STAGE KISS Play Guide | Round House Theatre 2015-2016 Season

STAGE KISSB Y SARAH RUHL

D I R E C T E D B Y AARON POSNER

PLAY GUIDEDECEMBER 2 - 27, 2015 | 2015 - 2016 SEASON

Pictured: Dawn Ursula

THE PLAYWRIGHT

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PRODUCING ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Ryan Rilette

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This play guide had been prepared by the Round House Theatre Artistic and Education staff, along with production dramaturg Jessica Pearson.

Designed by Cheyenne Michaels.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE 3

THE PLAYWRIGHT 4

4 About the Playwright

4 - 5 Comments By the Playwright

5 Comments About the Playwright

THE PLAY 5

6 Synopsis, Setting, and Characters

7 Excerpts from the Play

THE PRODUCTION 7

8 - 9 Realism vs. Ruhl-ism

CULTURAL CONTEXT AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION 9

10 Forgotten Flops of the 1930s

10 Other Absurd Plots of the 1930s

11 - 12 An Interview with the Playwright

by Tim Sanford, Artistic Director,

Playwrights Horizons

FOR THE CLASSROOM 13

13 Common Core/Curriculum

13 Practical Information & Theatre Etiquette

14 Discussion Topics & Activities for the Classroom

14 Response Letter

Round House Theatre is a home for outstanding ensemble acting and lifelong learning. We seek to captivate audiences with stories that inspire compassion, provoke emotions, and demand conversation. It is our hope that this play guide will serve to not only enhance the understanding of students who attend as part of an education program, but also allow all audience members to deepen their own theatrical experience. Use this play guide as a starting point or as a way to continue engaging in the show long after the performance ends. We want to inspire you, our audience, in an ongoing dialogue of ideas while encouraging lifelong learning and participation in theatre.


TITLE PAGE

Behind the lighting designer’s table before a tech run-through of Stage Kiss. Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.

A R O U N D H O U S E T H E A T R E P R O D U C T I O N Ryan Rilette, Producing Artistic Director

presents

STAGE KISSB Y

SARAH RUHLD I R E C T E D B Y

AARON POSNER

Scenic Designer: TONY CISEK

Costume Designer: KELSEY HUNT

Lighting Designer: ANDREW R. CISSNA

Sound Designer/Composer: JAMES BIGBEE GARVER

Props Master: KASEY HENDRICKS

Fight Choreographer: CASEY KALEBA

Choreographer: KELLY KING

Dramaturg: JESSICA PEARSON

Assistant Directors: JENNA DUNCAN & GABRIELLE HOYT

Production Stage Manager:

BEKAH WACHENFELD*

CASTShe DAWN URSULA*

He GREGORY WOODDELL*

The Director CRAIG WALLACE*

Kevin/Doctor/Butler/Pimp MICHAEL GLENN*

The Husband/Harrison TODD SCOFIELD*

Angela/Millie/Maid TYASIA VELINES+

Millicent/Laurie RACHEL ZAMPELLI*

The Piano Man TOM TRUSS+

Assistant Stage Manager DAVID MAVRICOS+

* Member Actors’ Equity Association, The Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States+ Equity Membership Candidate

Sponsored in part through generous support from Mitch & Heidi Dupler and Marion Ein Lewin.

THE PLAYWRIGHT


THE PLAYWRIGHT

ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include The Oldest Boy; In the Next Room, or the vibrator play; The Clean House; Passion Play; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Melancholy

Play; Eurydice; Orlando; Late: a cowboy song; Dear Elizabeth; and Stage Kiss. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony nominee, her plays have been produced on Broadway at the Lyceum by Lincoln Center Theater, off-Broadway at Playwrights’ Horizons, Second Stage, and at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Her works have premiered at theatres across the country, including Yale Repertory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Goodman Theater, and the Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago. In 2014 she was the second most produced playwright in the country. Her plays have also been produced internationally and have been translated into twelve languages. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her MFA from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has received the Susan Smith Blackburn award, the Whiting award, the Lily Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur “genius” award. You can read more about her work on www.SarahRuhlplaywright.com. Her book of essays 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was published by Faber and Faber last fall. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

COMMENTS BY THE PLAYWRIGHT

“ Lightness isn’t stupidity…It’s actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.”

