Stop Kiss – Unlikely Productions and ATYP

Overview

It’s a rare thing, to see a live theatre audience cry. But when darkness falls on Stop Kiss, tears are streaming down at least two faces in the front row opposite. It’s testament not only to the potency of the script but also to the devastating emotional intensity sustained by the cast.

On October 6, 1998, 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was tortured and left for dead in a field near Laramie, Wyoming. He was the victim of an anti-gay attack that made international headlines and, ultimately, led to groundbreaking hate crimes legislation. Two months later, on December 6, 1998, Diana Son’s play Stop Kiss made its world premiere at the New York Public Theatre.

Such timing meant that the work’s impact was particularly acute. But, even though a homophobic act of horrendous violence drives Stop Kiss’s dramatic arc in part, it is very much a tale of love — told in an extraordinarily smart and sensitive fashion.

Late-twenties New Yorker Callie (Olivia Stambouliah) divides her time between her radio traffic reporter job, which she finds meaningless, and her on-off boyfriend George (Aaron Tsindos), to whom she doesn’t want to commit. When she agrees to cat-mind for St Louis export and Bronx schoolteacher Sara (Gabrielle Scawthorn), the two discover a mutual connection that quickly turns into sexual attraction.

For the next 90 minutes, Son plays a transfixing game of pass-the-parcel with the audience. Except that she’s the only one doing the unwrapping, and we’re the five-year-olds looking on — part of us thoroughly enjoying the suspense, the other wanting to tear the thing open in one fell swoop.

Two narratives run concurrently, one beginning where the other ends. In the first, Callie and Sara grow closer and closer, all the while tiptoeing awkwardly (and occasionally hilariously) around their real feelings, each trying to figure out how to address their undeniable chemistry. The second begins right where it explodes. Callie and Sara have just kissed for the first time when a passerby attacks them, beating Sara so brutally that she’s hospitalised and comatose. Their relationship becomes headline bait and Callie finds herself under media, police and familial scrutiny.

Under the brilliant direction of Anthony Skuse (4000 Miles), the Stambouliah-Scawthorn combination is potent — beautifully restrained yet electrically charged. The slightest glance or movement speaks emotional volumes. Stambouliah bubbles with offhand charisma, delivering an infectious balance of city-slicker cynicism and underlying fragility. Scawthorn’s transformation from idealistic primary teacher to potentially brain-damaged victim is utterly devastating.

The parallel stories are conducted on the same stage, which serves as Callie’s eclectic ‘90s New York apartment, police station, hospital, waiting room and West Village street. Some incredibly smooth scene changes and clever sound design carry us seamlessly from one world to the other. Two of the actors even double up as musicians: Ben McIvor, who plays Sara’s beleaguered ex, Peter, gets behind the drum kit, while Suzanne Pereira, a sassy witness to the crime, sings several ballads a cappella.

Presented by Unlikely Productions, Stop Kiss is the first show in the ATYP 2014 Selects season (previously titled Under the Wharf) and an official 2014 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras event. Despite Matthew Shepard’s tragic death having occurred 16 years ago, the work remains every bit as relevant today.

Image by Gez Xavier Mansfield.