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Thursday, 5/29/97 Imagination alive in '2.5 minutes' THEATER: Introspective one-woman show comes to UCLA Freud Playhouse

By Kristi Nakamura Daily Bruin Contributor Pull the shoulder straps down tight and be sure that your lap belt is fastened because it's going to be a fast-paced "2.5 Minute Ride." Inverting and blurring the distinctions between humor and tragedy, performance artist Lisa Kron takes her audience on a wild trip, swerving through her family history. Kron combines stories as varied and seemingly unrelated as her trip to Auschwitz with her father, a German Jewish Holocaust survivor, her brother's marriage to the bride he met over the Internet, and the annual Kron family trip to the Cedar Point Amusement Park in Ohio. These stories and many more all serve to create the illusion of being strapped onto a mental roller coaster. Kron will present the Los Angeles premiere of her solo autobiographical work, "2.5 Minute Ride" at the UCLA Freud Playhouse this Friday and Saturday. "I think one of the main themes of the piece is how tragedy and humor are flip sides of the same coin in life in general so the piece goes back and forth very rapidly from one to the other," Kron says. "'2.5 Minute Ride' is actually describing a specific roller coaster that we go on at Cedar Point, but it's also this emotional ride - from this is funny, now this is sad, now this is funny and sad, and this is sad but it's supposed to be funny, you know. It's a wild ride that way." Although the stories are all taken from Kron's experiences, she says that the show is only superficially about her own family. "2.5 Minute Ride" is her attempt to use the details of her life to illustrate something more universal. Kron wants the audience members to relate and project their own family relationships onto her stories. Family relationships are the nuts and bolts that hold this roller coaster together. The stories of "2.5 Minute Ride" are tied together by the struggles and the experience of relating to our parents. "It's about sort of anticipating the death of a parent and particularly for me, anticipating the death of my father and coming to grips with his history and the way that it's affected me and who I am because of it, what I will be when he is gone, the sort of debt I feel toward him as a child," Kron says. Kron's mother and father influence not only the context of the story, but also the way it is told. "The piece deals a lot with (my father's) very dry sense of humor and it has many examples of it," says Kron. "My whole family is funny and both my parents are really great storytellers." Both of Kron's parents saw the premiere of "2.5 Minute Ride" at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. Since then, the piece has been taken apart and completely reconfigured. Currently, it is being billed as "a work in progress." "I had a pretty good run (in La Jolla), but there were things I was dissatisfied with about it so I decided I wanted to take the whole thing apart and put it back together again," Kron says. "It was sort of risky, but we wanted to make it better." Although the piece is still being polished, Kron is confident that "2.5 Minute Ride" is very close to being a finished piece. She says that although it has progressed very far and the audience would not be able to tell the difference, she is still not ready to have it reviewed. Aside from "2.5 Minute Ride," Kron is a charter member of the 6-year-old theater company, The Five Lesbian Brothers, whose play "The Secretaries" won an Obie and Bessie Award and was produced in 1994 by the New York Theater Workshop. Kron is also a recently announced recipient of the CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts for theater. Despite all of her accomplishments and her 13 years of experience as a solo performer, "2.5 Minute Ride" has proven to be a new and challenging experience for Kron. "This is going to sound so stupid, but I had this shocking experience when I was writing it in La Jolla, like, all of a sudden I had given away too much, feeling kind of exposed by it. I think I always sort of thought that by making the decisions about which stories I would tell, I was really controlling what I was communicating about myself," Kron confesses in her endearing, confidential way. While Kron plans on taking a much more extensive tour next year, for now "2.5 Minute Ride" can only be seen on the two-stop "mini-tour" that includes UCLA. Although the tour is short, Kron is eager to perform outside of New York City again and test the reconfigured "2.5 Minute Ride." "I've been doing solo autobiographical performance for many years now and ... this show does feel much more vulnerable," Kron admits. "This show puts me in the position of having to say all these words that have to do with the inevitability of my father's death ... I certainly felt those feelings very deeply, that's how I was able to write them, but revisiting them on a nightly basis is a little bit dizzying for me." THEATER: Lisa Kron's "2.5 Minute Ride" premieres on Friday and Saturday, May 30 and 31 at 8 p. m. at the UCLA Freud Playhouse. Tickets are $22; $9 for UCLA students. For more information call (310) 825-2101. Lisa Kron performs her one-woman show "2.5 Minute Ride" on Friday and Saturday at the UCLA Freud Playhouse.

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