Stage Kiss by the ever-popular playwright Sarah Ruhl is several things at once: a backstage theater farce, a love story, and an exploration of the question of artifice vs. reality. The play, which premiered in Chicago in 2011 and then was seen Off-Broadway in 2014, has a wacky, sometimes surrealistic quality which presents a challenge for any director: how to find a style to match the text’s eccentricities. The Geffen’s Bart DeLorenzo opts to have his actors speak in a loud, nasal, highly exaggerated manner, as if parodying a British drawing-room comedy. It works well at first but begins to grate and become annoying as the play goes on for nearly two and a half hours: too long a stretch for such a slight play. Glenne Headly plays an old-pro actor trying to restart her career after a 16-year layoff to become a mother. At her first audition (for the revival of a creaky 1932 melodrama) she comes face to face with a former boyfriend of hers, a leading-man type played by Barry Del Sherman. The flame between them is re-ignited when, during the course of the audition, they are obliged to keep kissing each other. The kissing continues when they leave the audition and become even more intimate at his place, despite the fact that Headly has a husband and kid, Sherman a girlfriend. Is the love these two troupers feel for each other real, or is it simply an imitation of the passion they must share while performing together in New Haven? Their romantic relationship is tested even more strenuously when their respective significant others show up and, after denouncing them for being unfaithful, beg them to come to their senses and return to home and hearth. These things happen in comic fashion, with the laughter being sparked by Ruhl’s witty lines and outrageous characters, which include a clueless director (Tim Bagley), a gay character actor (Matthew Scott Montgomery), a foul-mouthed teenager (Emily James), a stuffy Wall Street trader (Stephen Caffrey), and a pot-smoking kindergarten teacher (Melody Butiu).>
