Hartford Stage presents Tony Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride, directed by Zoë Golub-Sass.This story fuses a retrospective exploration of Lisa’s history by way of her father’s life with happenings from her family’s present. 2.5 Minute Ride is an emotional rollercoaster that allows us to try on a lens of personalized grief to view stories we only received glimpses of though the histories we’ve heard recounted over and over again— but with an understanding that life goes on despite all those things “we thought we could walk alway from.”
Lisa (Lena Kaminsky) intends to put together a video to honor the life of her father, who, at the tender age of 15, finds himself parentless in his escape from Nazi persecution. Lisa highlights emotionally juxtaposing moments, including stories from the annual family trip to Cedar Point Amusement Park and the father-daughter trip to Auschwitz, where her father’s parents were taken from him. Lisa unpacks themes of grief and the connectedness of humor and horror in the deeply personal and, somehow, deeply universal exploration of the things we can’t walk away from.
Kaminsky starts off slowly: matter-of-factly stating truths and recalling lighter moments before picking up slightly with a deep dive into memories whose gravity causes emotions to drop to the pit of the stomach. She then reconciles the resilience of the human heart before taking a turn and going through the loop again. Thoughts and emotions are triggered by photos whose frozen moments are worth an abundance of words.
The lighting and sound design of Daisy Long and Jane Shaw work together to give additional depth to Kaminsky’s storytelling. Judy Gallen’s scenic design is simplistic but provides a poignant visual that asks questions in the direction of archiving the contents of one’s life—how does it look? What would be vast enough to hold a lifetime of moments? —an ode to the strength of memory.
2.5 Minute Ride’s weaving together of family and cultural histories reminds us that there are always bigger truths than our personal experiences allows us to reconcile. It tells us that processing grief isn’t a linear process, and it asks us who we are, where we’ve come from, and what we’re doing with it all.
2.5 Minute Ride is showing through June 23rd. For tickets, visit https://www.hartfordstage.org/
