Theatre in Review: Stage Kiss (Playwrights Horizons)Jessica Hecht and screwball comedy; it's a match made in heaven. Cast as an actress who has snagged her first leading lady gig in years, she has a hundred different ways of illuminating the indignities that show folk must endure on the road to opening night. The job in question is a resident theatre revival of a 1930s potboiler by the team of "Erbmann, Landor, and Marmel." "Isn't it a bad sign when three people wrote a play?" wonders one of her colleagues. In this case, the answer is most definitely in the affirmative. Based on what we see, it is a maudlin tearjerker about a dying socialite (Hecht) who, with the permission of her husband, reunites one last time with her ex-lover, who cures her with his kisses and then runs off to Paris with her daughter. There are songs, too. It's like a Mint Theatre Company production gone horribly wrong. Having spent most of the last two decades at home with her banker husband and their daughter, Hecht's character is definitely rusty. (There was that antidepressant commercial some years back, but that's not much on which to hang a resume.) The first scene of Stage Kiss is a comically mortifying audition sequence in which she breezes in, late and scattered, a mass of nervous gestures and awkward laughs; armed with no knowledge of the play's plot, she must make stage love to the plump, adenoidal, alarmingly young, and obviously gay reader who is feeding her lines. (Looking him over, she wonders if they should really kiss, adding, "I don't want to traumatize you.") The sight of Hecht trying to put the moves on this rather squatty, stand-in Romeo while breathlessly delivering lines like "Oh God, I want to kiss you all day, until I am breathless with desire") is a study in high comedy technique; she finds laughs that are all but invisible on the page, instantly winning us over. Despite her less-than-stellar reading, Hecht's character lands the job, but whatever joy she might have taken in her return to the stage is annihilated by the news that her leading man (Dominic Fumusa) is her partner in a too-hot-to-handle love affair from two decades earlier. A certain animosity still sizzles between them -- Hecht keeps adding face slaps to the play's nonstop parade of kissing scenes -- and as rehearsals unfold, the emotional temperature soon reaches the boiling point. By opening night in New Haven, Hecht and Fumusa can't keep their hands off one another, and soon they are living their own drama of adultery, she having abandoned her little family and he having cast off his schoolteacher girlfriend. But the difference between stage kisses and those in real life becomes all too apparent, especially when, in dire need of money, they are cast in the Detroit production of a turgid melodrama about New York in the '70s, starring him as an IRA bagman and her as a myopic prostitute from Brooklyn who wants to ensure that children everywhere are suitably outfitted with eyeglasses. Their new vehicle may creak a bit, but their clashing accents provide plenty of hilarity; you could write a book about the different ways they pronounce the word "whore." Under the precisely timed direction of Rebecca Taichman, all sorts of Noises Off-style stage mayhem -- miscued scenes of torrid romance, onstage injuries, and a scene of gunplay that always, always goes wildly wrong -- is executed like clockwork by Hecht, Fumusa, and a skilled supporting cast. Hecht is golden, playing even the wildest situation with the lightest of touches. As the chiseled leading man who never grew up, Fumusa is a most stalwart straight man, earning plenty of laughs of his own when, having broken an ankle, he must add a pair of crutches to his suave lover act, which isn't easy when the script calls for throwing an arm around your paramour's shoulders. Patrick Kerr is priceless as the less-than-commanding director of both these creaky vehicles. (Speaking of the first, he says, "So it's tonally, very you know, slippery. And 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 very well received in New Haven.") Daniel Jenkins is stalwart as both of Hecht's maltreated husbands, on and off stage, especially when he gets to drop an Act II bombshell about the provenance of his wife's latest production. And Michael Cyril Creighton slays repeatedly as Kerr's factotum and lover, a 20-something teddy bear who, having proved his total inadequacy during auditions with Hecht, is assigned to be Fumusa's understudy; he is especially delectable when hoisting his well-upholstered frame onto a divan, hovering lustfully over Hecht; opening his mouth like a hungry lion before planting a kiss on his nonplussed scene partner; or making a gun-waving entrance as a riotously unthreatening pimp. You might not associate this kind of raucous comic business with the playwright, Sarah Ruhl, but she seems to reinvent herself with each new work, and even though there are certain moments of excess -- most notoriously a sequence in which, for no particular reason, four of the principals burst into "Some Enchanted Evening" from South Pacific -- she is after more than the fun of slammed doors, badly timed bits of stage combat, and embarrassing romantic revelations. Between the gags, she invites us to contemplate the difference between the volatile romances depicted on stage and the kind of steady devotion that is the foundation of a happy marriage. Be careful, she notes; you confuse the two at your peril. As befits a play in which real life and stage romance become hopelessly entangled, the action unfolds on Neil Patel's clever set. The first act begins on a rehearsal stage that, from scene to scene, adds additional bits of dressing until it is a fully realized set for that '30s potboiler. He also provides a marvelously exact rendition of Fumusa's one-room apartment, which, with a few changes of dressing, becomes the set for that unhappy production in Detroit. Peter Kaczorowski's lighting creates a variety of looks as the rehearsal room goes through its transformations. Susan Hilferty's costumes are spot on for both plays-within-the-play and the off-stage scenes. Matt Hubbs' sound design includes some fine atmospheric effects and some highly amusing (and intentional) examples of sound design gone awry. For all of its outrageous situations, Stage Kiss never really oversteps the line into silliness, a tribute to the control exerted by Taichman and by Hecht's tone-setting performance, which finds laughter in throwaway gags, deadpan line readings, and exquisite timing. Each time she appears, she seems to reveal yet another aspect of her multifaceted talent. If there is something she can't do, I haven't seen it yet.--David Barbour 
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