Sun. April 8

Lisa Kron gets to go through therapy nearly every night. Lucky actress. Lucky playwright. Or, maybe, not - she is an excellent playwright and gifted actress - but she is playing some version of herself in "Well," which has got to be a tad wrenching. The play, up at the Huntington's Boston University Theatre through Easter, concerns Kron and her mother Ann, played by Mary Pat Gleason. This play, for which Kron (the actress) was nominated for a Tony, is about, well, being well. And not being well. It's an avant-garde comedy with a lot of dark corners and angles. It's about the difficulty of coping with an aging, possibly infirm parent; it's about anger and acceptance; it's about growing up in a "new" integrated neighborhood; it's about actors breaking character to speak to us or among themselves. It's about Kron explaining at the outset that the play is not about her and her mother (but it is), and that it's a theatrical construct, where the small stories on stage illuminate realities for us all. "Well," quite consciously, turns in on itself, jumping from past to present, from Kron as the reliable narrator to her mother as the reliable narrator, making us wonder who really is. Probably, they both are in their own heads. But Kron wrote this play and her mother is an actress. Kron acknowledges the lack of continuity by musing how an avant-garde play can bite you in the ass.

A little confusing? Yes, but not overwhelmingly so. The themes are about illness - specifically the chronic allergies Kron and her mother suffer - and integration. Kron, a white Jewish girl, is raised in a Catholic neighborhood that becomes a mixed black-and-white neighborhood. Her mother (when younger) heads up the neighborhood association to bring the races together. When she's elderly - which is her state through the play - she has bursts of energy, but is mainly fatigued, and resting in her La-Z-Boy recliner. She strikes both empathy and fear in Kron - will Kron end up this way too? And, this will strike a resonant chord with any of us who have dealt or are dealing with an aging parent. At one point, Ann's version of events so enrages Kron's character that she stalks upstairs and cedes the stage to her mother. All this back-and-forth, the time-shifting, the perspective-altering motion makes "Well" jarring ... but in a good way. It's closes today at 2 p.m.  Tickets: $75-44. Limited number of $15 and $14 tickets.

264 Huntington Ave., 617-273-0800, huntingtontheatre.org