When Lisa Kron was growing up in southern Michigan, her family would make an annual trek to a noted amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio — Cedar Point — one of the oldest operating amusement parks in the country, known in particular for its 16 different roller coasters.

So when Kron, the Tony Award winning playwright, went looking for a title for a one-woman, autobiographical production she was developing, she was thinking in part about riding in a small train of narrow cars, plummeting in near-vertical drops and taking tight curves at breakneck speed.

But Kron’s “2.5 Minute Ride,” which will be staged at Northampton’s Academy of Music for three weekends in late January/early February, examines a number of other stories from her life and her family’s history — in particular, her visit to Auschwitz with her German-American father, whose family perished in the Holocaust.

Yet even with material as dark as that, the play, since its debut in the late 1990s, has been celebrated for its mix of humor and tragedy — a roller coaster ride, if you will — and an expansive vision of the human experience and the sometimes strange ties that bind families.

As the New York Times wrote in 1999, Kron’s play “sets off emotional vibrations that just won’t stop.”

“It has a certain amount of understatement and a kind of outrageousness,” said Mary Beth Brooker, director of the Academy production. “It’s a work of real imagination, in that [Kron] is able to juxtapose moments of genuine tragedy and grief with really disarming humor.”

The Northampton play, which is being produced by Debra J’Anthony, the Academy’s executive director, will be presented in a black box format, which limited seating on the stage itself. It has a minimal set and is designed to focus on the script and performance.

Taking on Kron’s role – Kron is also an actor who appeared in her first productions of “2.5 Minute Ride” – is a relative newcomer to the Valley’s theater scene, Allie Wittner. Wittner grew up north of Boston, was active in theater in a number of other cities including Los Angeles and Chicago, but was thinking of moving on from theater when she came to the region in summer 2021.

Instead, Wittner said, “I fell in love with the area, and then I got very connected to the local theater scene. I had a profound desire to make theater again.”

Brooker, who’s been involved in theater for years in several capacities – directing, writing, dramaturgy — met Wittner a few years ago through the Northampton group Play Incubation Collective and came to see her as an ideal choice for Kron’s play.

“Allie has a very understated sense of humor, very sly,” said Brooker. “I appreciate Allie as a fellow actor. She’s someone of deep reflection who understands the nuances of this play and can handle its range.”

Pulitzer Prize runner-up

Kron, who lives in New York City, has a local connection of sorts: She’s married to another playwright, Madeleine George, who grew up in Amherst.

And both playwrights were semi-finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 2014 when Annie Baker, the 1999 Amherst Regional High School graduate, won the award that year for her acclaimed play “The Flick,” making Amherst ground zero for the Pulitzer in drama. (George also once babysat Baker when both were growing up on the same street in Amherst.)

That said, Kron’s play is rooted in part in her experiences growing up Michigan, where she has said she felt like something of an outsider. She, her brother, and her father were Jewish, and her mother converted to Judaism when she married. But her mother’s side of the family were Christians, and all her father’s relatives had died in the Holocaust.

Her father, Walter, was sent from Germany to the United States in 1937 at age 15 to escape Nazi persecution, though he returned to Germany at the end of World War II when he served as a U.S. Army interrogator of Nazi war criminals.

He also took his daughter to Germany with him in the 1990s to see his hometown and to visit Auschwitz, which Kron recounts in her play in a number of ways, such as pretending to screen a slide show of old photographs of her father’s hometown and his parents, and relating her father’s memories of childhood.

Brooker says Wittner uses a number of means to personify the other characters in the story, such as speaking in a different voice or accent. Primarily, though, Kron’s story is presented personally: “She’s telling the stories in her own voice, filtering them through her memories and her emotions,” Brooker said.

For her part, Wittner says the play also invites audience members “to project our own experiences onto what’s happening. [Kron] starts out to tell the story of her parents, but in doing that she discovers something else.”

As Kron said in an interview several years ago, “I wanted to tell this story about [my father], but I couldn’t find a way to do it until I took a trip with him to his hometown and we visited Auschwitz … He also loved to ride roller coasters, and I was interested in the way humor and horror are flip sides of the same coin.”

Some of the play’s laughs come from Kron’s description of how her brother, who’s a few years younger than her, met his wife online. That’s not all that uncommon today, Brooker notes, but “2.5 Minute Ride” is set in an earlier time when Internet dating was “still something of a novelty,” she said.

“They meet through AOL [America Online] in its early days, so that tells you something about the era,” Brooker said with a laugh.

Wittner says she’s been developing an autobiographical play of her own, which makes performing in “2.5 Minute Ride” a natural progression of sorts and a great opportunity “to explore this wonderful story with a full range of emotion … doing this feels like a culmination of my having grown as a person and an actor” since moving to the Valley.

The play also has a soundtrack — part of it invokes the experience of riding roller coasters, after all — and will run about 80 to 90 minutes, Brooker says. As program notes put it, the play is “a roller coaster ride through a family album.”

“2.5 Minute Ride” will be staged Jan. 19-20, 26-27, and Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m. and on Feb. 4 at 2:30 p.m. at the Academy of Music. For tickets, visit aomtheatre.com.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.