— Sarah Ruhl

“ Perhaps we would have more sublime plays if we had more tolerance for and interest in imperfect plays. Because perfect plays are not sublime plays. Shakespeare’s plays are weird and wonky and oddly shaped and wonderfully imperfect but sublime. They

are as untidy-sublime as nature is. Contemporary playwrights are often encouraged to make tidy plays rather than plays with cliffs and torrents…Perhaps we have lost our pleasure in bad plays. Certainly we have, as a culture, lost no pleasure in watching bad television. It can be equally fun to the average American to watch something considered “bad” on television as something considered “good.”…Perhaps theater is just by and large too expensive to tolerate failure. Perhaps we no longer believe in the sublime; we only believe in the tidy.”

— From 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

“ Some people plan the whole play before they write it. What I do is, I have an image or a fragment of a story—what you called a premise—and I think, is that worth writing about for two years of my life? But I don’t really think through what will happen. When I’m ready, I sit down and I have no idea what I’ll write, and then I write it.”

— From “Sarah Ruhl discusses Dead Man’s Cell Phone with Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Tim Sanford,” by Tim Sanford

“ I’m not sure I believe in progress, because I make theater. And theater, by its nature, does not believe in progress. We must constantly go back to go forward. And theater cannot believe in absolute knowledge, because usually two or three characters are talking and they usually believe two or three different things, making knowledge a relative proposition. But increasingly in the American theater we are led to believe that plays are about knowing, or putting forward a thesis.”

— From 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

“ I think [Stage Kiss is] one of my sillier plays, and I don’t want to be apologetic about that. It’s a bit of a soufflé in the way that 1930s plays are, but I think I really wanted to think about illusion and love and projection, and that was my way in - something that was apparently more insubstantial. But I do want people to come and have a good time.”

— From “Ruhls of Play: An Interview with Sarah Ruhl”

THE PLAYWRIGHT


THE PLAYWRIGHT

“ I never feel apologetic about an audience having fun. Why else—we don’t come to the theater to be moralized to; to a large extent we come to be delighted. And that’s one thing I love about those older plays. They were our popular form before film and TV, so they still had to delight people. And now I think movies are supposed to delight people and we’re supposed to come to the theater and be bored and preached to.”

— From “Artist Interview with Sarah Ruhl” by Tim Sanford

COMMENTS ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT AND PLAY

“ In a sense, Stage Kiss is a ghost play in which both the play-within-the-play and the rebarbative lovers keep the past present. Is life imitating art? Or is art imitating life? Ruhl, in her gleeful counterpoint, gets to have it both ways.”

— John Lahr, The New Yorker

“ The play is peppered with wry, funny commentary on the emotional antics of actors at work…[Ruhl’s] affection for the confused bustle of backstage life suffuses the play with warmth and genial humor. The rehearsal scenes are full of ripely played jokes about the oddities of the acting process and the havoc it can play on actors’ emotional equilibrium.”

— Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“ I can report that Stage Kiss itself is a gift and a rarity: a superb new romantic comedy that does justice to both sides of the genre equation. It’s moving, smart, and flat-out hilarious.”

— Jesse Green, vulture.com

“ Most of us do not know what place we possess as students in our teachers’ thoughts. Unless we ourselves teach, how could we know? That we teachers share our students, bring the work home, mention their names over the dinner table until they become household words…And so in my household there is a name: Sarah Ruhl.”

— Paula Vogel, playwright and former teacher of Sarah Ruhl, Bomb Magazine

“ Sarah Ruhl is a fresh, compelling, and versatile playwright…a powerful presence in the American theater.”

