One of the better things about New Village Arts\u2019 West Coast premiere of Stage Kiss, Sarah Ruhl\u2019s backstage farce about two actors who reprise their real-life affair onstage, is that the first act doesn\u2019t look like a backstage farce. Absent are the 78 window seats, 25 smoking jackets, 17 housemaids and 53 slamming doors that have helped brand the genre since the days of N\u00f6el Coward, the art form\u2019s arguable centerpiece; two chairs, a desk and little else frame the action as the absurd situations unfold. I sat there and waited for something a little less stylized to creep across the minimalist set, and I never got it. Oddly refreshing, in an oddly refreshing sort of way. Then the second act begins, with its more substantive scene design and its accelerated story development, aptly framing the farcical lead female in what might be called a poor man\u2019s drawing room \u2014 and then it hit me: Stage Kiss hasn\u2019t incubated yet, and it won\u2019t for a couple more rewrites. Far too much of the burden falls on that lead gal in the play\u2019s progression, no matter the sets\u2019 attempts to frame it in different ways; the secondary characters never shed her influence long enough to take on lives of their own. Farce is unutterably difficult to stage, because the actors must rely on the situations, not on themselves, to drive the action. Here, since so much of the action revolves around one role, the situations never develop. He (John DeCarlo) hasn\u2019t missed a beat since he and She (Amanda Morrow) did the nasty in the past-y. Photos by Samantha Jeet. Try telling that to She (Amanda Morrow), married to cool guy The Husband (Dallas McLaughlin) after having done the nasty with He (John DeCarlo) long before she settled down and had a kid. Her inner diva bids her onstage with He in a play about two figures who, of course, did the nasty and lived to tell about it. According to The Husband, She falls in love with all her leading men, whose stage kisses become markers for her own hardscrabble outlook on life. It\u2019s an OK idea, as each kiss has a different and well-drawn characteristic (while He\u2019s smooches derive from the couple\u2019s past, stand-in actor Kevin looks like he\u2019s going to eat She\u2019s face). The problem is that there\u2019s no attendant disparity among the other characters, because they\u2019re too busy drawing their raison d\u2019?tre from She. I don\u2019t think Morrow\u2019s ever offstage for more than an interval or two, which tells you how overly dependent on her the story is. Ruhl hasn\u2019t written a play so much as a character sketch, unwilling to spread the wealth that someone like She can share. The performances are steady as far as they go, with director Adrian Schwalbach in the always-reliable hands of Daren Scott. Brian Butler\u2019s Kevin sports a part in his hair that frames his nerdiness (he has to take that quality a step farther), and the show\u2019s end proves McLaughlin\u2019s Husband a solid straight-shooter (although Ruhl doesn\u2019t draw enough of him one way or the other early on). Christina Flynn and Sarah de la Isla are fine in several roles of subtext. Director Adrian Schwalbach (Daren Scott, right) has the patience of Job, especially around Kevin (Brian Butler).
\nI really did like Brian Redfern\u2019s scene design, for the reasons I stated (I can\u2019t remember ever seeing a farce so sparsely staged for an entire act, and that shows that Redfern thought things through to his liking). Chris Renda\u2019s lights, Matt Lescault-Wood\u2019s sound and Mary Larson\u2019s costumes define things adequately; Renda\u2019s lighting design is very, very good in illuminating tone and idea between the first and second acts. But director Chelsea Kaufman simply doesn\u2019t have a vehicle to work with, at least not insofar as equitable divisions of labor are concerned. To Morrow\u2019s great credit, she bucks up by herself under all that weight, and she\u2019s superbly cast to type. Now, it\u2019s Ruhl\u2019s turn to entrust that kind of freedom to the rest of the players. This review is based on the matinee performance of Feb. 8. Stage Kiss runs through March 1 at New Village Arts, 2787 State St. in Carlsbad. $23-$42. 760-433-3245, newvillagearts.org.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the better things about New Village Arts\u2019 West Coast premiere of Stage Kiss, Sarah Ruhl\u2019s backstage farce about two actors who reprise their real-life affair onstage, is that the first act doesn\u2019t look like a backstage farce. Absent are the 78 window seats, 25 smoking jackets, 17 housemaids and 53 slamming doors that […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":271165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11560","_seopress_titles_title":"NVA's 'Stage Kiss' has a hard time coming up for air","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11560],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-la-jolla-village-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}