When Lisa Kron's father, Walter, saw her acclaimed, one-woman show, "2.5 Minute Ride," his response was wry. "Nice eulogy, but I'm not dead yet," the 78-year-old Holocaust survivor quipped.

Kron, a 38-year-old actor-monologist-comedian, admits that the piece, in part, "is a 70-minute meditation on the [inevitable] death of my father." It is her attempt to come to grips with his mortality; with her yearning to "become a receptacle for all the things he knows."

But in the end, Kron realizes, that is ultimately impossible. When her father dies, all the information he carries about his lost Jewish world will die, too. "There is nothing I can do about it," Kron said, during a telephone interview. "And I have to grieve that."

Kron, known for her work with the Obie-winning Five Lesbian Brothers, says her father, an attorney and civil rights activist, was, in many ways, responsible for her career in alternative theater. Having lost his parents in Auschwitz, he came to the U.S. at the age of 15 on the Kindertransport, an effort to evacuate Jewish children from Nazi Germany. But, he always maintained, had he not had the fortune of being born Jewish, he could just as easily have become a Nazi.

Conformity was not a value in the Kron household. When Lisa asked her father why he raised his children Jewish, he replied, "I didn't want you to fit in. I wanted you to be different." Feeling different, he suggested, breeds empathy. And so, during a period of white-flight, the Krons bought a home in a black area of Lansing, MI, where they were the only Jews in the neighborhood.

After attending Kalamazoo College, Kron spurned the mainstream theater to create amusing solo pieces like "101 Humiliating Stories." All the while, she longed to write a piece about her father, about her need to relate to his legacy and the impossibility of comprehending it. But her own impressions of his saga were "too mythologized," she realized. She needed a different "way in."

Kron's chance came in the early 1990s, when she accompanied her father on a trip back to his German hometown and then to Auschwitz. It was a wild ride across Europe followed by another "wild ride": the Kron's annual sojourn to the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, OH, where her father gleefully rode all the roller coasters. Kron realized that by intertwining the two tales from her own point of view, with some additional family stories, she had her piece. "I'm telling my father's story, but I'm also a filter," she says. "His story is filtered through me."

For tickets and information about the show, which plays through March 5 at the Tiffany Theaters, call (310) 289-2999.