5 - Messy Confrontations: Theatre and Expert Knowledge

Summary

Acquiring a vaudeville-style education among performers such as Deb Margolin, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver when she moved to the East Village in the 1980s, Lisa Kron, an American performer known for her edgy autobiographical one-woman shows, developed a very dynamic connection to her audience. What her solo work tries to create is the impression that the performer is not dissimilar from a storyteller, appearing herself in front of an audience and speaking to them directly as if for the first time. The production notes of her autobiographical performance 2.5 Minute Ride (1996) describe the atmosphere she aspires to create: ‘The sense should not be that the performer entered the room with every word planned out, but that the energy exchanged by the teller and the listener is building the story in the moment and taking it in unforeseen directions’ (Kron 2001: 4). Even plays like Well that draw on more traditional theatrical conventions seek to create the kind of ‘presence’ and the sense of an event's unavailability for re-presentation (even as it can be re-staged several times) that gives performance art its unique power. Like Wenders’ film Lightning over Water, which negotiates the tension between documentation and narrative in the representation of Ray's illness and dying, Well uses a mixture of forms to explore questions of health and illness drawing on Ann Kron's story, and relies on the collision between autobiographical performance and theatrical convention to interrogate the criteria of its successful treatment of these questions.

Well, directed by Leigh Silverman, received its world premiere at the Public Theater in New York on March 16, 2004 and opened on Broadway at the Longacre on March 30, 2006. Unlike Margaret Edson's 1993 play Wit, widely used in medical curricula, with which it shares some similarities (for example, the use of humour and metafictional elements), Kron's play is not as familiar to medical communities. This fact returns us to the question that many of the chapters of this book have posed: what do we bring into medical education and medical humanities, and why?