Lisa Kron’s Well: When a Play Sings Your Story

by David Dower

Lisa Kron’s WELL is up and running in the Fichandler. If you missed the article on Arena’s signature space, here’s a link. It’s a good read. It’s also timely, as director Kyle Donnelly has outdone herself in taking full advantage of the Fichandler stage's idiosyncracies.

There is something happening here that I always look for as a producer, but don’t always see. After the show is over, when the company has taken its bows and the house lights have come up and people are heading for the exits, invariably there will be small groups of people scattered around the theater who remain in quiet conversation about what they’ve just seen. Often they are in the grip of strong emotions. I first noticed it at the Open Rehearsal but it’s been happening ever since.

I’ve made a point of engaging several of these small groups, trying to understand what’s moved them about the play. After all, it is a riotous comedy. On its surface it seems to be up to nothing but hijinks—the kind of madcap romp where a person with a high and mighty opinion of themselves gets their comeuppance. And, as a mark of how successful the production is, the laughs and surprises just keep on coming all night.

But underneath that quirky comic surface, Lisa Kron is tapping into something deep, private, and powerful for many in the audience. It comes as a surprise, both welcome and overwhelming. The play is singing the story of people who are living with illness. In these groups I am finding people who are caregivers as well as people who are unwell. I’m finding middle-aged men and women caring for elderly parents or chronically ill partners. There are chemically sensitive people, people living with disability, people struggling with maladies that their loved ones think they should just “get over.” In most cases, they are completely surprised that the play “got” to them. They came for the comedy. They had no idea it would rock them like it has.

How has she managed this trick? It’s a question akin to the questions Lisa’s framed in the play, when she wonders of her mother “How can she be so sick? And yet she’s so well?” I wonder how this play can be at once so funny and so serious. How it can seem so whacky and yet land such truth.

Some people are completely untouched by the emotional undercurrents of the play. They leave with a sense that the play was fun, diverting, entertaining. But for those living the story of the play, there’s a sense of discovery, of release, of catharsis buried in it.

You remember the Roberta Flack song “Killing Me Softly”? You may remember it better as Lauryn Hill’s breakout hit with the Fugees. The lyrics are the best description of the feeling of being one of those people whose song is being sung at this production:

…I felt all flushed with fever

Embarrassed by the crowd

I felt he’d found my letters

And read each one out loud

I prayed that he would finish

But he just kept right on

He sang as if he knew me

In all my dark despair

I felt he looked right through me

As if I wasn’t there…

Strumming my pain with his fingers

Singing my life with his words

Killing me softly with his song

Killing me softly with his song

Telling my whole life with his words

Killing me softly with his song.

To all of you who are finding your song being sung in the Fichandler this month, we invite you to sit and talk amongst yourselves as long as you want following the performance. And if you feel like sharing something of that experience with us, our comment box is always open here at Stage Banter.

For those of you who want to know more about the experience of coping with the sort of illness that Ann Kron is dealing with, here’s a link to an article by Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit, in which she details her own battles with the illness, which she describes as “a thief”.

And for those of you in need of more information about living with this type of illness or caring for the loved ones battling it, I found many resources listed on the links page of the website of Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome Association of America.