It takes some 90 minutes to go on actress-playwright Lisa Kron’s “2.5 Minute Ride,” a title that alludes to a roller coaster at an Ohio amusement park that was the site of an annual family reunion.
And, like any good roller coaster, it’s fun, mostly due to Kron’s easy delivery and hilarious portraits of family members.
Kron’s experience is reflected in her one-person show that opens CenterStage’s “Growing Up Jewish in America” series Saturday at the Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael. Following the Marin opening, Kron will move to the Magic Theatre in San Francisco for a three-week run.
The name of Kron’s show also reflects its development, as she weaves into her tale the story of her brother’s wedding to his “Internet bride” and a trip to Auschwitz with her German-born father. There are emotional highs and lows and switchbacks in time that move the audience through at a thrill-ride pace.
Even the Auschwitz segments are marked by a certain ironic humor as Kron’s father, sent to safety in the United States at age 15 while his parents perished, reflects on the good fortune that made him Jewish rather than a Gestapo officer who would eventually be punished for war crimes.
Kron says her family is not all that unusual, although they may appear to be in the show. “It’s the job of the writer to find the uniqueness in the ordinary,” she says.
“Although I talk about my family, the pieces are not really about them but something larger. I hope my audiences see their own experiences in my work and that’s what they come away with.”
They’re bound to smile when Kron tells the tale of how her brother, who spent a lot of time in front of his computer in Jewish chat rooms trying to meet girls, met his future wife.
Whenever he found someone promising, Kron relates, he’d jump into his van and go check her out. In the case of his wife-to-be it was quite a drive, however. She lived in Brooklyn and he was in Lansing, Mich. Undaunted by geography, he courted her anyway and now they both live in Lansing with their 1-year-old son.
Kron grew up in Lansing in an observant household, and regularly attended the Conservative synagogue her father helped to found. “I went to Hebrew school until I left for college,” she relates.
“2.5 Minute Ride” is far from her first theatrical effort. Kron’s “101 Humiliating Stories” toured from New York to Boston, as well as Los Angeles, Louisville, Portland and San Francisco’s Josie’s Cabaret. Also a monologue, it was nominated for a 1994-95 Drama Desk Award.
While she admires other solo performers like Spalding Gray and Anna Deveare Smith, emulation has influenced her less than economics.
“The cost of touring a show is a definite factor,” she says. “You do what you can with what you have.”
Kron lives in New York City, where she began her career in the East Village in 1984. She tours “in spurts,” spending much of her time working with the Obie Award-winning company The Five Lesbian Brothers, which she helped found.
No stranger to the Bay Area, the Five Lesbian Brothers spends several months a year at Theatre Rhinoceros, a kind of “second home,” she says.
Kron is the recipient of several playwriting grants and awards, including the 1997 CalArts/Alpert Award in theater.
Strangely enough, a recent benefit for the Holocaust Museum in Providence, R.I., was the first time she recalls working in front of a primarily Jewish audience.
“I was speaking for myself as a Jew but I wasn’t sure how that would resonate for other Jewish people,” she says. “So it was particularly gratifying to see the way this kind of audience accepted it.”
She may find the same kind of gratification in Marin.
The “Growing Up Jewish in America” series continues with the sixth annual Marin Jewish Film Festival March 28 to April 3 and concludes with a reprise of Bay Area performer Sherry Glaser’s popular “Family Secrets.”