Los Angeles Theater Review: STAGE KISS (Geffen)

KISS OFF

A backstage comedy with  more personalities than Sybil, Sarah Ruhl’s preposterous — and in some ways pretentious — 2011 play was apparently given a boffo treatment at Playwrights Horizon, San Francisco Playhouse, The Guthrie, and more. But not at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where Stage Kiss  had its World Premiere, and certainly not at the Geffen, where this misguided effort  opened last week.

Ruhl’s plays  — I’ve seen  The Clean House, Passion Play, Eurydice, Dead Man’s Cell Phone — are apparently worthy of a MacArthur Fellowship,  two Pulitzer Prize finalist nods, and a Tony Award nomination. I don’t get it. While I saw one of her plays  that was wholly enjoyable (yet still problematic) —  In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) —  I don’t think time will be kind to Ms. Ruhl’s works. She seems to be in a constant state of experimentation without having offered a Renaissance  in the art of playwriting.

Imagine  love story, farce, sit com, rom com, magical realism, alternate universe,  two plays-within-a-play, and more. Stage Kiss  is a very dubious  piece  to start with. Ruhl is asking if  actors can switch  between fantasy and reality as it relates  to their own love lives. Are they misguided  by all the showy speeches  they spew  onstage, or are they better at navigating their own romances  through artistic insight?

An audition, rehearsal, and performance in Act I  give way to an Act II apartment where actors  He (Barry Del Sherman) and She (Glenne Headly) carry out an affair; the real-life  actors who played the stage  actors in the first act also  play people in the lives of He and She — including a husband, daughter, lover, and pimp (yeah, it goes there, too).  Forget trying to figure it out.

This Stage Kiss  may well be a  metaphysical metatheatrical  masterpiece, but under Bart DeLorenzo’s flabby direction, what might  have been an uproarious farce ends up as an enervating dud and (the more I examine it) a senseless, angering mess.

There are moments which divert  pleasantly, but  once the novelty of the situation quickly  wears off, there isn’t much here  to justify the undercooked  concept or the characters’ nonsensical zigzagging  (like breaking out into “Some Enchanted Evening” while spotlit). Remembering  her strengths from The Vibrator Play, I think Ruhl  could have touched on some provocative ideas. But that was a rather straightforward play compared to her other works.  Here, she creates a razor’s edge that slices the chance for  romance or  comedy.

At the head of the  ridiculously miscast class is Glenne Headly, best-known from the film Dick Tracy;  whenever I watch her, she  always seems to have graduated from the Georgia Engel school of distinctive-but-one-note acting.  Here, she  has the task of playing a civilian who hardly ever acts,  an actress in a play, and  the play’s  character in both rehearsal and performance. According to The Director (Tim Bagley), she’s a wonderful performer. Problem is, we never see her perform wonderfully. Her odd demeanor suits the actress auditioning for some sort of regional theater, but once she gets the part, it seems the rest of the cast-within-the-cast would be shocked  at her lousy performance. Was her lack of differentiation  intentional?

Indeed, most  of the actors seemed like they were supposed to be acting poorly in a poorly written play in community theater. (And poor Stephen Caffrey, one of my favorite actors, was positively floundering as the on- and offstage husband.) But if this is community theater, where the hell did they get the money for those lavish sets?  I don’t get it. Neither does Mr. DeLorenzo.

photos by  Jeff Lorch Photography

Stage Kiss
Gil Cates Theater
Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave
ends on  May 15, 2016
for tickets, call 310.208.5454 or visit Geffen