“2.5 Minute Ride” opened at the Public Theater in 1999 and shot its writer-star, satirist Lisa Kron (of Five Lesbian Brothers fame), straight to the upper echelon of working dramatists. She returned a few years later with the resoundingly acclaimed “Well,” which made it all the way to Broadway, where it earned two 2006 Tony nominations.

Given that “2.5 Minute Ride” is an autobiographical one-woman show — and that Ms. Kron has spent nearly two decades honing her unique style of delivery — the notion of reviving the piece without Ms. Kron must have appeared daunting. Yet, as Matt M. Morrow’s affecting revival at Altered Stages proves, “2.5 Minute Ride” is compelling theater, with or without Ms. Kron.

If anything, seeing the play without Ms. Kron highlights its ingenious structure. The piece centers on two different outings — one an uproarious extended-family excursion to an Ohio amusement park, the other a sobering visit to Auschwitz with her elderly father, whose parents were killed there. But around and between episodes from the two disparate trips, Ms. Kron fills in the gaps with a seemingly random collection of odd and funny asides. Only with hindsight, as the resonances between the various stories accumulate, does it become clear that each has been chosen and positioned for maximum impact.

All the stories share a single goal: Lisa (played here by Nicole Golden) wants to create a portrait of her father. Being a child of postmodernism, she critiques her portrait even as she’s building it, attacking her own easy clichés and struggling mightily against the conventions of family remembrance and Holocaust memoir. At one point, she angrily rejects “the myth, the awe” that creep into her voice when she describes her father.

Nonetheless, awe seems a not-inappropriate response to her father’s extraordinary life. A German-born Jew who was evacuated by Kindertransport in the 1930s, raised in America, and sent back to Germany as a G.I. to interrogate German prisoners, Lisa’s father is the sort of man who asks himself what he might have done if he had been born a gentile in Nazi Germany. In later life, after losing most of his vision, he becomes the kind of dad who pops a nitroglycerin pill while waiting in line for a roller coaster.

Ms. Kron’s juxtaposition of heavy and light is masterful. Comedic set pieces about her family’s supersized existence in Lansing, Mich., bleed into monologues that achingly capture a child’s anxiety for her aging parent. Sarcastic cracks about her brother’s Orthodox Brooklyn wedding dissolve in a touching image of her parents under the chuppah. In the universe of “2.5 Minute Ride,” all varieties of experience are on equal footing — and all feed a growing sense of wonder, joy, and pain.

Ms. Golden, a little-known actor, steps boldly into the shoes left vacant by Ms. Kron. A pretty woman in her 30s, dressed in a simple top and jeans, she has a winning, Midwestern everywoman quality. She confidently handles the stand-up-like humor and the quicksilver shifts of mood, and she gets through a variety of accents relatively unscathed. She lacks some of the impudence that Ms. Kron’s performance used to cut the sweetness of certain moments, and she tends to strike the piece’s soft notes more softly than Ms. Kron would. But under Mr. Morrow’s crisp direction, she brings the material vividly to life on a stage that contains little more than a chair, a stool, and a blank screen. (The screen’s colored rectangles are treated as “slides” in a kind of postmodern slide show.)

The 2.5-minute ride of the title takes place on an especially terrifying roller coaster. Sitting next to her father, Lisa is overcome by fear that he’ll have a heart attack any second. Rushing forward, wanting to stop the ride, Lisa is every child who has ever loved a parent with that yearning, bottomless desire that overwhelms us as adults. And then, close on the heels of her love of metaphor, comes her fear of sentimentality, and Lisa cracks a joke.

Until February 9 (212 W. 29th St. at Seventh Avenue, 212-868-4444).