Lisa Kron’s ‘2.5 Minute Ride’ returns to Hartford Stage after 22 years with new production

The title of the one-person play “2.5 Minute Ride” refers to a roller coaster thrill ride at a midwestern amusement park. It’s also a metaphor for playwright/performer Lisa Kron’s exploration of periods of turmoil in her family history. It is largely about her relationship with her father, a Holocaust survivor.

Kron, an accomplished writer and performer who is now also known as the book writer of the award-winning musical “Fun Home,” performed “2.5 Minute Ride” herself at Hartford Stage in 2002 as part of the theater’s former “Stage, Too” series. Now it’s being given a new production with someone other than Kron telling her story at Hartford Stage from May 30 through June 23.

The intense 75-minute monologue, which resembles a warped slide show presentation, is being directed by Zoë Golub-Sass. The play marks Golub-Sass’ directing debut at Hartford Stage, where she became the theater’s associate artistic director last year. In that position, she is on the planning team, which decides each season. She also works with casting directors, does “a lot of project management” and will likely direct a show each season. Next season, she’ll be directing Madeleine George’s mythical modern environmental disaster comedy “Hurricane Diane.”

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Golub-Sass has staged “2.5 Minute Ride” once before, in Ithaca, New York, with Lena Kaminsky, the same actor who is performing it in Hartford.

“Lena is brilliant, charming, very kind,” Golub-Sass said. “I’m thrilled that she could come back to do it here.”

The Hartford Stage rendition has the same star, director and lighting designer (Daisy Long) as the Ithaca one, but otherwise has a different design team and feels like a different production, Golub-Sass said. “It’s six years later. Lena and I are making new discoveries all the time. You can come at it again and again and again.”

There is a personal reason Golub-Sass chose this show to direct, she said. “My mother’s parents got out of Austria in 1939. I only recently learned a lot of new details about that. The play is Lisa’s family history, something she’s trying to figure out. For me, it’s a personal Jewish story. It’s about what it is to be second generation trying to understand what it is to have that legacy.”

Golub-Sass emphasized that while Kron based the script on her own life, she essentially created a character and a format that allows the work to be done by others.

“The piece was developed in the ‘90s and Lisa performed it herself into the 2000s. She made a theater character based on herself. It’s a play where the audience can find themselves. It has these fantastic long sentences, and also the rhythms of how we speak,” Golub-Sass said.

The play is full of detail about the Holocaust and about Michigan and Ohio in the mid-20th century, but Golub-Sass is impressed with how universal it can seem.

“It’s about how great it can be to really know someone, but how difficult that is,” she said. “We can never know someone else entirely. That’s something Lisa’s after. It’s also about feeling like you don’t fit in.”

Golub-Sass said when she first did the play at The Kitchen Theatre in Ithaca in 2018, “it was just after the Squirrel Hill shooting in Pittsburgh. It was a difficult and confusing time. It’s still a difficult and confusing time.” She saw the play connect with a variety of audience members, covering two or three generations.

While Kron performed on a bare stage with projections, Golub-Sass said that, for this version, “we’ve created a theatrical environment. It’s a minimal set, but everything in it is very important and specific.

“Lisa Kron is brilliant. I listen to her on podcasts obsessively,” Golub-Sass added. “In this piece, she really throws us off course. You don’t know what will come in the next moment. We joke about it, but it really is a rollercoaster ride for the actor and the audience.”

“2.5 Minute Ride” by Lisa Kron, directed by Zoë Golub-Sass and starring Lena Kaminsky, runs May 30 through June 23 at Hartford Stage, 50 Church St., Hartford. $20-$100. Performances are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. There is no 2 p.m. performance on June 1, no performance at all on June 11 and the June 11 performance is at 2 p.m. rather than 7:30 p.m. $20-$100. hartfordstage.org/2.5-minute-ride.