Munk's WELL review

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 3:32am

Lisa Kron (who was unknown to me before becoming aware of this show) starts the show off by addressing the audience with a set of index cards. She tells them what the show is about - what is explores, what it asks, and hopfully, what it will attempt to answer. She says over and over that it is very non-traditionally theatrical. Well, Ms. Kron, that's a pretty major understatement.

To be quite frank, this show doesn't make any sense. The entire time I suffered through this intolerable bore, all I kept thinking was "Who cares?" and "WHY!?" I don't care about Lisa Krons's life! And frankly, after watching the show for 90 minutes (before fleeing the theatre), I didn't care about the well-being of Kron or her hypochondriac mother.

The "story" is told through various, entirely non-sensical vignettes. However, the cast (including Lisa and her mother) keep stating over and over to each other and to the audience that they don't know what's coming next. They don't understand what they're doing on stage. They don't understand this random order of "events" that's taking place.

Think GODSPELL (minus the score and Jesus) plus Eve Ensler (without the whole feminism thing) plus THE FANTASTICKS - all telling the story of a woman's childhood and her relationship with her mother that no one cares about.

To be fair, there were people in the audience laughing - but everone that I was with just kept turning to each other and saying "Why are people laughing?" I don't get it. It's the most utterly perplexing, unfocused, and (dare I say it) pointless play I have ever seen.

Is this even a play? Yea, Leigh Silverman is billed as the director, but something tells me that Kron entirely wore the pants on this one. The set (one half being her mother's living room; the other being "everything else") is just plain ugly. It looks like they kept half of what was there from VIRGINIA WOOLF and just made it look frumpy and awkward.

Props must be given where due, so I will say that Ms. Kron has a wonderfully commanding presnce on stage, and is even funny for a few (note: a few) moments. Jayne Houdyshell, as Kron's mother, is sort of playing a stereotypical irritating mother. She does fine with the part - has nice little monologue (whick of course, doesn't make sense with everyone going on around it and it's entirely random), but still a nice monologue that alteast lets the audience know that she can act.

I don't know what kind of reviews this show got off-Broadway, but why anyone would think that this show could succeed on Broadway must be on the same drugs that the people over at the Barrymore Theatre are on.

So in closing, aside from the two main performers, there is a supporting cast of five - more noteable - two whites, and two African Americans. Kron speaks over and over and integration and trying to make the minorities in the community feel welcomed, but quite honesly, it was all a bunch of garbled words coming out of a mouth that I stopped listening to scenes before. This show is about nothing. Okay, Kron warned the audience fair and square about that in the beginning - but she didn't go on to warn is that the show we were about to see would make absolutely no sense and leave no impact on any of it's audience members. It's a pity, too - because I really wanted to like this show.

Unfortunately, and in closing, this show will be a big flop. There is no way in hell this show will have any sort of successful run on-Broaday. Off-Broadway, i'm sure it was a meaningless, delightful night out at the theatre - but here on Broadway, it just doesn't work. Not even for a second.

[tophertilson]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 7:59am

It amazes me how quick people are to put ANYTHING on Broadway that has garnered a few positive reviews. The hell with the New York Times critic! Producers need to start asking themselves, "What does the AUDIENCE want?"

I found WELL interesting when I saw it off-Broadway; neither time nor money wasted. But at no point did I think, "This needs to be on Broadway!" They should have done this in a variety of regionals and called it a day.

TT

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 10:38am

Well said.

Any other thoughts? I'm intrigued by what people might think of the show or my review (if you think I'm just stupid, and didn't get the show, or what).

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 11:19am

I saw it twice at the Public and thought (and still think) it was one of the finest original plays in several years. I'd go so far to call it the best play of the 21st Century so far. I sent at least a half dozen people I know to see it at The Public and they all agreed, with some of them going back multiple times. And yes it did receive across the board raves from every critic (which is why it moved). As for the play being about nothing or or pointless or even one second of it being nonsensical, I could write volumes in disagreement -- I've rarely seen a play about SO much and SO dense and that manages to tie together so many ideas on so many levels.

I haven't seen it on Broadway, yet, but I'd be surprised that it's lost THAT much in the move (though it probably would be better off in a smaller venue). Sorry you didn't like it.

Updated On: 3/11/06 at 11:19 AM

[melissa errico fan]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 11:23am

I loved the play when I saw it at the Public, but I'm worried about how it will do on Broadway. I have a feeling it will have trouble finding an audience and close rather quickly. How full was the house last night, Munk?

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 11:40am

It was probably half full - possibly even less. There were about 15 people in the balcony.

