2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron
Lisa Kron’s “2.5 Minute Ride” is a one-woman play, that follows the comedic narrative of Lisa's trip to Auschwitz with Father, where her Grandparents were killed, juxtaposed with a family vacation to an amusement park. As the New York Times commented, "There's no way you can draw a straight line between these excursions, and Ms. Kron doesn't try"(Bartley 1999). Kron talks about her work of the play being a six-year healing process, but also the performance being a way to challenge certain topics,
“[the work] seek out the awkward moment…They dwell in discomfort. It is here that humor can be found, of course, and it also allows for the exploration of great feeling while avoiding sentimentality. The work seeks the place where we stumbled, where we are derailed by awkwardness, grandiosity, pretentiousness, vanity. It looks for the humanity lurking in the crevices of human behavior, and in so doing, creates a bond that makes room for certain assumptions to be challenged” (Kron 2).
Yes, I thought the same thing too, “....A comedic play involving the Holocaust?” Starting in the description the audience is challenged and confronted with a topic that is taboo to hold any type of space with humor. But Kron displays the sensitivity, complexity and the type of meditation human beings need to make sense of tragedy, grief and everyday life. Her work exemplifies how humor and horror can share the same human moment, all while pushing audiences to think critically.
"2.5 Minute Ride deals with the Holocaust-- a subject an audience approaches with a tremendous amount of emotional assumption. It seems to me that in this age of Holocaust museums and memorials we have developed a way of responding to this most horrible of tragedies that, in fact, protects us from ever approaching its horror...They are made up of elements handpicked from chaos to form sense"(Kron 2).
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- Uproar: The Power of Humor Mary Lopez