— The MacArthur Foundation, after awarding her a Genius Grant

“ Her plays are bold. Her nonlinear form of realism—full of astonishments, surprises and mysteries—is low on exposition and psychology… She writes with space, sound and image as well as words; her goal is to make the audience live in the moment, to make the known unfamiliar in order to reanimate it.”

— John Lahr, “The Surreal Life,” The New Yorker

Dawn Ursula (She) and Gregory Wooddell (He). Act 1, scene 7 of Stage Kiss.Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.

THE PLAY

SYNOPSIS

After a decade-long hiatus from the stage, an actress (referred to as “She” in the script) is set to make her comeback in the 1930s melodrama The Last

Kiss as doomed heroine Ada Wilcox. Despite having the support of her husband Harrison and her daughter Angela, her world turns upside down when she finds that the role of her character’s ex-lover (with whom Ada reignites a passionate affair) will be played by none other than her own ex-lover, (referred to as “He” in the script). Forced into close proximity with He—and his lips—the lines between She and her character begin to blur. On top of their inexorable attraction to each other, She and He must also contend with a panoply of theatrical challenges, including a broken ankle, a slippery script, a director who implores them to “trust your instincts,” and an understudy who kisses like a plachoderm. Still, on opening night, thrilled by their apparently successful show, She and He lose sight of reality entirely. The acted and the actual become one

and the same, and the two characters decide to re-consummate their stormy relationship.

Act Two opens after The Last Kiss has closed; despite the production’s terrible reviews, She and He have blissfully continued their affair, and are holed up at He’s apartment in New York City. That is, until Harrison, Angela, and He’s Iowan girlfriend Laurie show up to confront them. Afterwards, having severed ties with their loved ones in order to stay together, the pair decides to star in a new play directed and written by the same director as The Last Kiss. Forced to move to Detroit, and to act in a production set in the seventies about an undercover IRA agent and an aging prostitute who wants to become an ophthalmologist, She and He begin the same downward spiral that ended their first relationship. As art and life begin to separate, the characters look at each other with newly clear eyes—an act that radically changes their conceptions of themselves, their desires, and their relationship.

SETTINGThe set has four modes: A raw theatre space, a 1920s stage set, a naturalistically messy east village apartment and the set for a new play called “Blurry” at Detroit Actors Theatre.

CHARACTERS

She, an actress in her mid-forties. Plays the role of Ada Wilcox in The Last Kiss.

Played by Dawn Ursula

6 301.585.1225 | www.RoundHouseTheatre.orgROUND HOUSE THEATRE | Stage Kiss Play Guide

He, an actor in his mid-forties. Plays the role of Johnny Lowell in The Last Kiss.

Played by Gregory Wooddell

A Director, Adrian Schwalbach

Played by Craig Wallace

Kevin, the reader, also plays the understudy, the doctor, and the butler in The Last Kiss.

Played by Michael Glenn

The Husband/Harrison, an actor in his forties or early fifties. Plays Ada Wilcox’s husband in The Last Kiss and She’s husband, Harrison, in Act 2.

Played by Todd Scofield

Angela/Millie/Maid, an actress in her early twenties—plays Millie and the maid in The Last Kiss and She’s daughter, Angela, in Act 2.

Played by Tyasia Velines

Millicent/Laurie, an actress in her late twenties or early thirties, plays Millicent in The Last Kiss and He’s girlfriend, Laurie, in Act 2.

Played by Rachel Zampelli

The Piano Man

Played by Tom Truss

Assistant Stage Manager

Played by David Mavricos

THE PLAY

EXCERPTS FROM THE PLAYKEVIN: What a strange job to kiss strangers in front of people and make it look like you know each other. Or kiss someone you know in front of people and make it look like a stranger.

SHE: My mother told me never to marry an actor. She said never marry a man who looks in the mirror more than you do.

SHE: Why do people enjoy watching other people kiss onstage, anyway?

HE: They don’t enjoy it. They tolerate it.

