays in every way that's ever been on Broadway.

Do you think that's been a stumbling block?
Well, people tend to gravitate toward things with men in them. It's subconscious, but I think they just feel that it's more important. But I also think there's a shift [with theatergoers] that I realized when I was in The Normal Heart for a brief period [in 2005, the Public closed its revival of Larry Kramer's play the week after Kron took over for Joanna Gleason.] This is just my armchair theory, but they were really trying to market that play to gay men. The younger gay men didn't want to know about it, and the older gay men had lived through it and didn't want to live through it again. And I thought, the audience for this play is women. Middle-aged women!

Yeah, well, they've been a huge percentage of the loyalists for TV shows like Queer as Folk.
Right. And although I actually think Well has a tremendously wide appeal, women are our audience. If they get tapped in to, they will come. I also think there's a huge audience of people who have various health issues who would come see the play. The trajectory of this play could be like My Big Fat Greek Wedding—it stayed in theaters long enough to find its audience. I have no doubt that Well can find its audience. It's just a matter of whether we can stay open long enough to do it. And who's gonna fight that fight better than Liz McCann? She's the one who can do it.

How did you two become friends?
I had met her many years ago. When I first came to New York, I was [theater and fiction critic] Marilyn Stasio's personal assistant for six or seven years. They're old pals, and Marilyn started bringing Liz to my shows. Then John Dias brought her down to the Public to see Well. At the time, everyone was saying, "Maybe an off-Broadway transfer?" And Liz said, "No, no. This has broader appeal than that."

Speaking of broader appeal, do you feel like Well may be a part of helping more women to bring their work to Broadway?
I wish that were true. The statistics are appalling. I think Leigh [Silverman] is like the sixth woman to direct a Broadway play. And I'm like the twenty-third woman playwright. It's crazy! So I would like to think Well is a harbinger of a new time. But that hasn't proven to be true in the past. Every now and again a woman seems to get there and then nothing really seems to change. Certainly for me it's tremendously gratifying that the lesbians are on Broadway. And though Well is not a particularly lesbian play, Leigh and I are both out lesbians. I remember when I was in college sitting in bed and crying because it was clear to me that there was no place for me in the theater.

But this season, there's you and Cherry Jones...
…and Cynthia Nixon! There are three out lesbians on Broadway at the same time!

But as a playwright, do you have any sense that Well, with its unique structure and theatricality, may be helping to shake up the standard of what a play on Broadway can be? Like a Metamorphosis? Or I Am My Own Wife?
I think the question of a fresher kind of playwriting on Broadway is more about who buys a Broadway theater ticket. It is a commercial kind of world. Absolutely, Metamorphosis and I Am My Own Wife are a part of that category. But I really think the secret is the diversity of the audience. Because the more diverse our audience is [at Well, the better time we all have at the show. I guess this is true of all plays, but I definitely feel it in mine, because they tend to speak to a number of different constituencies at the same time. When you can get younger people and older people and a mixed race audience and a certain amount of savvy queers—everyone will laugh at everything! The audience cues each other. The whole issue of the way it lands—and its success in landing—has to do with that diversity. But it's hard to achieve that kind of diversity, because it's hard to convince a lot of people that Broadway is a place they want to go and that they want to pay that amount of money for a ticket.

And for you personally? How does it feel to find yourself in this landscape called Broadway?
Well, I do feel like a downtown-er who's gone uptown. [Laughs.] I got this really lovely e-mail from Hapi Phace [downtown drag legend]. He sent it to me after he'd seen the show, and said, "I don't know if this is appropriate or not, but I feel so vindicated for all those years I spent at the Pyramid Club and at LaMama." And I thought, absolutely. I feel like that whole downtown world—all those people—are there with me. I didn't really have an idea of my own work going to Broadway, although I am completely thrilled by it. But it does feel like it's not just me, but that whole world I came out of, that whole community, that's being represented up there. And that feels tremendously meaningful to me. I would like to feel that Ethyl Eichelberger and Split Britches is there with me, and Carmelita, 'cause that's where I came from. That's where this work comes from. And that's what I feel is there on that stage.

See Lisa Kron in Well at the Longacre Theatre, 220 West 48th Street. Click for tickets and more information.