On a dismal Friday the 13th, as America was sliding ever deeper into the chaos of the corrupt Trump regime, the world’s broken climate was breeding more out of control wildfires around the West, and vicious wars continued in Europe and the Middle East, I found myself needing a moment of respite from the harsh realities of today’s world.
Stage Kiss, which opened June 13 at Very Little Theatre, proved to be just the ticket, providing two hours of entertaining and intelligent relief from the news. Sarah Ruhl’s play, which opened in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2011 and moved to off Broadway three years later, is half farce and half rom-com — and yet it offers a serious examination of a social and artistic issue woven into Ruhl’s bright valentine to the back-stage theater world: How, exactly, do actors kiss each other night after night on stage without side-tracking their actual lives?
In the story, a middle aged actress who’s been away from the theater for years shows up at an audition for the female lead in a revival of a 1930s melodrama. In the audition, she flounders her way through an awkward romantic scene, made even more awkward by a clueless director (Clancy Miller), with an actor who’s a hilariously terrible kisser (Avery Eberardo), only to be paired next with an actor who turns out to be a man from her distant real-life romantic past. Awkward, indeed.
“She” and “He” — those are the only names offered for the couple in Ruhl’s script — get the lead roles in the play-within-a-play melodrama, and soon find that their stage kisses are overpowering their real-life romantic lives.
In the VLT production, directed by Maggie Hadley, Jocelyn Kerr combines an earthy sexiness and vaudevillian comic sensibility in the role of She, who tries to get the emotionally cool He (Mark Cunha-Rigby) to open up about their situation. Thomas Weaver plays her patient husband, who tries to keep their marriage together, as their teenage daughter, played by Lauren Carter, savages the passionate couple for their indifference to those around them. Hillary Ferguson plays He’s blandly happy school-teacher girlfriend.
Hadley keeps the action moving right along, from French-farce rapid-fire pacing in the first act to more reflective moments in the show’s second act, when reality returns to the love-struck stage couple. In her job as director, Hadley also took on the challenging task of intimacy coordinator, a relatively new position in theater and film productions. Just imagine the subtle difficulties of choreographing the depiction of an awkward kiss between strangers that turns out to be not all that awkward.
The straightforward set, which variously depicts a theatrical stage and backstage, and an apartment in 1970s Manhattan, was designed by Juilianne Bodner.
Though Stage Kiss might not be the best of Ruhl’s often exquisite work, the show is a delight, and it pulled me out of my funk just in time to enjoy the real-life nationwide theater the next day, as millions of people marched against Donald Trump. Perfect timing.
Stage Kiss runs through June 29 at Very Little Theatre, 2350 Hilyard Street. Tickets and show times at TheVLT.com.