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[Theater reviews]

Son and lovers
erinys’s Stop Kiss doesn’t linger

By Julia Cohen

Stop Kiss
By Diana Son. Directed by Alice R. Moore. Set design by Kristin Burgess. Costumes by Sarah Bartlett. Lighting by Sacha Shapiro. Sound by Stacey Cohen. Music by Brian Cimmet. With Arwen Anderson, Lin-Ann Ching, Jamey Roberts, Craig A. Brown, and Jonica Patella. Presented by erinys at the Boston Center for the Arts, Thursday through Saturday through August 25.

When a play has its own power to shock and disturb, opening it by shining flashlights in the audience’s faces is overkill — it immediately alienates the audience from the action. Diana Son’s Stop Kiss, which premiered Off Broadway in 1998, is not about menacing the audience; it’s about a friendship between two women that turns into something more, with unexpected and tragic consequences. Besides, Son has a trick of her own. Stop Kiss develops on parallel lines to show, in alternating scenes, the burgeoning of an unanticipated sexual attraction and the devastating aftermath of the gay bashing that results from it.

A third-grade teacher from St. Louis, Sara has left her long-time boyfriend and her family in favor of a teaching fellowship in the Bronx. Radio-station traffic reporter Callie, a friend of a friend, gets stuck showing Sara the ropes when she moves to New York City. But soon their acquaintance develops a sexual edge. The divided storyline shows the women’s relationship, laden with sexual tension, growing at once closer and more awkward at the same time that it treads the wake of the West Village gay bashing of which they are victims. Privy to both the flowering and the horrific results of the liaison, we’re caught between wanting Sara and Callie to overcome their inability to speak their feelings and wanting them to avoid the homophobic attack.

Son’s script relies heavily on contemporary liberal morality — something that’s not given enough attention in the erinys production at the Boston Center for the Arts. Director Alice R. Moore places too much emphasis on creating sexual tension between the women and not enough on the play’s broader concerns. Palpable sexuality factors into the success of some scenes. Yet Callie’s behavior after the attack lacks the intensity of her investment in the edgily progressing friendship. Because the characters haven’t really established an honest relationship before Sara winds up in the hospital, it falls to Callie to convey her growth into responsibility for an as-yet-undefined love; here she just looks like a deer in the headlights.

The arc of the play has to lie in Callie’s convincing evolution from cynical, trendy New Yorker to a woman with more emotional depth than she was aware of. Although Sara too must make a transition, her character is from the beginning more vulnerable and open to risk taking. And though Arwen Anderson, as Callie, and Lin-Ann Ching, as Sara, easily convey the sexual awkwardness of their characters’ relationship, they have difficulty capturing the emotional complexities of its deepening. Similarly, Jamey Roberts, as boyfriends George and Peter, and Craig A. Brown, as the detective who investigates the attack, are confined to aggressive male stereotypes. Their overbearing physicality dictates that they become antagonists, and that steals focus from Sara and Callie. All the actors possess enviable confidence, but the misguided direction mutes their effectiveness.

Erinys’s root problem, however, is its timing. Since the action alternates between the women’s edging into their friendship and the aftermath of the attack on them, more time needs to be given to the transitions. Moore’s production is just too rushed — jump-cutting à la filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard leaves the audience reeling. We don’t get time to ruminate on the women’s difficulty expressing their feelings, or to consider the pressure Callie feels when she and not Sara escapes the attack virtually injury-free. Son’s ability to dovetail the story of a budding romance with one of homophobia and violence surpasses that of this production, which bounces back and forth too fast to dig its feet into the compelling material.

Issue Date: August 16-23, 2001