Playhouse Tuesdays: Stop Kiss

by erica wachs, prose reader

“They lock eyes, hoping the other will say something perfect. They keep waiting.” These beautiful, evocative lines of stage direction in Diana Son’s Stop Kiss, to me, are everything. The play is composed of twenty-two short (2-3 page) scenes out of chronological order, that tell the story of how two women, Callie and Sara, inexplicably fall in love, and are then brutally attacked after sharing their first kiss. The flashback scenes, therefore, that show their progression of love, are all flashbacks, or meant to take up the space of time that Sara has been in a coma. To read or watch this show is to actively keep waiting.

But what also makes these stage directions so gripping is the fact that most of the things these characters do say to each other are short, choppy sentences where the subtext—the actions—really do speak louder than words (I know, cliché). Diana Son’s world of Stop Kiss is entirely one of actions. There are offstage actions: “friends with benefits” sex scenes, ex-boyfriends flying into New York City at a moment’s notice, a detective interrogation, an assault. But it is also a play of onstage actions, where the stage directions carry more weight than the words do.

What are stage directions? According to an old director I once worked with, stage directions are “some jerk sitting behind his computer in Manhattan telling me how to stage my show.” This brings up the larger question: what right do playwrights have to play God? Yes, we as playwrights create our own worlds, but how can we account for human error? How can we calculate how others will make us feel one night; our emotions, and our actions are certainly the most “unscripted” aspect about us as people. I’m not saying there are easy answers to any of these questions. My stage direction are usually the cop outs of “Enter Alex, late 20s,” while other playwrights I know could provide long poetic accounts of Alex. But because the audience can’t see the stage directions, is any of that poetry really necessary?

While we can rehearse what we see, and how those words make us feel, there’s something exciting about finding spaces of reality in our own silence, in the places where actors can move on stage a certain way and the audience knows just from the way they walk a little bit more of who they are. It’s difficult to pull off, but Son manages marvelously. The opening of Scene 5, where Callie and Sara have started to become good friends, provides just an example of how the audience is able to see stage directions: “Callie’s apartment. Callie walks on wearing jeans and carrying a fresh bouquet of flowers. She places them in a vase. She goes into her bedroom and reenters with several hangers of clothes. She looks at herself in the mirror as she holds up a tube top in front of her—too slutty—then drops the top onto the floor. She picks up a shirt and holds it up in front of her—too butch—then throws it onto the floor. She looks around—as if she were in a public dressing room—then puts her jeans back on. She puts on a third top—it looks like something Sara would wear.” Here, Callie, through not only her clothing, but the way she tries on outfits, reveals more to the audience than she has throughout her first four scenes in words. She is not a slut, nor the standard definition of “lesbian-butch”: she is a regular girl trying to impress, she is thinking about Sara, she is dressing to impress, and yet, she is self-conscious. The directions go on—scene five doesn’t start until Callie knocks over the vase of flowers and her “friends with benefits” friend George walks in. But in that paragraph of stage directions, Callie can take as long as she likes. The text does not dictate what she says, rather how she gets her message across. Throughout the time that she is getting ready, the audience is waiting.

Finally, in one of the last scenes of the show, Callie visits Sara in the hospital, and goes through the long process of undressing and redressing a near-comatose Sara into clothes. The scene is a page long, and consists of Callie interrupting her speech to partake in the action of dressing. What’s impressive about this scene, again, are, again, the directions that give way to moments of characterization, especially at the end of the monologue: “Now you’re gonna stand up. I’m gonna help. One, two, three—she puts her hands under Sara’s arms and lifts her up. She pulls her pants up. Sara loses her balance; Callie tries to ease her down; they both come down with a thud. I can do this, you see? Sara nods. Choose me. Sara smiles. Here, this not only reveals Callie’s character—she’s really trying—but Sara, who is mute, and physically unable to communicate vocally is able to tell the audience that despite the efforts of her ex-boyfriend, she will choose Callie. She loves her. She will choose her. How could she not? What makes this near-last scene so satisfying is the silence of Sara responding to Callie’s actions. It’s a conversation, in a way. But the best part about this conversation is that at the end, they are finally able to communicate. Callie says “Choose me,” and with Sara’s smile, the audience knows she does. She absolutely does. That’s what makes the ending, and all of the stage directions of Stop Kiss so gratifying: all of the waiting the audience does eventually pays off.

#playhousetuesdays #ericawachs