2.5 Minute Ride -- Whew!

Lisa Kron’s “2.5 Minute Ride was a very intense experience. This one-woman autobiographical show (featuring a wonderful Adrianne Krstansky as Lisa) is a study in how one woman comes to terms with her heritage, and her efforts to make sense of this heritage in the context of her Midwestern upbringing and her family’s experiences.
The play’s conceit involves Lisa’s project to capture her father’s life and history in a video. Her father was a Holocaust survivor whose parents were killed at Auschwitz. Coming to the United States at 15, he eventually moved to the Midwest and raised his family in Lansing, Michigan. The play begins with Lisa discussing her family’s quirks and giving a mock travelogue of pictures taken on a trip to Auschwitz with her father. The stories about her family and her relationship with her partner are humorous and sometimes hilarious. Her stories about the trip to Auschwitz are heartbreaking. The two story lines – the humor and the heartbreak – are told alternately, and Lisa slips from humor to heartbreak without notice. Krstansky played the scenes – especially the Auschwitz scenes –so beautifully, so well, and so intensely, that they were almost too much to take. I found myself wanting some scenes to end; not because they were bad, but because they were so painful to experience, even second-hand.
By re-living her grandparents’ experiences in the trip to Auschwitz, and by seeing how her father processes this experience, Lisa comes to more fully understand the role of her Jewish heritage in her life. This processing culminates in her discussions of her brother’s wedding to an Orthodox Jew. It was a decision her family could not understand and initially mocked, but the wedding turned out to be a surprising and healing event.
This is an excellent play. Just be ready to be taken on quite an emotional rollercoaster.