EMOTIONAL ROLLER COASTER.

Byline: Reed Johnson  Theater Critic

Among certain Midwestern households, no summer is complete without a visit to Cedar Point Amusement Park, a 15-acre expanse of heart-thumping rides and nutritionally challenged foods in Sandusky, Ohio, west of Cleveland.

Each year, Lisa Kron and her extended family would make the pilgrimage from Lansing, Mich., to Cedar Point, a half-day's drive away. Undeterred by poor eyesight, creaky limbs or brutal heat waves, Kron's aging relatives, including her father, a 75-year-old Holocaust survivor, took a kind of stoic pleasure in enduring this annual ordeal.

Suffering in the name of family solidarity is what held these trips together, and it's also part of the thematic glue that binds ``2.5 Minute Ride,'' Kron's kaleidoscopically astute 70-minute monologue, playing through March 5 at the Tiffany Theaters in West Hollywood.

A talented comic actress known for her solo work and her performances with the Five Lesbian Brothers theater company, Kron combines a quietly humorous conversational style with a gift for spotting hidden connections among drastically dissimilar subjects. Her easygoing persona and eloquent wit allow Kron to transport her audience all the way from suburban Ohio to the Nazi killing fields, almost before we know we've been hijacked.

``2.5 Minute Ride'' is actually the story of three separate spiritual excursions, which Kron skillfully entwines into one emotionally resonant narrative.

First is the aforementioned Cedar Point outing, made when Kron was an adult, accompanied by her unflappable Irish-American partner, Peg. The second revolves around the wedding of Kron's brother to a woman he met through a Jewish singles chat room on AOL.

The third concerns the trip Kron made several years ago with her father to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where her paternal grandparents perished. (Her father was sent overseas as a child to escape the Nazis.)

This encounter, which casts a deep shadow over the other two stories, proves more painful in some ways for Kron than for her father, who has learned to take life with a philosophical shrug. Instead, it's Kron, a generation removed from Hitler's Final Solution, who struggles to find words to express the inexplicable horrors she envisions through her father's rapidly failing eyesight.

Appearing on a nearly bare stage, Kron initially relates these adventures like a cheerful tour guide, using slide projections that appear to us as blurry swatches of color. But through her penetrating words, the images resolve themselves into vivid mental postcards, sweeping the action forward.

Kron's monologue weaves and swoops like a roller coaster, now pausing to consider the gruesome efficiency of a death camp layout, now racing through a hilarious description of a state-of-the-art Midwestern shopping emporium. As the three stories converge, we, too, begin to glimpse the world through the eyes of her father, a man whose keen sense of destiny's fuzzy edges prompts him to remark that ``if it wasn't for the good fortune of being a Jew, I might have been a Nazi.''

Gracefully yet unobtrusively shaped by Mark Brokaw's direction and Kenneth Posner's dramatically nuanced lighting, ''2.5 Minute Ride'' is both a daughter's lovingly clear-eyed portrait of her father and an incomplete act of contrition for events already faded and distorted with time.

``I can feel the myth and the awe in my voice,'' Kron says, speaking not only of her father but of an ultimately unknowable past, ''and it makes me sick because it's not him.''

THE FACTS

--What: ``2.5 Minute Ride.''

--Where: Tiffany Theaters, 8532 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood.

--When: Through March 5. Performances at 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays.

--Tickets: $25 to $32.50. Call [phone].

--Our rating: three and 1/2 stars

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo: Lisa Kron weaves together three stories about her life into ``2.5 Minute Ride,'' a solo show at the Tiffany Theaters.

Box: THE FACTS (see text)