Stop Kiss

It seems a tautology to call this a passion project for Charlie Peters, since everything he does is a passion project. But I will go ahead and take that risk. Stop Kiss is indeed a passion project for director/local legend Charlie Peters, and one that he has been relentlessly promoting since the start of the Live Five season. I spent most of these months with only a vague awareness of what the play was actually about, though I assumed it was a romantic comedy. It's not. But it sort of is.

Stop Kiss is a play of two stories: a comedy and a tragedy. It begins with the meeting of two women, Callie and Sara. As two young, single women in New York City, they strike up a fast friendship, and that friendship turns into something else, and they struggle to come to grips with their true feelings for each other. When it seems they are finally ready to embrace the reality of their relationship, their lives are torn asunder by a shocking act of violence, leaving Sara lying comatose in a hospital bed. Callie has to carry on in grieving vigil, facing judgement and hostility from all around her, facing the obliteration of the life she had, all because of one kiss.

Two stories: a comedy and a tragedy; first one, then the other. The play's narrative arc is severed at the halfway point, and the scenes are scissored up, interlaced with one another to alternate in an odd/even rhythm, telling both halves of the story in parallel. Diana Son's script is a play of form. Trying to organise the narrative arc chronologically doesn't work; the story becomes patchy and lop-sided, without a clear emotional climax or sense of resolution. The strength of Stop Kiss, rather, lies in its powers of juxtaposition, the parallel lines of the story batting the audience back and forth between emotional states like a ping-pong ball. It emphasises each individual scene as a closed system. We dig in hard during the comedy because we know it's only going to last briefly, while we feel the sting of the tragedy fresh every time because we are still so close to what was lost. Arranging these singular scenes in this way is how the drama exists, and it is the only way it can exist.

Diana Son wrote this play in 1998, when issues of LGBT rights were only just beginning to accrue mainstream acceptance. 16 years later its effect has not diminished. Subjects of violence and homophobia are still central to our public conscious. Because this play is about more than one act of aggression; it's about a whole system of society that fails Callie and Sara, working fervently against them to prevent them from being who they really want to be. In one scene, Callie is relating to Detective Cole the nature of the assault, while the detective listens with thinly veiled disgust. Callie is made to feel that the attack was instigated by her lifestyle (which had not yet become a lifestyle at all) and that Sara aggravated the attack by not just walking away. Later Callie is confronted by Sara's former boyfriend Peter, who berates her for not being able to protect Sara. Everyone is interested in making the attack her fault while not providing any comfort for her, because her relationship with Sara is invalid.

But apart from the heavy material, Stop Kiss is also a delightful, humourous tale of the tribulations of two women living in New York City. There are clearly some local references that I could not entirely understand, but mostly it is relateable as a story of two people unsure of where they fit in a large world. Sara is a self-confident optimist teaching at a rough-and-tumble Bronx school, while cynical Callie is a traffic reporter who sees the whole world as being in a state of perpetual gridlock. They come together when Callie agrees to take care of Sara's shy cat (I'll leave it to everyone else to find a crass metaphor in that) and they connect through a mutual willingness to challenge each other without judging each other. The relationship flourishes onstage in a very sort amount of time, doubtless due in large part to the long-standing friendship of the two leads, Jenna-Lee Hyde and Angela Kemp. They have such natural chemistry that they are instantly believable as budding soul-mates.

The interplay between these two halves of the story is enhanced by Jenna Maren's set design. The stage is set up around Callie's roomy but cluttered Manhattan apartment. Making a living space look appropriately messy can be a difficult thing onstage, but Maren succeeds in making something that really feels inhabited. Along the back is a wall of several window screens. The screen on either side of the stage runs on a track, so it can be pulled forward to section off one wing of the stage to create an external space. Most of the tragic half of the story takes place is such external spaces, so in those scenes the stage creates a very claustrophobic effect, with Callie's world tightening around her, while the apartment set, and the happier associations that go with it, lingers tauntingly in the background.

One of the most striking decisions Charlie Peters made in his direction was how to handle scene changes. Multiple scene changes can be challenging for small productions without a dedicated crew, because actors then have to drop out to shuffle furniture around in the dark, and that can have a detrimental effect on character dynamics. But Peters avoided this problem by choreographing the scene changes, so that rather than pulling away from the scenes, the transitions become miniature scenes in themselves. There are no hard edges to the drama. When the lights dim, we see Callie and Sara being pulled away from each other and we see the tonal shift happening right in front of us. We also get to see these small character moments that are not in the script but which work perfectly logically in the form the drama takes. From beginning to end, the action flows freely.

