“Well” Takes a Shot at Reality

“Well” Takes a Shot at Reality
March 2008
By Mary Corcoran

The world has become a place where sickness—terminal illness, even—has been trivialized by the healthy; where minority verbalization about disadvantage is often referred to as “playing the race card;” and where the media indulges the privileged by producing television and film devoid of compassion but chocked full of pre-packaged judgments and labels.

The human impulse to label things—to group them together and give them a name—despite having a tendency to cloak reality, reinforces the label-er’s judgments by providing him with the illusion of being in control.

By this logic, American media is a control freak. Mainstream television and film habitually snub the truly disadvantaged by silencing their realities and promoting idealized—easier to handle—images of sickness, poverty, and general disadvantage.

While theatre is hardly mainstream, the voice of one woman—to be fair, two women: her mother chimes in at turns—have graced a Broadway stage, and more locally, the Nelda Balch Playhouse, to bring to light these disparate perceptions and subsequent projections of privilege,
both in the arts and in American culture.

In addition to authoring the play “Well,” in the Broadway production, Lisa Kron K’83, stars in the story she describes as a “multicharacter theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness both in the individual and in a community…I work using autobiographical material, but ultimately this is a theatrical exploration of a universal experience.”

A play within a play, “Well” discuss wellness in terms of mental and physical health, racial integration during the 1960s, and the tricky relationship between mothers and their daughters—oh, and the convenience of selective memory and perspective. Kron questions perspective and her play begs understanding of disadvantage, wholeheartedly speaking to the truth of being a minority.

According to the Media Awareness Network, a Canadian organization dedicated to media literacy, biology is not the sole determinant in racial identity; rather, the North American perception of race is “equally shaped by social norms and expectations, which are based on historical events and current practices.” The organization, comprised of experts in education, journalism, mass communications, and cultural policy has found “being white is perceived as the norm. Often the fact that whiteness is also a race is not acknowledged.” This belief mirrors Kron’s argument that whiteness, health and Christianity, are merely the foundations for the disadvantages and vice associated with minority status, sickness, and any non-Christian religions.

“Well” delves into the privileged perspective, specifically drawing attention to untrue notions of duality in several contexts: of whiteness—simply being black on top of white; of
religion—being Jewish on top of Christian (like a decoration), and of health—being sick on top of healthy, as if when sick one should just summon the underlying strength of his health to overcome. All of these beliefs are real, naturally idealized and perpetuated by the privileged, those graced with the fortune and luck—a central theme in “Well”—to not understand what it means to be unwell.

The Media Awareness Network attributes differences in white and minority perspectives to the advantages inherent in white privilege; that is, in schools all American children learn a predominantly white ethnocentric perspective. To be fair, that’s not the case during February or March, Black History Month and Women’s History Month, respectively.

Through “Well,” Kron brings to the surface many sticky topics often avoided in television, theatre and, you guessed it, real life.

Raised in Lansing, Michigan during the 1960s, Kron grew up in a primarily white middle-class neighborhood that during her childhood was in the process of undergoing gentrification efforts (spearheaded by her mother and the Westside Neighborhood Association). In several settings however, she was a member of the minority—the out-group, the unprivileged—specifically in measures beyond that of biological race. In her play, Kron details her experiences as a privileged, “well” individual, while also giving voice to her struggles and the realities of being unprivileged and unwell in a generally unsympathetic, narrow-minded society.

She questions why some people get better while others remain sick—why some people transcend their obstacles while others are forced to simply muddle through. And her perspective is genuine. As a child, Kron and her family were the lone Jews in their Westside neighborhood of Lansing. She is also a lesbian, and though she does not bring to her play the trials she’s encountered specific to her sexual orientation, the theme bleeds through. The crutch of Kron’s case—that often media and the entertainment industry portray only privileged perspectives—is one that is often consumed unquestioningly, and hardly ever vocalized.

White Americans are indulged through television as they watch mostly white characters move through an artificial, race-free reality. The mere coinage of the term “token black character” speaks volumes to the norms media has taught America to accept. Kron’s Well unpacks these ideas by giving them voice—a voice people want to hear. In 2006, the play’s lead actors each received a Tony nomination.

The play’s completeness is concreted by a critical, ironic paradox. Throughout the plot, as the character of Lisa remembers and retells experiences from her youth, her mother, Ann, often can’t help but interject. “The rest of it was right, but that last part—I think you must have made that up so you could have a nice ending,” she says. “Its just that I’ve noticed a number of little inaccuracies as you’ve been going along.”

The interplay between mother and daughter chips away at stories, splicing together differences in perspective to form a cohesive picture of their lives together and, more broadly, a snapshot from the time—Michigan in the 1960s. Well’s integrity rests in collaborative storytelling and the transparency of their efforts at sifting out truth from fiction.

In a review of Well, Linda Winer of “Newsday” explains, “The revelations are both graceful and awkward, subtle and obvious, elegant and confusing. Like life.” At this stage in American media and culture when so much realistic thought is stifled, the content of Well’s revelations is almost arbitrary, and the provocative progressiveness of individual thought and opinion, revolutionary.

As the play takes place in the recesses of Lisa’s memory and in comfort of her mother’s living room, thought and conversation are intimate and uncensored. Projecting images more truthful than others, “Well” is an honest work—a reminder to look beyond the glitz and shine American mass media so often glosses over true disadvantage.