2.5 Minute Ride
Hartford Stage
Hartford
Through June 23, 2024
2.5 Minute Ride is a one-person show about a woman named Lisa, who is making a movie about her father. He’s a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany whose parents were killed at Auschwitz. The play shifts between the present tense, where Lisa is looking through a slideshow of pictures of her family, and the past, when she visited Auschwitz with her father and aunt.
Lena Kaminsky does an incredible job as Lisa. My career as an actor was short-lived, but from that one performance I can extrapolate that the one-person show is difficult, to say the least. There’s no one else to rely on or look to for cues, no one’s energy to feed off of. Kaminsky captures the playfulness and joy of a proud daughter during the present tense, and the taut anxiousness of a young woman headed into hell in the past tense.
At first I questioned the decision to not show real pictures during Lisa’s slideshow. I came to see that Kaminsky’s imaginary interactions with the screen did far more for the show than giving me a concrete image to focus on. She drew the images herself through her tone and body language; it made the play so much more compelling.
My one complaint about the play is the framing of Lisa’s father, particularly during the visit to Auschwitz. Throughout the play, Lisa communicates the exuberance and humor of her father during their annual family trips to amusement parks; the play’s title comes from the length of the ride of a particularly punishing roller coaster during one of the trips. Yet none of her father’s personality comes across during the visit to Auschwitz. I was absolutely not expecting fun times in a concentration camp, but I was expecting to hear more about the impact such an experience had on this otherwise jovial man.
I think this is the only weakness in what is otherwise a great production. The Holocaust is one of the great evils committed in human history, and Auschwitz is one of the darkest places still standing. The horror of the place subsumes all of the characters save Lisa. We can feel her terror at being forced to return to find her father’s glasses, but I never get a sense of what her father or her aunt are feeling, save for the glum stoicism such a place demands. The play relies on the enormity of the crime to convey the emotions of the visit, without diffusing those emotions through characters.
At one point in the play, Lisa says in regards to Auschwitz, “Why am I telling you this? You’ve seen the images, so you don’t need me to tell you about it.” That’s exactly the point of theater and literature — yes, we can read the books about it and look at the pictures, but experiencing those truths through characters makes the truths human enough for us to absorb them. She also says, “I wanted to tell you about the trip — no, I wanted to tell you about my father.” But I don’t feel like I learned anything about Lisa’s father from the Auschwitz trip, and it’s a shame because he’s such a wonderfully well-drawn character otherwise. When Lisa shares her father’s story about sending the Gestapo officer to his death, I can imagine him wondering about the moral clarity he was operating under. It would have been good to have the experience of visiting a concentration camp distilled more through Lisa’s father than through the audience’s historical knowledge of it.
2.5 Minute Ride is a great showcase of the talents of Lena Kaminsky, and the interplay between family both here and gone. There are events in our history which must never be forgotten. This play is ensuring that at least one of those events never will be.
NEXT
2.5 Minute Ride continues at the Bushnell through June 23rd.
Jamil hits the streets to get a taste of Hartford.