I just didn't get the show. I'm amazed that people are able to sit through it once, let alone more than that. It's completely bizzare to me that this play would get good reviews...I just didn't see the brilliance.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 11:44am

Oh I agree, it's going to have trouble finding an audience. Straight plays with no major stars never recoup on Broadway anymore (I'm hard pressed to name a non-revival, non-musical, non-star vehicle to turn a profit in the past 5 years). Clearly Liz McCann knew that and knew she wouldn't make a dime from this play, but bless her for moving it anyway. She believes in the play and thought it was so brilliant that it deserves a higher profile, even if she ends up losing a couple of million in the process.

Must be nice to have so much money that you can support only what you care about and believe in, even when you know it has little commercial potential (and McCann has a long history of doing just that going back to the 70s).

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 11:47am

And that's great - we need more people like her, and I appreciate all the efforts behind this play.

From the moment "the ensemble" emerged on stage as several different characters, wearing costumes that look (purposely, I'm sure) like they were just pulled out of a trunk, I was lost. The over-the-top characterizations is what probably ruined the play for me. I couldn't even concentrate on what they were saying, because they were all speaking and acting in such an intolerably irritating manner. Again, I assume it's the point. They're not really embodying these people, they're "acting out" these people - but it just doesn't work.

[LouW95]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 12:04pm

One might better understand the play after reading some of the professional reviews, which were mostly positive. Talkin Bway is a good example. This play truly does best off-Bway.
Updated On: 3/11/06 at 12:04 PM

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 12:36pm

I need to go back and see it in this incarnation before I really comment, but after I do, maybe I can explain what Kron is going for. The play is a metatheatrical, deconstruction of the very concept of the solo biographical play (which she became famous for) and the actors function as they do in Pirandello and are constructs of her memories of the past. That's why actors step in and out of character, commenting on the stories they are acting out. The play explores the stories we all tell and questions what do we owe to the truth? And who's truth is it? And what is the truth? What do we owe to the past? Who owns our stories? When we embellish our stories are we rewriting the past to suit our own purposes? And what about the people in those stories -- our family and friends? Are we rewriting them too, to perhaps make them what we want them to be rather than who they actually are?

How does the passage of time affect all of this? Does memory play tricks? Do we alter our own memories of the past -- purposefully or subconsciously -- to be able to live comfortably with them in the present? And what about forgiveness and making peace with one's past?

And then there's Kron's exploration of sickness and health and the very concept of what it is to be "well." Can communities be sick in the same way that individuals are? Is racism a sickness and can efforts to cure it lead to other hurts and problems and complications -- as can happen with trying to cure disease? And if there is racism in a community, who do you have to cure to overcome it -- the black people or the white people? Or both? How much of a factor does "wanting to get better" play in having a healthy community (or a healthy individual)?

Do sometimes people NEED their illnesses to survive? What happens when illness becomes a person's single most defining characteristic? And what happens to them if you cure them? Do they lose their identity? Do they simply develop other sicknesses to compensate? Why do some people (Lisa's mother for one) use illness as a kind of safety blanket? Why do people hide behind illness? Sympathy? Control? What about illnesses that no one else can see and no doctor can find? Are they psychosomatic? Are they real? Can they be as damaging as real disease?

I could go on. The play asks all these questions and more and somehow manages to answer a lot of them, though Kron wants you to find a lot of these answers within yourself and within your own families and communities. It's a remarkable piece of writing that on the surface looks like some gimmicky new-agey self-help feminist tract, but that's the smokescreen. As you peel back the layers and watch her "lose control of her play" and see her smiling facade begin to crack, you realize that she has a hell of a lot more going on in this play than what she initially stated. It's a highly theatrical work, using techniques and devices few artists even attempt to try anymore, yet it has a deep emotional core. It's hilarious and powerful and heartfelt, managing somehow to be intensely personal and completly universal at the same time.

It's that rare kind of theatre that can make you re-examine your own life and your own past and ask questions and see the lies you tell yourself and the walls you put up and the aspects of the past you've tried to forget, in order to be able to live your life in the present. A brilliant work that I hope can run a few months and effect some of the people who encounter it.

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 1:01pm

I understood WHY the characters were stepping in and out of character - I know what she was trying to go for. Undoubtedly, she succeeded in making the audience aware of the type of show it is.

I understood everything, really. I just don't think ANYTHING that she commented on or anything that resulted from the show was told in a very effective manner.

[WithoutATrace]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 3:02pm

I was there last night as well and thought it was an incoherent mess. I honestly couldn't even tell you what it was about if I tried. I'll be surprised if it finds an audience on broadway.

[muscle23ftl]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 3:04pm

LOL i like to read WOT reviews.

[WithoutATrace]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 3:11pm

this show isn't worth my time to write a detailed review...

hoping that The Most Happy Fella (tonight) will be time well spent!

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 4:10pm

Interesting. Everyone I knew loved the show at the Public and found it fully coherent and entertaining and smart and clever, etc........