SHE: What do you mean?

HE: They tolerate it because it signifies resolution which people like to see on stage but they don’t really like to see the act of kissing on stage, only the idea of kissing on stage. That’s why actors have to be good-looking because it’s about an idea, an idea of beauty completing itself. You don’t like to see people do more than kiss on stage, it’s repulsive.

SHE: This—here—this feels like my real life. I don’t want to be me. I want to be Ada Wilcox.

HE: I don’t want Ada Wilcox. I want you.

SHE: When I kissed you just now did it feel like an actor kissing an actor or a person kissing a person because I’ve kissed you so many times over the last few weeks I’m starting not to know the difference.

HARRISON: She always falls in love with whoever she’s in a play with. You and—Johnny here—have kissed each other—let’s see—nine times a night, eight shows a week, four week run, two hundred and eighty-eight times. That’s not love. That’s oxytocin.

HE: I’m afraid it was fate, being cast in that play. We’re in love again.

HARRISON: I may not be a rakish actor. I might not be a romantic who believes in ‘fate’ or soul mates but I believe in you. I believe in eighteen years of choosing each other, morning after morning.

ANGELA: Marriage should be like a tattoo. You leave it on.

HARRISON: Marriage is about repetition. Every night the sun goes down and the moon comes up and you have another chance to be good. Romance is not about repetition.

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Michael Glenn (Kevin) and Dawn Ursula (She). Act 1, scene 5 of Stage Kiss.Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.


THE PRODUCTION

By Gabrielle Hoyt, Assistant Director

“Suspension of disbelief”—a theatrical cliché that takes on new life and meaning when grappling with Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss. The problem, of

course, is that so much of Ruhl’s play seems so very familiar, on both a practical and emotional level. And yet at every turn, the playwright takes care to remind us that she does not write within the realm of the real—whether she’s shoehorning a month of rehearsals into ten minutes, or instructing that her characters break into song, her choices are just off enough to keep actuality at bay.

The question facing director Aaron Posner, then, was a slippery one: how to create a theatrical world that meshes with what audience members understand about theatre, romance, and marriage while still emphasizing the trademark peculiarities that make Ruhl’s writing so compelling. The answer, for Posner, comes down to a single word: “quintessentialized.” The world of Round House Theatre’s Stage Kiss feels achingly close to the world in which its audience members exist. The difference is that the world onstage represents the most intense, vivid, and vibrant versions of familiar elements within our own lives.

This decision to fashion a kind of uber-world, with higher highs and lower lows than we generally experience in our day-to-day lives, makes itself felt in every design and acting choice that takes place onstage. The effort to quintessentialize shines through quite clearly in our scenic design, which creates a fluid visual aesthetic that can quickly transition from the opulent set of a 1930s melodrama to the bare backstage space of a theatre to a “hyper-real” NYC studio apartment. The audience not only sees these different venues, but witnesses the transitions between them, a decision that calls attention to the non-real nature of the proceedings onstage. Our sound design, too, lives in the space between realism and something quite different. In the first act, the play-within-a-play employs an accompanist for its musical numbers. In the second act, however, the accompanist returns, this time playing along with a song that is happening in the “real” world of the play.

Of course an equally difficult—and often entertaining—challenge in approaching Stage Kiss has been asking actors to act as if they are in rehearsal. Alone, this task would be simple. But the rehearsals and performances that take place within Stage Kiss exist as a funhouse mirror of rehearsals and performances in which actors actually participate. In order to present these scenes in a believable and compelling fashion, our actors must transition seamlessly from the familiar world that

REALISM VS. RUHL-ISM

Act 1, scene 5. Scenic design by Tony Cisek, lighting design by Andrew R. Cissna, costume design by Kelsey Hunt. Dawn Ursula, Michael Glenn, Tyasia Velines, & Todd Scofield. Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.


