Callie (Amy Cronise) is a slightly manic traffic reporter who, through mutual acquaintances, befriends Sara (Jodi Sommers), an earnest schoolteacher trying to find her footing in an unfamiliar New York City. Jumping back and forth in time, Son details their casual, unconscious courtship and the aftermath of the brutal gay-bashing that follows their hard-won and monumental kiss. Director Steven Dietz has a blessedly unforced hand with both sides of the tale, and his touch allows his actors -- and Son's text -- to display a disarming genuineness. Sommers' ingratiating calm makes Cronise's attraction to her inevitable, and if Cronise herself is pushing the frantic New Yorker bit a tad too far, she never falters in her depiction of Callie's blossoming affection. The rest of Dietz's ensemble -- particularly David Scully as Callie's friend and convenient lover -- inform the play's edges with natural empathy. Son may sometimes get knowingly cute with her dialogue, but mostly it's in the self-conscious way that two people talk as they begin to take soft-footed steps toward each other. The production does a nice job of appreciating the ephemeral gestures and tensions that add up to romance, and gets at the nervous, jazzy rhythms of being young and oblivious and in love.
What the production illustrates most successfully is the concept that each experience is only a small part of living. The kiss, the bashing, Callie's begrudging acceptance of her newfound sexuality (Son does a splendid job with the rarely understood awkwardness of coming out to yourself) -- none of these things actually ends the play, because Stop Kiss is primarily about recognizing love as a beginning.
GREX PRODUCTIONS is presenting the American premiere of Semi Monde, a "lost" NoËl Coward play, and is very happy about it. Everybody in the show is having a good time -- they're practically smiling at themselves -- and no one seems to care that not a single one of them has a believable English accent. The particular demands of Coward's style of comedy are twinkling hazily just above their heads, and only a few of the actors think to look up. Everybody really means it, though hardly anyone can do it.
Director David Morden tackles this rare piece in the sense that Coward is carrying a football and Morden is preventing a touchdown despite himself. Semi Monde, with its infi- delities and ambisexual couplings among the smart set in 1920s Paris, was originally too daring for the world to witness. Now it just feels overblown, and Morden takes it a few steps beyond that. It's nice to hear Coward's playful wit, and the over- zealous way his people create their own realities by trilling promises of love, but Semi Monde is essentially a series of vaguely woven sketches, an overpopulated comedy that Morden has alternately overdone and underdressed. For some reason, perhaps in the name of an unwise metaphor, he's allowed costume designer Kristin Hubbard to put most of his cast in bedclothes, and further musses things up by making his troupe play multiple characters and genders. The resulting confusion is not comedy with social commentary, but comment upon comment upon comment.
Comedy in Coward comes from the ludicrously meticulous abandon of his characters, the self-conscious composure they maintain while supposedly writhing in fits of ecstasy. Morden's actors are often doing battle with their own posture, let alone struggling with the burden of the required style. They have distinct difficulty articulating Coward's delicious shifts from pouting to passion and back again. Most of the players hurl themselves sincerely at the material with goosey vocal mannerisms and leering facial contortions; there must have been some very tired eyebrows after opening night. Only a trio of women -- Dawn Box, Susan McIntyre, and Amy Kim Waschke as various lovestruck socialites -- have any clever sense of the demure charade. Morden has failed to delineate the fine line between a character posing and an actor playing dress-up.
