By Dawnell Smith
Daily News Correspondent

Fairly early in the play "Well" by Lisa Kron, the narrator talks about reverting to adolescence when returning to her mother’s house as an adult. "Your parents live in an alternative universe where your therapy has no power," she says.

Well, "Well" lives in an alternative universe where assumptions have no power. Actors go out of character, the narrator loses control of her script and multiple story lines slip-slide-slam into a tangential exploration of illness as wellness, wellness as illness, and segregation as metaphor for closing doors, closing minds and closing hearts.

The play made waves when it opened in New York in 2004 and again last month in London. The Out North production is also sharp and worthy of far bigger crowds than it got Sunday afternoon. Clever and witty, homey and heady, the play grounds itself in the tangles of life rather than the tied up endings often forged in theater.

Though Kron played herself in the original production, Schatzie Schaefers fills her shoes nicely as the poised and frayed playwright scrambling to make life make sense through art even as it interrogates it. The narrative begins with Kron addressing the audience directly, using art lingo to explain how meaning and connections unfold in theater.

"This play is not about me and my mother," she says, but rather about "issues of illness and wellness."

Meanwhile, her mother Ann Kron (a pitch-perfect Bernie Blaine) snoozes in the living room at the rear of the stage. The younger Kron describes her as the picture of frailty and lethargy in a family with two core beliefs, “allergies and racial integration."

The elder Kron comes off as an outsider at first—she’s not much of a "theater person," says Lisa Kron—but soon trades places with her daughter as inquisitor and storyteller. This switching of status or position happens over and over as both structure and content for the play.

The set is simple, but suitably cluttered where needed, and the performances range from the silly to subtle. Indeed, Dick Reichman makes his directorial debut at Out North with an enviable cast and script.

Schaefers holds the entire piece together as the persona of the narrator trying to hold onto her material as sympathy shifts from her to her charming mother.

And, honestly, Blaine so thoroughly embodied Ann Kron Sunday evening that when she walked off stage—not at the finale but at a moment of revelation—you could almost see a communal thought bubble rise above the audience: "Hey, you can't do that. You're her mother!"

Though those two leads stole the show, the supporting cast ran away with scene after scene through wisecracks, changing allegiances and whimsical inside jokes.

Aaron Wiseman takes a game show host approach to his role of a nurse in an allergy clinic while Audrey Smith pulls out the stops in several male roles from schoolboy to inebriated neighbor; Jill Yarbrough nails the part of a jittery allergy patient while Chelsea Robinson cops an attitude as Kron's childhood nemesis.

Each actor plays multiple parts, including that of him and herself, as the play within a play disintegrates and reshapes itself.

Plenty of meta-hilarity ensues, but poignant insights keep the piece from annihilating its own vision. Above all, "Well" is about unraveling the nature of relationships, memory and art making—about how it takes more than good intentions to understand what it means to walk in another person’s shoes whether they be your mother’s or your childhood foe’s.

If you want good luck in a busy month of performing arts, through a penny in this “Well” before it runs dry.

"Well" continues at 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, at Out North, 3800 DeBarr Road (www.outnorth.org, 279.3800). Tickets cost $18 online and $20 at the door.