THE PRODUCTION

Act 1, scene 6.5. Scenic Design by Tony Cisek, lighting design by Andrew R. Cissna, costume design by Kelsey Hunt. Dawn Ursula & Gregory Wooddell. Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.

exists in Round House Theatre’s rehearsal space into the bizarre Stage Kiss world, defined by disastrous directorial demands, an insanely accelerated timetable, and a play that even one of the characters calls “so fucking fake.”

Considering the massive effort it takes to create a not-quite-real world, an obvious question presents itself: Why even bother? The answer, in fact, comes from the play itself. Asked why audiences enjoy watching actors kiss onstage, leading man He explains, “[T]hey don’t want to see the act of kissing on stage, only the idea of kissing on stage.” He has just articulated what Sarah

Ruhl intuitively knows: theatre does not aim to represent reality, but an idea of reality—and sometimes not even that. In creating a world that feels both familiar and foreign, Ruhl simultaneously demonstrates theatre’s power to affect its audience, and the demands it places on them: Believe that there’s an apartment on the stage in front of you. Believe that the instruments above your head are emitting “light through the dust of Hell’s Kitchen at five o’clock in mid-November.” Believe that stage kisses are real, and that real kisses are staged. Suspend your disbelief—a difficult task that our production strives to make easy, desirable, and unavoidable for all who see it.

Act 2, scene 5. Scenic Design by Tony Cisek, lighting design by Andrew R. Cissna, costume design by Kelsey Hunt. Gregory Wooddell & Dawn Ursula. Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.


CULTURAL CONTEXT &

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

THE LAST KISS: TERRIBLE, FORGOTTEN PLAYS OF THE EARLY 1930S

By Jessica Pearson, Dramaturg

“… it was a flop on Broadway in 1932 but we think with the proper cast, a new score, and some judicious cuts it

will be really well received in New Haven.”— The Director, Stage Kiss

There were a lot of flops on Broadway in the early 1930s. The story of why starts on August 18, 1930, the day Noel Coward’s Private Lives opened in Edinburgh; fewer than six months later, it opened on Broadway. The critical and financial success of the play, a mannered comedy about the droll amusements of infidelity, led to a slew of second-rate imitators. The 1931 and 1932 seasons on the American stage were full of plays about cheating spouses, unfortunate marriages, and extravagantly unlikely goings-on. Many of these plays ran for fewer than two weeks, some closed after a single weekend. The short runs are not surprising when one sees the plot summaries of these plays. Consider, for example, Lady Beyond the Moon by William Doyle, which ran for just 15 performances in the spring of ’31: A young lady goes to a resort town in Italy to surprise her fiancé, but upon her arrival she is led to believe that her gentleman has become engaged to another woman. In retaliation, the young woman marries her Italian host. After a disastrous wedding night, she learns that her lover is still true, so she ditches her new husband and runs off with her fiancé.

In retrospect, fifteen performances seems like a lot.

Promotional artwork for Walnut Street Theatre’s 2015 production of Private Lives.

Other Absurd Plots of the 1930s

Private Lives by Noel CowardOpened in 1930

Summary: A divorced couple, while honeymooning with their new spouses, discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel. Despite a perpetually stormy relationship, they realize they still have feelings for each other.

Private Lives has had a much longer life than any of the other plays in this list, but it is worth noting because of its slew of imitators.

Divorce Me, Dear by Katherine Roberts Opened in 1931

Summary: When Veronica Vare insists she has found the young man of her dreams, her husband agrees not to stand in the way of a divorce. Her husband’s casual acquiescence disturbs Veronica, and before long she is also disillusioned with her dreamboat. The divorce having gone through, Veronica has no choice but to start courting her ex again.

Paid Companions by Bernard J. McOwens Opened in 1931

Summary: Lilia Vaugh, who has come to New York and let herself be kept in a swank penthouse by a rich man, has a change of heart when her old boyfriend comes to town and urges her to marry him. When her rich lover refuses to let her go, she kills him. The sympathetic police contrive to call it a suicide.