There is only one problem with the format, and that is that it does not allow time for any make-up. We see Sara in a hospital bed after having been badly beaten, but to the audience there are no visual signs of injury. There is no good solution for this given the constant back-and-forth of the scenes, but unfortunately it is a detail that stands out.

With a cast of six, there are a lot of shifting dynamics that the actors have to manage gracefully. Jenna-Lee Hyde and Angela Kemp carry the majority of the play, but they have a solid group of actors supporting them. Curtis Peeteetuce is Detective Cole, whom we first see aggressively questioning Callie about an unspecified incident. He is the closest thing to a villain we actually see on stage, but Peeteetuce handles the role with a great sense of control. He does not play up the hostility to an exaggerated degree, but he carries through his scenes with a quiet, reserved disdain for people. Carol  Wylie is Mrs. Winsley, a considerate bystander armed with spider plants. She injects some compassion back into the play after Detective Cole, but she still has a New York steeliness about her. Jaron Francis plays George, Callie's sometime FWB who is not sure what to think about her relationship with Sara. Francis brings charisma and emotional realism to what is probably the least active character in the play. George pops in and out, mostly just as someone for Callie to bounce off, but Francis and Hyde have enough chemistry to make those scenes work. Then there is Chris Donlevy, who makes two short appearances as Peter, Sara's former (or current, depending on whom you ask) boyfriend. First he has an angry confrontation with Callie, then a soft moment with an unconscious Sara. Donlevy gives a weighty performance, hitting an emotional peak with very little time but also folding in the vaguely sinister and controlling undertones of Peter's sympathies.

Angela Kemp tackles the daunting task of playing Sara. The challenge for her is the vastly different energy levels at which she must play. In one scene she is feisty, animated, bouncy; in the next scene she is catatonic, or nearly so, and the scene after that she switches back. She never misses a beat, and even after spending one scene immobile she charges out on stage moments later firing on all cylinders. Kemp has a natural vibrancy that plays into Sara's fun and spunky side, but she also has an edge, a sense of strength and ferocity. In her tragic scenes, while she is, by necessity, doing little, she communicates a lot of emotion in her few, lingering glances.

And then there is Jenna-Lee Hyde, fearless and peerless. She demonstrates why she is the best young actress in the city with this dynamite performance. Callie is, at best, a lost soul. She begins the play as passive, cynical and withdrawn, able to let loose only by blasting pop music alone in her living room (displayed in the play's opening moments where Hyde shows off her lip-syncing skills). Her arc is based on finding strength, but not in a clean-cut heroic epic kind of way; it is a messy struggle to learn how to fight for something. And Hyde embraces that messiness. She digs deep into the character, staying present with every action, resonating with every minor emotional climax, putting a real flesh-and-blood person in the scene. This role takes a lot from her. Apart from one brief scene, she is onstage for the entire duration of the play, and she doesn't have a chance to take a breath. I think I've used the term "emotional whiplash" before, but it has never been more appropriate than right here. Jumping between these parallel scenes, Hyde is tossed around like a rag doll, going from comfortable joy to twisted misery, and she never misses her mark.

This is a play that lives for the stage. It needs to be shared. I can understand why Charlie Peters felt so strongly about sharing it. Stop Kiss contains a lot of pain, moment to moment, but overall it is a story about love, learning to accept your own desires, and the ability to fight for the right to be yourself. It doesn't moralise, because none of the characters pretend to have all the answers. Rather, it creates a dialogue. At some point we have all been Callie, and whether not we choose to admit it, we have also been Peter and Det. Cole. In this audience we are invited to ask ourselves what person we really choose to be.

And before I sign off, I should pause on the title. Stop Kiss. It's easy to say a play's title so much that it loses meaning. But this title is worth a moment, worth considering how much effort, throughout the course of the play, goes in to stopping a simple kiss from happening, worth considering why it is such a dangerous thing. But then again, maybe the title is an imperative, a guideline for those rough moments in the days that go by. Stop. Kiss.

Words to live by.