"2.5 Minute Ride" is a Powerful Trip

By Jana Pollack, New Rep Reviewer

“2.5 minute ride,” the one woman show currently playing in the black box theatre at New Rep, begins with a family slide show, presented by a daughter. She points out the people in the photographs with a laser pointer, often finishing her descriptions with “but of course, you can see that.” 

The catch, though, is that we can’t. The audience sees just empty slide after empty slide, blurry around the edges. As the piece moves forward, this becomes a metaphor for the blurred vision of the woman’s father, who has lost all sight except for a sliver of peripheral view. When he looks at his daughter, he tells her that this loss of vision has actually given him a more accurate perception of the world: “and when I look at where your head is,” he says, “all I see is flowers.” 

Adrianne Krstansky, the actress, who embodies the writer of the piece, carries the show with passion. The playwright, Lisa Kron, has written a piece that jumps from the midwest to Eastern Europe, from the old world to the world of twenty-four hour stores that carry everything from Wonder Bread to guns. The action moves from an American amusement park to the streets of Poland and into the depths of Auschwitz. What makes this journey work is Krstansky’s complete embodiment of Lisa, and her acceptance of Lisa’s world; her relationships with the people she is describing are clear and fully realized, which brings them to life.

What works best are the hardest parts. Lisa speaks honestly about her expectations for her trip to Auschwitz - her biggest fear upon going, she says, is that she will feel nothing at all. But when she arrives, her telling of the tale is truly horrifying, and all the more so as she admits that she cannot possibly do it justice, and hardly even wants to try. A powerful moment comes when Lisa embodies her father, and describes his insistence that he was lucky to be born a Jew, so that he did not have to face the choice of whether to join the Nazi party. 

What is less successful are the stories of the every day. The script works admirably to provide comic relief, but the attempt to mix comedy with tragedy feels somewhat staged, and the transitions aren’t smooth enough to allow for time to adjust.

But Krstansky is not afraid to look her audience in the eye, and that is what makes the experience of this play so effective. She paints clear pictures of the people in her life, so that despite the empty slides, we can see them. The not seeing - the fact that there are no pictures of these people, and we must rely on Lisa’s perceptions - ultimately gives us a better view.