The Life Line by Gretchen DamroschOpened in 1930

Summary: Bronson Cutler’s minister returns a check for $5000 that Cutler has given him, saying he should offer more personal charity to those in need. Mrs. Irving Ives appears, laments that her husband is neglecting her for another woman, and is offered refuge in the Cutler home. This brings problems when Mrs. Butler takes offense and when Ive’s new love proves to be Cutler’s daughter. But it all ends happily.


CULTURAL CONTEXT &


INTERVIEW WITH THE PLAYWRIGHTExcerpted from Artist Interview with Sarah Ruhl by Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Tim Sanford

TIM SANFORD: You have talked about the play being a tribute to actors you’ve loved working with over the years. But that relationship obviously began when you were growing up.

SARAH RUHL: My mom often took us to rehearsals when I was growing up, and she took us to see plays that she was in, or that she directed. And I remember she directed a community theater production of Enter Laughing. And I thought the actors were so glamorous. This actor Harry Tinowitz played the lead, and whoever played Angela Marlowe, and I was besotted with the whole thing. And I would watch it over and over and over again. And I remember I wasn’t able to come on the last night, maybe it was a school night, and I remember weeping bitterly. So I always loved actors, sort of from a distance, and loved what my mom did.

TS: Did you do any acting yourself?

SR: Yes, I did a little as a kid. I went to the Piven Theater Workshop and Joyce Piven was my teacher.

TS: Did you ever kiss someone yourself onstage?

SR: Yes, when I was in Joyce’s scene study class. I was 13 and I’d never kissed a boy before, and Murphy Monroe just went in with full tongue, and I’ll never forget the look on Joyce’s face. She said, “Oh, Murphy, you need to ask permission.” [Laughs] But I was not a very good actor. It was clear that I was meant to be in the back writing and watching other actors even though I loved, I loved rehearsal but I didn’t love the audience to come and see me.

TS: So how did the idea for the play come to you?

SR: The idea was very simple. Over the last decade or so of working, I thought, “How weird, to watch actors kiss. It’s their job, and what a wonderful job, to get to walk in and kiss attractive people all day, but also what a weird job.” And sometimes there’s no chemistry and you have to sell it and make it work. And that’s odd and a little bit like prostitution, but yet it’s not. It’s an art form. And there are so many technical things about it, and yet it’s also about these undefinable things, like chemistry. And I wondered—hormonally— what was going on inside actors, having to do that physiological thing, this real physical action, that must affect your body chemistry, and then to also keep your brain compartmentalized when you go home. And a lot of actors can’t do it and they fall in love with whoever they’re working with, and a lot of actors are complete professionals about it. So I really just wanted to write a play about actors kissing. And then somewhere along the line the idea came to me that it would be ex-lovers acting together, in a bad 1930s chestnut, and they would have to kiss each other many many times.

TS: Stage Kiss is not the first time you’ve portrayed actors as actors in a play. But Passion Play and Stage Kiss are different in that one is based on a real Mystery Play, while the other makes up a faux-thirties style play of your own invention, and then a kind of kitchen-sink-realistic play in act two.

SR: Yes, and I would say in a funny way Passion Play is a more Western interpretation of acting and illusion, and this is a more Eastern interpretation of acting and illusion.

TS: Would you elaborate?

SR: Well, I think it’s about the world as a dream, the world as illusion, and theater being a metaphor for that. It’s not anything that they didn’t talk about in the Renaissance, so in that sense Buddhism doesn’t have a market on that notion, and Shakespeare said it: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” or “All the world’s a

Dawn Ursula (She), Gregory Wooddell (He), and Craig Wallace (The Director). Act 2, scene 2 of Stage Kiss. Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.


Rachel Zampelli (Laurie), Tyasia Velines (Angela), and Todd Scofield (Harrison). Act 2, scene 1 of Stage Kiss. Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.

