2.5 MINUTE RIDE
In 2.5 Minute Ride, Lisa Kron invites her audience on a roller coaster ride through the Kron family album. Rising and falling between high hilarity and deep disquiet, Kron demonstrates with disarming simplicity that humor and horror can share the same human moment.
The play switches back and forth between Kron's journey to Auschwitz with her septuagenarian father, a Holocaust survivor; her Michigan family's annual pilgrimage to a Sandusky, Ohio, amusement park; and her brother's marriage to his Internet bride.
By moving seamlessly between these three diverse recountings, Kron creates a complex and at times startling meditation on how human beings make sense of tragedy, grief, and everyday life.
EXCERPT
(As the audience hears the sound of a slide projector advancing to the next slide, lights up on Lisa, holding a “clicker” and a laser pointer. She describes the following “slides” which are not actually slides but squares of colored light. As she talks she indicates what she sees with the pointer.)
These are my grand parents. My father’s parents. This, as you can see, is their wedding picture. I never knew them, actually… My father left his hometown in Germany in 1937, by himself, when he was fifteen years old, as a part of a program to get Jewish children out of Germany. I’m making a video tape about my father—about his experiences—well, actually about this trip we took together to his hometown in Germany and to then Auschwitz.
(Changes the slide with the clicker. The sound of an advancing slide projector is heard as a new square of light replaces the old one.)
Okay. This is my father’s hometown. And here you can see we’re looking down on the town from the clock tower. It was originally a walled city—I think you can see a little bit of the wall right here. It’s very beautiful. All these red roofs. My dad remembers eery cobble stone in this city. He knows its his tory from its inception in the middle ages and I think he con siders him self a part of that continuum. It was incredible, actually, when we were driving around. He can’t see too well anymore but he’d say things to me like, “Now if you look to your left, you should see two dirt tracks,” and there would be two dirt tracks, and he’d say, “That road was built by Napoleon.” Then he’d say, “All right now we’re go ing to go over a bump in the road,” and we’d go over a bump, and then he’d say, “And if it’s still there, you’ll see to your right, a hill with a ditch at the bot tom,” and there would be this hill and a ditch. And he’d say, “I remember when I was a boy I used to ride my bike as fast as I could down that hill and try not to get caught by the group of boys who were chasing me but if I did I developed a technique in which I would lie down in that ditch and pull one of the boys on top of me to use as a human shield.”
(Changes the slide.)
PURCHASE SCRIPT
Dramatic Publishing
Theatre Communications Group