We review Sarah Ruhl’s ‘Stage Kiss’ at City Lights in San Jose.
Play within a play is pulled off deftly by a strong cast
The Sarah Ruhl play “Stage Kiss” now playing at San Jose’s City Lights Theater Company is really three plays in one. It’s a backstage comedy about a stage kiss between long-ago ex-lovers acting in a play about a reignited affair between long ago ex-lovers. We see extended chunks of the play they’re in, a dreadfully overwrought melodrama called “Last Kiss,” a fictional Broadway flop from the 1930s by three different playwrights, and of course the line between that play and the actors’ lives quickly becomes very, very blurred. There’s also another play within the play, in a very different style but hilariously over the top, but the less a potential audience member knows about that in advance the better. Ruhl’s 2011 play has made the rounds a bit locally since San Francisco Playhouse gave the play its Bay Area premiere in 2015, with other productions from Santa Rosa and Walnut Creek. The City Lights production is one of several Sarah Ruhl plays running in the Bay Area, including “How to Transcend a Happy Marriage” at Custom Made Theatre Co. in San Francisco and her new play “Becky Nurse of Salem” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It’s also one of two key South Bay theater openings from last weekend. “The Pianist of Willesden Lane,” pianist Mona Golabek’s Holocaust-themed solo show about her mother, presented by TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, is playing in Mountain View. Intentional bad acting can be a tricky thing, but the City Lights cast pulls it off with comic gusto in director Jeffrey Bracco’s lively staging, with a lot of wildly exaggerated gestures and takes. The main characters — the longlost lovers playing long-lost lovers — are simply named He and She. April Green lends She palpable, almost voracious insecurity, always looking around for some guidance or validation, which makes her initial audition a very funny whirlwind of overcompensation. All that also makes her a sucker for Asher Krohn’s brooding, sullen He, who’s as much a posturing overactor in life as onstage. Damian Vega is amusingly oblivious and overstated as She’s onstage husband and understated and touchingly tolerant as her actual hubby. Alexandra Velazquez also does double duty as both versions of her daughter, and the real daughter (or rather the slightly less fictional one) is a wonderfully formidable force of righteous adolescent disgruntlement. April Culver is almost desperately earnest as He’s girlfriend, who tries way too hard to pretend that everything’s OK. Former City Lights artistic director Tom Gough (with a very artificial British accent) is entertainingly useless as the wishy-washy director whose lack of guidance borders on malpractice. Matthew Regan is particularly funny as the all-purpose understudy Kevin, a sweetly awkward and easygoing guy whose face twists into a ridiculous grimace when he’s about to kiss. Sound designer and composer George Psarras punctuates the scene changes with old jazz hits (at least in the first act) and provides appropriately old-fashioned music for the 1930s play’s comically corny songs. Ron Gasparinetti’s set deftly shifts from raw backstage space to an elegant set for the playwithin-a-play and a seedy, grubby apartment. Costumer Anna Chase also adds a touch of elegance with She’s gown for the play. As is often the case in Ruhl plays, the line between relative reality and fantasy is very thin at times in a way that keeps the audience on its toes (and perhaps occasionally wondering, “Wait, what?”). The play goes on longer than one might expect, not because it’s terribly long but because whole new chapters start up just when the play seems to be winding down. At the same time, the comedy keeps building on itself, making some of those final scenes terribly funny, and also touching. It’s a quirky, rueful love letter of sorts to ill-fated love affairs, especially to performers’ sometimes quixotic and heartbreaking relationship with the theater.