Shana Wride in 2.5 Minute Ride, a one-woman show that portrays the author's father onstage.

Lisa Kron’s mother Ann has been chronically ill for decades. So why can’t she get better? Come on. Other people do. They have ailments for years then suddenly heal and move on with their lives. Wait a sec: maybe Ann likes being sick. Needs the attention. Or is too lazy to try. Even worse: she could suffer the Lord’s punishment for some vile sin. Yeah, that must be it! Insalubrious karma. A curse from the Almighty.

(Ann may have learned long ago that remarks like these tell more about the questioner than they do about her.)

Lisa Kron’s Well dives into this medical conundrum. The narrator, named Lisa, says she isn’t the playwright, but acts as if she is, and also the director of Diversionary Theatre’s production. Lisa had a debilitating illness as a teen. She went to a famous allergy center in Chicago and eventually recovered. Not only that, she’s convinced she just got better. Didn’t need the sensitivity tests and chalky food.

Her mother Ann has been gravely ill most of her life with profound fatigue, immobility, and myriad aches. When we enter Diversionary’s playing space, she’s conked out on an ancient La-Z-Boy, a black Lone Ranger mask over her eyes. She’s quilted into the chair so well we barely notice her.

Lisa wants to stage a “multi-character theatrical exploration of issues of health and illness, both in the individual and society.” Oh yug! Here we go. Descriptions as abstract and pretentious as that scream “Snooze button!” Plus, she has a fistful of dog-eared index cards, which makes Well even look to be a dreary pseudo-lecture disguised as performance art.

Kron (a comically nervous Samantha Ginn) will ask why some people overcome chronic illness and others, like her mother, don’t, even though Ann somehow healed a community in Lansing, Michigan.

What follows is as scattered as spilled index cards and at times an eloquent response to the question. And as the show proceeds, Lisa grows smaller and smaller.

You could say Well attacks itself. Kron/Ginn plans an orderly chronology of events, performed by four local actors who use their real names: Adam Cuppy, Cashae Monya, Durwood Murray, and Tiffany Tang. They play people in Kron’s “montage” and also themselves later on. But the chronology keeps missing important details. Ann, who doesn’t want to be part of the show, hears so many mistakes she rises from the recliner and intercedes.

Ann is almost two people. She’s the shut-in, barely able to move. And somehow she has enough spiritual energy to integrate an African-American neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan, apparently all by herself. Wanting Lisa and her brother to live in a racially diverse environment, she founded the Westside Neighborhood Organization. And the Krons moved there, among the first white families to do so. Which raises another question: how can someone so ill have that kind of strength?

And another: how to paint such a portrait? Where to start? How to account for the extremes?

It turns out, Lisa can’t. Like Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, things fall apart. The scripted scenes don’t help (and are the weakest part of Diversionary’s in many ways fine production); the actors threaten to revolt, and Lisa loses control.

Sean Fanning’s spare set, cloudy blue walls with an oasis of realism stage right — Ann’s La-Z-boy and a small, faded wooden book case — divides the space in two: Ann’s domain and Lisa’s bare performance space. In effect, the stage puts fiction on one side and actuality on the other. As the 140-minute piece proceeds, Lisa’s efforts become chaotic. Frail, recliner-ridden Ann takes over and attempts to restore order — as does Annie Hinton as Ann. She’s so natural, so real, the others are obviously acting. They’re performing before an audience; Hinton treats the audience as neighbors watching a performance. And would they care for something to drink?

Well is Kron’s tribute to her bedridden yet somehow indefatigable mother (“a fantastically energetic person trapped in an utterly exhausted body”). Diversionary is running Kron’s solo piece, 2.5 Minute Ride, in repertory with Well. Seeing one helps inform the other, since 2.5 is Kron’s attempt to portray her father, Walter, on a stage. It came first in 1996 (Well in 2004) and asks similar questions. Once again Kron faces a Humpty Dumpty–like inability to unify disparate elements.

She’s giving a slide show. Every time she presses the clicker a new box of light appears on a wall. “This is my father’s hometown,” she says, “looking down from the clock tower.” Yet all we see is light.

Kron chose contrasting events to characterize her father, a Holocaust survivor. One is her family’s annual, and insane, trip to the Cedar Point amusement park — “the roller coaster capital of the world” — in Sandusky, Ohio. The other is a trip she and Walter took to the Auchwitz concentration camp, where her grandparents died.

Kron makes the stage bipolar: manic silliness on one side, bottomless solemnity on the other. She never tries to unite the two. Yet as she leaps from one to the other, the contrasting perspectives account for much more than a mere narration could.

Shana Wride plays Kron’s emotional shifts so expertly it’s near impossible to imagine it’s her first solo work. She’s engaging, personal, wacky, hurt almost beyond grief — and wonderful throughout.

Well and 2.5 Minute Ride by Lisa Kron

Directed by Kym Pappas (Well), Rosina Reynolds (2.5); cast for 2.5: Shana Wride; cast for Well: Adam Cuppy, Samantha Ginn, Annie Hinton, Cashae Monya, Durwood Murray, Tiffany Tang; scenic design, Sean Fanning; costumes, Kate Bishop; lighting, Curtis Mueller; sound, Melanie Chen

Playing through March 19, 2.5 Minute Ride and Well run in repertory. For specific days and times contact the theater at 619-220-0097 or [email protected].