CULTURAL CONTEXT &


stage.” So it’s an old, old archetype, looking at the theater as a microcosm. But I think this play, because it’s about love and whether or not love is an illusion, and whether or not our lives are a dream, what’s real… These are, one might argue, Eastern questions.

TS: So as you were developing the idea for the play, you thought, maybe they’re ex-lovers doing a play together, and immediately, once you decided you were going to show rehearsal and putting together a play, you made your play much more complicated. It’s almost like a whole other thing to explore.

SR: Well that’s often what happens. I set out to write about vibrators in ...The Vibrator Play, and it ended up being about marriage and all kinds of other things. And I thought I’d write about cell phones [Dead Man’s Cellphone] and ended up writing about the attempt to connect with strangers.

TS: So what happened here?

SR: You start with a premise but if it stops there then it’s sort of dead, there’s nowhere to go. You can’t write about a noun forever, you can’t write about a kiss forever. So I think the play is also about this—I hope—universal thing, not just relevant to actors, about holding onto a relationship in your mind and what would happen if it sort of materialized, if you were presented with the option of that “what if?” person in reality.

TS: And the play within a play, how did it come to be this ’30s play?

SR: I love that period, I love those costumes, and I’d never done anything in the period before. I think I’ve always had a great love for that period. And one question I had was whether that heightened language of the ’30s was any more fake a way to talk about love than the way we talk about love in our contemporary dialogue.

TS: There’s another theme in the play besides this love

and illusion idea, and the idea of the play-within-the-play. There’s also an anatomy-of-a-marriage notion in it, which I guess also relates to the question of, beyond oxytocin, what is a marriage? The play gets very eloquent and passionate about it and we’re not sure where you’re going to take us, and we obviously land in a place that you’ve invested with a lot of feelings. How did that come to be?

SR: Well, I probably was married about three years when I wrote the play. And I think too often marriage is an end point in literary genre. It’s sort of, “and then they get married.” Period. The end. So it’s a sense of marriage as an evolution. How can you make the ordinary, non-narrative, repetitious form that is a marriage, how can you imbue that with some poetry or some transformation? It interests me as a married person, as someone who loves her husband a lot, but also as someone who loves stories and the unexpected.

TS: Do you think their marriage grows from this, or survives it? How would it grow?

SR: Well, in the last scene, he makes this plea: kiss me once a week in a theater and pretend I’m someone else. And I think what he’s doing is bringing the world of play and illusion and fantasy, her world, into their marriage. And there’s this sex therapist, Esther Perel...She’s a Belgian couples therapist who lives in New York. Her husband is a trauma psychiatrist. [In her book, Mating in Captivity] she writes about how domesticated we all are, and how we think that intimacy and talk will lead to greater intimacy in the boudoir and actually it doesn’t: she argues that greater mystery and greater fantasy is actually what marriage often needs to sustain itself over a long period of time. So, I’m not saying that my play is a how-to guide about bringing fantasy back into a marriage at all, but I think the husband is throwing down the gauntlet, and making an offer to his wife, a request, that they merge worlds. That their worlds are not so separate, the quotidian world of marriage and this beautiful world of fantasy. That they actually come together.


FOR THE CLASSROOM

COMMON CORE/CURRICULUM

Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss and this play guide address specific educational objectives.

Common Core State Standards CCSS.ELA-Literacy. CCRA. SLS. 1Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussion (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on topics, texts, and issues building on other’s ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

CCSS. ELA- Literacy. CRA. WS. 2 Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

CCSS. ELA- Literacy. CRA RS Lit 1Determine two or more themes of internal ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account.

National Core Arts Standards

TH.Re7.1 Perceive and analyze artistic work.

TH Re8.1 Interpret intent and meaning in artistic work.

TH Re9.1 Apply criteria to evaluate artistic work.

TH Cn10.1 Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to make art.

TH Cn10.2 Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context to deepen understanding.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION AND THEATRE ETIQUETTE

Location and Arrival: Round House Theatre is located at 4545 East-West Highway in Bethesda, MD. The cross streets are East-West Highway and Waverly Street. Feel free to use the restrooms and water fountain in the lobby before the show begins, at intermission, or after the show.