Here's some review excerpts I found online:

Brantley from the Times:

"Ann is the archetypal parent who hovers in eternal rebuke and praise in so many adults' imaginations as a mythic and slightly grotesque nag and comfort. But when Ann is finally allowed to have her say in this ingeniously self-sabotaging memory play, something magical happens.

A flood of feelings that have been hammering at the door of 'Well' for the previous 90 minutes break in to seize unconditional power. And as Ann speaks simply and regretfully about a daughter she thought she knew to her core, the whole play, as it has been presented up to that moment, seems to dissolve. So, it might be added, do the hearts of the audience.
____________________________________________________________

It's hard to describe 'Well' without making it sound like some arcane Pirandellian exercise. But whenever it creaks with intellectual preciousness, Ms. Kron applies the oil of self-deprecation. The show has a warmth and accessibility that make you want to recommend it to everyone, not just downtown hipsters who like to have their theater and deconstruct it, too.
________________________________________________________________

But at the same time 'Well' underscores the limitations of such cleverness. Acting out Ms. Kron's memories, the other performers have the bright comic flatness of people compressed into amusing anecdotes. As the play progresses, they keep breaking character, commenting on the script's confusion and shallowness. In the meantime Ms. Kron's mother, as embodied by Ms. Houdyshell, unaccommodatingly takes on more and more complexity, until finally the whole play bursts open.

You could argue of course that since Ms. Kron is the author of 'Well,' she remains in manipulative control. But here, in her richest achievement to date, she finds such heartfelt theatrical forms for formlessness and confusion that you never feel hoodwinked or doubt her integrity.

And in accepting that it is impossible to know someone else completely, 'Well' paradoxically leads you into believing that by the end you have come to know Ms. Kron's mother better than you do most people. By the way, the real Ann Kron (not just the actress playing her) is very much alive, and the last words in 'Well' belong to her. They come from a speech made decades ago about civic responsibility. But in this context, they become poetry that defines the very soul of Ms. Kron's deeply affecting play.

http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9B00E5DE1E30F93AA15750C0A9629C8B63


Michael Feingold of The Village Voice:

"One reason not to trust the pedantic jargon of "performance studies" departments: Look hard at the newest theatrical forms and you find, essentially, good old theater in updated clothing. Here's Lisa Kron, a noted explorer in solo performance and collective creation. And here she is turning out, in Well, an absolutely traditional scripted play—delightfully scripted, as it happens—that thrives by cunningly pretending to be almost anything but. The resulting game, which Kron plays vivaciously and with honor, was perfected by Pirandello about a century ago. Its tricks, staples in the workrooms of such continental playwrights as Frisch and Anouilh, were the daily bread of early-'60s Off-Off writers like Ronald Tavel, Lanford Wilson (who still employs them), and Rosalyn Drexler. If you see Well, which I enthusiastically recommend, you can gauge the extent of its pedigree from the remark that a character in one of Drexler's early plays made on meeting an author: "I've always wanted to write myself—but then, I've been written already."

I certainly don't mean to accuse Kron of concealing her play's origins, any more than I would accuse Drexler of plagiarizing The Knight of the Burning Pestle, probably the first popular work in English to be built on the premise that the elements of a play are arbitrary and rearrangeable at will. The exhilarating feel of such plays, as in Well, comes from their liberating individualism, their teasing dialectic between the impulse of the moment and the demands of dramatic form. Precedents notwithstanding, every such play is its own template; Kron's play is especially so, because its endlessly disruptive form is the aesthetic equivalent of its content. The story of a daughter's struggle with her mother's enfeebling reliance on psychosomatic illnesses, and the mother's simultaneous struggle to avert her crumbling neighborhood's decline, Well's moral is that people can solve their problems best, even the most grievous ones, just by talking openly and candidly to each other. Since such candor in confrontation is the essence of drama, a play could have no better moral engine.
______________________________________________________________


Beyond Kron's formal playfulness, her love of truth, and her compassion for sick and injured souls, Well offers something bigger. It's political in a sense rare nowadays: as a model of conduct. Kron shows us her mother working democratically (and lovingly) to undermine a false structure that could only function at the expense of the people it purports to represent. At a time when every part of life's fabric is under threat, when lies and spin make up the bulk of our political discourse, and when our current administration will do anything to avoid speaking the truth on any subject, it's vital to be reminded again how much can be accomplished by a little calm, honest talk between humans. I hope some of next fall's candidates take the hint. "

http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0414,feingold,52451,11.html



All That Chat:

"These ideas combine into a show that entertains and provokes by turning familiar theatrical conventions upside-down. Kron is desperate to tell the story in her own uniquely theatrical vocabulary, while her mother wants everything presented in a straightforward, simple manner; in this battle of wills, each even attempts to impose her concept of "reality" on the play's other actors (Kron demands they stay in the world of the play; her mother offers to serve them drinks and refers to them by their real names).

