‘Stop Kiss’ Student Review
In the serene silence just after 4 o’clock last Wednesday night on the Russell Auditorium stage, a small, live band began to play.
There was no crash of sound, nor was there a slow augment of music, but the music spoke with the kind of tranquility one might find shopping in a grocery store or riding in an elevator. It was the harmony of regularity, and it began Callie’s average day in her apartment in New York. It was the day that she met Sara.
Although grim and tragic in its societal conflicts, Diana Son’s play, which is about the common misinterpretations of love in society and within ourselves, carries with it the same harmony that director Kathleen McGeever used to set the play’s opening rhythm.
Showing the contrast of personal and public relationships, “Stop Kiss” is split into two narrative timelines that follow Callie and Sara’s growth from friends into lovers and their subsequent trauma at the hands of a brutal hate crime that leaves Sara in a coma and Callie exposed as a lesbian to her peers and friends.
While Son’s commentary is the heart of the play, Callie and Sara’s tumultuous courtship is the star. Kate Bean, who plays snazzy New Yorker Callie, handles the awkward silences with co-star Maria Victoria-Perez the way that a magician handles cards.
The cleverly implied moments of mutual attraction are the highlight of both performances. Particularly effective is the scene where both Callie and Sara want to sleep in the same bed, but neither wants the other one to know. Maria Victoria-Perez plays straight to Kate’s sarcastic wit and klutzy physical gags, and the dynamic works wonders.
Unfortunately Son wrote all of her other characters as flat as day-old soda. George and Peter are both given due diligence by Taylor Roy and Addison Walden, but both characters are as dumb as bricks and actually remove some of the polish from Son’s controversial motif.
These guys would drive any woman to homosexuality. They’re completely one-dimensional and clueless. Charles Bender does a good job of softening the dent Detective Cole makes in the play. As a stereotypical detective in a play trying to remove and look past stereotypes, Cole seems rather out of his element. Bender doesn’t play him too heavily and makes him more identifiable than I think Son meant for him to be. I was actually sad to see him go.
Meghan Fleming plays perhaps one of the most understated and difficult parts of the entire play, Mrs. Winsley. With a very fine “oh dear!” kind of charm, her homophobia is displayed with subtle remarks and gestures which suggest their purpose, but don’t blast it.
Aside from the performances of its stars and the play’s pop culture wit, McGeever demonstrates excellent familiarity with the play’s key problem of rapid scene change by laying out all the sets together and using lights instead of curtains to transition between one and the other.
Other effective touches, such as dressing the shift crew in hospital garments and having a Sara stand-in for the coma scenes, help move the play along wonderfully. She finds ways to smooth out the play’s rougher edges to reveal, at its core, a tale of inner power and inner peace that transcends the boundaries of sex and society in favor of that harmony of regularity that comes with being with someone you love.
Son’s “Stop Kiss” gets three paws, but the opening night performance definitely gets four paws for acting, music, and direction. Three and half paws in all. Congratulations to everyone involved on selling out all five shows.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Oct 7 2005. Filed under Other.
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