Stage Kiss is about two hours and ten minutes long with an intermission.

Theatre Etiquette:

It would be a good idea to take a minute to give your students these quick theatre etiquette reminders:

• The actors can hear the audience and appreciate the laughter, gasps, and quiet attention. We encourage you to engage in the performance—laugh when things are funny, listen closely, and remember that the actors experience the audience in a tangible way. They can hear and see you! Talking, moving around, or other activities are very distracting to others and can dampen the energy of what is happening on stage.

• There is no food or drink permitted in the theatre.

• Cell phones and other electronic devices must be turned off and put away during the performance. Do not text during the show.

• Blackouts may happen during the show. Please remain seated and quiet.

• There is no photography allowed in the theatre.

• Once seated, please stay in your seat through the performance. If you leave the theatre during the show, re-entrance is at the discretion of the house manager.

• We prefer chaperones sit among the students rather than gathering together.


FOR THE CLASSROOM

DISCUSSION TOPICS & ACTIVITIES FOR THE CLASSROOM

• How do artists balance the relationship between fantasy and reality in Stage Kiss?

• Compare and contrast the relationship between She and The Husband and that of He and She. Why does She leave The Husband, and what does she decide is ultimately of value to her?

• As we age, how do our relationships to love change?

• How does love evolve over time, and how do we see that reflected in this play?

• How does this play demonstrate that love is a choice?

• How is Angela impacted by the separation of her parents?

• How does Angela hold her mother accountable for her behavior? Can you relate to this experience?

• Reflect on the state of marriage in the 21st century. Examine the different perspectives toward the institution of marriage presented in this play.

• How has this production embraced the theatrical world inherent in the text?

• Why do He and She not have names, but the other characters do?

• Reflect on watching a play about the creative process and performance. How does the structure of Stage Kiss reinforce the nature of this process?

Activities

1. Stage Kiss explores key relationships: mothers and daughters, lovers, husbands, and wives.

Activity: Select an important relationship in your own life, and script a scene based on a conversation you have had with that person. Like in Stage Kiss, be “The Director” for actors bringing your scene to life. Share the work and reflect on the theatrical experience versus that experience in real life.

2. Play the Actor. Performance styles have changed over time. In Stage Kiss, we see actors portray characters

in a style characteristic of the 1930s. Activity: Research that performance style, select a modern text, and perform it in that style. Try again in a more realistic fashion. Discuss how the performance style changes the story itself and the experience of watching it.

3. Read two selections of reviews from productions of Stage Kiss around the world (excerpts can be found on page 5). Activity: Assess the production you saw at Round House Theatre. Write a review with your analysis of the creative choices made in bringing the story to the stage.

RESPONSE LETTER After you’ve seen the show and discussed your reactions in the classroom, let us know what you thought! Your response letter lets us know what parts of the play were important or meaningful to you, and what you’d like to learn more about. All of the letters we receive are forwarded to the artists involved in our productions. Ask a great question and you may get a response.

Here’s what to do:

Choose an artist involved in Stage Kiss whose work was particularly memorable or interesting to you—perhaps an actor, the director, or a designer.

• Write a letter to the artist including the following:

• A description of your experience seeing Stage Kiss at Round House Theatre

• Your feedback on the artist’s work

• Any questions you have about the artist’s work or the production

• Be sure to include your NAME, AGE, SCHOOL, and MAILING ADDRESS in your letter, so we know where to send a response!

• Send your letter to RHT Education viaEmail | [email protected] mail | 925 Wayne Avenue Silver Spring, MD 20910

Rachel Zampelli, Tyasia Velines, Gregory Wooddell, Craig Wallace, Dawn Ursula, Todd Scofield, and Michael Glenn. Photo by Cheyenne Michaels.

Documents

STAGE KISS Play Guide | Round House Theatre 2015-2016 Season