As the show progresses, the question of who is really in control becomes ever murkier; Kron's theatrical fantasy world threatens to fall apart as her mother ingratiates herself to the cast members and to us. So convincing is all of this that the fact that Kron's mother is actually played by an actress (Jayne Houdyshell) is soon forgotten - she seems that real. In the play, Kron is determined to maintain solid control over her conventions, at least until she decides it's proper to tweak the audience with them. In Well, nothing is sacred.

That's just as it should be - half the fun in a play of this type is figuring out what the rules are and then watching to see if or when they'll be broken. (As it happens, in Well, nearly every scene is bursting with fun of this type.)
______________________________________________________________

While Kron succeeds at contrasting the health and rebirth of her neighborhood with that of herself, she does fail in one area: she has, in the end, written a play very much about her and her mother. That's part of the brilliance of Well, and what gives it such a universal, almost celebratory feeling. Sometimes the best things come about through hard work and sometimes they come about without our being aware of it. The method (or combination of methods) that led to Well are irrelevant; all that matters is that this hilarious and perceptive play has arrived."

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/ob/03_28_04.html

Updated On: 3/11/06 at 04:10 PM

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 5:38pm

Very interesting...it doesn't seem like they saw the same show that I saw last night...

[DG]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 5:53pm

Hmmm - I got tickets to this for our trip based solely on the fact that it was a Pulitzer finalist and had great press - and great word of mouth, at least from the few I heard about it from. Right now I'm having horrible flashbacks to last year when we saw Jane Alexander's piece, WHAT OF THE NIGHT, off-broadway

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 5:58pm

Except What of the Night got across the board pans, while Well got across the board raves. Munk and WithoutATrace are the only two people I've ever heard having a negative word about the show.

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 6:02pm

Perhaps the show just doesn't work outside of the intimacy of the Public Theatre? It wouldn't be the first play to suddenly "not work" in a Broadway house...

[DG]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 6:02pm

Very true, Margo

Even after reading those reviews last year, I STILL went just to see Jane - actually stating, "I'd pay to see her read the phone book" - and that would have been preferable!

I'm absolutely intrigued by this, and feel it will be invigorating to see something DIFFERENT, if nothing else.

[QMAN03]

Posted: 3/11/06 at 8:21pm

Munk and withoutatrace, where did you guys sit?

[WithoutATrace]

Posted: 3/12/06 at 12:48am

I was on the right side of the orchestra, Row N, seat 11. I could see and hear everything fine...unfortunately. Maybe some things were changed since when you all saw it at the Public. Munk and I definitely saw the same show last night.

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/12/06 at 2:42am

I was about 5th row Orchestra, dead center.

I just don't understand how it got such raves at The Public, and here, it seems like a straight version of BROOKLYN. By commenting on the poor form of the play (which was purposely written that way, I know!), she gets away with certain things.

Nothing really made sense to me. Nothing moved me, nothing made me think anything other than "Christ, RING OF FIRE and now this crap two nights in a row...I may have a ceizure."

Yea, it was definitely the same show - the only show - it was the first preview. There were even a few technical glitches - one of which was funnier than anything that actually came out of anyone's mouth.

Trace: And what was up with that black "wall" being raised up? I was like...okay.

Margo: I know you say everyone says it's amazing (except for me and WAT), which is legitimate - but I was with 4 other people - whom, together, have at one point or another enjoyed everything from THE OLDEST LIVING CONFEREDATE WIDOW to BROOKLYN - and none one of us a-- all 5, actually -- found anything exciting, funny, or even half intriguing about this play. Pulitzer final? Well, to be quite honest, I'm shocked.

I'm not saying end-all-be-all, this show blows - it very well could be that on top going right over my head, it just didn't make sense to me. And I doubt each of them are true, I'd like to think that many things don't go over my head - but the entire show was just seemingly pointless.

The should should be called "WHAT?"

[WithoutATrace]

Posted: 3/12/06 at 2:47am

Ok, i had NO IDEA what was going on with that black "wall." Did the set seem to fall apart at one point, Munk? And when that girl was trying to come up through the trap door to torment Lisa Kron, was the trap door supposed to get stuck like that? Lisa was trying to push the set backwards so the trap door would open, but the set wouldn't budge. It was so strange! Then the girl just entered via stage left instead. What a bizzare evening...

[munkustrap178]

Posted: 3/12/06 at 2:53am

The steps were covering the trap door, so she couldn't make her entrance, and after some tame ad libs, a techie walked our and fixed the problem.

Then the bottom right corner of the "wall" fell apart.

When the entire thing went up in the air, that was confirmation for me that I was lost.