Edward Albee on Lisa Kron's WELL

by David Dower

We got this wonderful note about Lisa Kron's Well the other day from one of America's greatest playwrights.

Edward Albee wrote: "Lisa Kron's Well is a splendid play—very funny and deeply serious. If an audience will give itself to it without preconceptions of how a play should behave, then they will have a deeply satisfying time."

He's right on about this. The play does seem to make a demand of the audience that folks meet it on its own terms. I've seen it with many audiences at this point and I've talked to many people afterwards. If you've seen it, I'm curious how you felt about it. If you haven't yet, you'll have to hurry now to experience what Mr. Albee is talking about. But you'll know where to find me to let me know if you agree with him.

My own thoughts sparked by his thoughts:

As I wrote earlier, I'm surprised by the number of people who are deeply moved by the play. Then, too, I'm a sucker for comedy, and I'm always delighted at how much laughter there is at each performance and how many times the play surprises the audience. And to hear the excited buzz and babble as they file out, trying to reconstruct the experience together with the people they saw it with. So I love the play and watching it through the fresh eyes of each new audience.

I'll admit, though, that I've been surprised that there are consistently patrons at each performance who seem to brace against the play right from the outset, seem uncomfortable with its gleefully anarchic approach to the rules of engagement, and seem to miss the real depth of the piece by resisting its surface. Because we're in the Fich, you can see them as they hold the play at bay. Not most patrons, by a long shot. But always some. And I can't quite figure it out.

But there's something in the fact that Mr. Albee is such a supporter of this play and asking the audience to come to it open to its 'behavior'. How many plays has he himself given the world theater that refused to behave within the conventional understanding of the day about a "well made play"? He knows whereof he speaks. And maybe he knows what he's seeing in Lisa Kron's willingness to break form to get to substance: a trailblazer, perhaps.

Comments

[Marigene Arnold]

I have seen Well at both the Public and on Broadway. Like Mr. Dower, I am puzzled by the resistance the play meets. Yet some of these same people are so taken in by the premise that they forget that Lisa Kron is both author and actor--I have heard them criticize what she has to say and talk about how she needs to listen to some other character in the play who has the "truth"!

[David]

Thanks for writing Marigene.

Your comment reminds me of Lisa talking about how difficult it was for her, during the play's development, to allow the picture of her own character to be that of someone who 'over simplifies' and to put the 'wisdom' in the mouths of others. "Some people relate to the character of 'Lisa' as if she were actually me. But I am the whole play. I am the playwright. 'Lisa' is a character I have invented to tell this story of the challenge of empathy."

It is true that when I talk with people who were less swept up by the play they tend to talk about 'Lisa' as being self-indulgent and ascribing that trait to the playwright. But they talk about her mother as if she were nonfiction.

Funny story: Ms. Kron relates that when she was performing the play in Boston and got to the climactic monologue that begins "What am I supposed to say to her?" a patron in the front row responded "How about THANK YOU."