Stop Kiss

Stop Kiss combines two themes into a chopped salad of a play. Its main ingredients: 1) a friendship between two women greens into love and the titled manifestion that 2} provokes a gay hate crime with aftermath. With past and present, long-to-brief duration and settings, the play’s 23(!) scenes are spiced with characters related to the principals or the crime.

Lucy Lavely interests as Callie from the moment Tori Grace Hines’ congenial Sara visits the NYC flat offered as refuge (from fussy roomies) for her cat. Callie’s former guy left the place when he took off with her sister. Nor will Callie’s long-time, “casual” sleepover, George, object.

Friendship grows between media traffic reporter Callie and St. Louis suburbanite Sara, now a teaching fellow in a tough area school taken on as a challenge. Though Callie’s spoken of fun in the past at a bar for lesbians and been liberal toward them, she shows fear at every chance she’ll be identified with them. Callie’s had sex with George and even argued with and resisted Sara’s overtures until an after-partying 4AM kiss in a park proved almost fatal to her. Being questioned by an unsympathetic cop (here, black and forceful and played by Reginald K. Robinson, Jr.,) who all but blames the victims, scenes of the aftermath of the kiss are sliced into the narrative attraction that developed between the women.

Slit into scenes of visits to Sara in critical care are Callie’s encounters with the hometown beau Peter (Jefferson McDonald, understandably showing upset) who wonders about the selectivity of the violence. The Nurse (Kristen Lynne Blossom) projects a similar attitude.

Callie continues to be hesitant about her lesbianism before a Mrs. Winsley (Maxey Whitehead, sympathetic), who testified as witness to the crime. That Callie begins to attest to her feelings comes only when she accepts the Nurse’s invitation, previously refused, to help bathe Sara.

Going back and forth in time seems to be author Son’s way of highlighting Callie’s continual putting down of her true feelings. Or maybe Son wanted to show a sort of rocky road to true, expressed love as well as a contrast between that theme and the one of violence toward gays (bashing, beating, berating). But, at least in Asolo/FSU Conservatory’s production, it looks like a technique used largely for the sake of being innovative or different. Unfortunately, the time shifts drag the play, and scene shifts are painfully slow, awkward, disproportionate in length and import. If ever a play called for use of the Cook Theatre’s side stages, this was it. And why did the director and designer use the device of a blank-and-blue square projection in the upper half of backdrop to mark scene changes? Every scenic element should have meaning, not be garnish on the musical bridges.

Two other quibbles, but with the author’s ingredients: The cat is just abandoned after his usefulness in getting the two leads together. Callie says she knows all about St. Louis where a car is needed to go from place to place. Maybe she’s talking about the County. But I lived in two places in St. Louis city and used only public transportation -- even out to suburban locations. Sara didn’t need to go to NYC for an urban teaching challenge, as I can attest from doing so in the then city-owned (now State) historically Black teachers’ college (and from part-time teaching in a private college on the periphery of city and county). These things occurred about 12 years before the date of Son’s play, and I know such opportunities continued at its time. Bad research, Ms. Son.