Playwright: Diana Son
At: Black Dove at Breadline Theatre Lab
Tickets: tickets@blackdovetheatre.org; $15
Runs through: Oct. 24
Black Dove, a new troupe in town with origins in Urbana-Champaign, seeks to develop multi-media productions of both classics and new works. The small troupe's next show, an original rock musical, will be closer to the stated mission than Stop Kiss, a play that's neither new nor multi-media. With this simple, low-budget studio theater staging, everything depends on the acting.
Stop Kiss is a 1998 play about two young, ostensibly straight women in New York whose journey of self-discovery draws them inexorably closer to each other. At the precise moment they tentatively reach the brink of physical relationship—their very first kiss—a hate crime leaves one physically damaged. Are Callie and Sara truly lesbians? They lack previous lesbian experiences, they don't have a sexual relationship, and they may never be more than friend and caregiver. Playwright Diana Son is exploring the essence of female relationship almost—but not entirely—removed from the physical. At what point does a woman become a lesbian? When, and how, does she begin to define herself as a woman who likes other women, or at least one particular woman? Son implies that the leap of faith, of mind, of emotion almost always precedes the leap into bed.
Stop Kiss has almost 20 scenes, some as brief as one minute, alternating between past and present. Half show how Callie and Sara meet and bond prior to the attack, and half dwell on the aftermath of the attack. As Callie and Sara, Mel Hard and Kelly Belmont are almost continuously on stage hopping from sofa to hospital bed, from costume to costume, and from then to now with appropriate shifts in mindset. Under director Jennifer Dobby they handle these tasks well, and are particularly engaging in the sometimes-naive and sometimes-flirtatious scenes of their deepening friendship.
Still, Stop Kiss grows tiresome even at just 100 minutes. Almost from the start, one knows how the relationship and story play out so there are few surprises, yet Son develops the play in step-by-step, leave-nothing-out detail. The burden of keeping the show interesting falls entirely on the performers and the physical production. This Stop Kiss offers only minimal production values (and an annoyingly humming air conditioner). While Hard and Belmont do have charm and chops, the audience remains two jumps ahead of them.
Other characters are ciphers appearing in one or two scenes, except for Callie's on-off boyfriend George (Joshua Gibbons). His words indicate a nice, decent, reasonably sensitive guy, but Dobby interprets him as a jerk half the time. The three men in Stop Kiss are quite secondary, yet all are portrayed to some degree as hostile. I can't say for sure, but I don't think women become lesbians because men are angry idiots.