Stage Kiss - Goodman Theatre

Sarah Ruhl’s
Comedic Cocktail
By Neena Arndt
BOTTOM: Alfred Lunt, Noël Coward and Lynn Fontanne
in Design for Living (1933). Photo courtesy of the Ten
Chimneys Foundation.
A butler named Jenkins. Songs, dances
and old lovers. Bubbly champagne and
bubbly repartee. It’s the stuff of 1930s
plays by writers like Noël Coward, George
S. Kaufman, Moss Hart and Edna Ferber.
It’s the stuff that cheered a nation in the
wake of the stock market crash of 1929,
keeping audiences entertained even as
their bank accounts dwindled. And it’s
stuff that often feels hopelessly dated
now, in an era when many theaters aim
to produce works with weightier themes.
The characters, plot lines and dialogue
can feel clunky and hackneyed in 2011,
and while 1930s audiences were laughing
with 1930s plays, 2011 audiences
might laugh at them. Like all decades,
the 1930s produced some memorable
hits that represented the best of their
genre—You Can’t Take It with You, The
Man Who Came to Dinner, Private Lives
and Design for Living, to name a few—
but also produced thousands of forgotten
flops by playwrights who lacked the verbal
agility of Coward, Kaufman and other
successful writers.
Enter Sarah Ruhl. In her new play Stage
Kiss, Ruhl creates a world in which two
present-day actors are cast in a (fictitious)
play called The Last Kiss that flopped on
Broadway back in 1932. The actors are
ex-lovers, but haven’t seen each other
in years; in a coincidence worthy of a
1930s comedy, the characters they are
playing are also reunited lovers. Realities
merge and soon the lines between actors
and characters are blurred; along the way
Ruhl provides delightful glimpses of The
Last Kiss, which she penned after reading
a selection of plays from the era. (The
Last Kiss does not exist in its entirety—
Ruhl only wrote the select scenes that
appear within Stage Kiss.) While the dialogue
she creates may be slightly exaggerated,
it is also hilariously accurate; with
her characteristic wit and and sly humor,
Ruhl creates a skillful parody of the kinds
of plays that triumphed or—more often—
bombed on 1930s stages.
Depression-era comedies trace their
roots at least as far back as the nineteenth
century, when song and dance
routines and smart-aleck dialogue ruled
the vaudeville stage. Those vaudevillian
elements, in slightly altered form, also
appeared in melodramas, which used
music and stylized movement to portray
intense emotions. In vaudeville and
melodrama, there was little attempt at
realistic dialogue; rather, the language
was heightened and ostensibly witty. As
the nineteenth century came to a close,
writers like Gerhart Hauptmann and
Henrik Ibsen began working towards a
new, more realistic aesthetic that would
come to define much of twentieth-century
theater, but the first half of the century
still carried traces of the old genres.
As any viewer of 1920s and ’30s films
can attest, the accepted acting style at
the time was more heightened and melodramatic
than today, and filmmakers
and playmakers alike still considered it
acceptable to throw in a musical interlude
that did little or nothing to advance
the plot; they valued entertainment over
storytelling. Goodman audiences will be
familiar with such interludes from the
2009 production of Animal Crackers,
the 1928 Marx Brothers Broadway hit.
Although Animal Crackers, like many
Broadway shows of its time, is a musical,
there also exists a poorly defined
genre called “plays with music”—that
is, plays with only a few musical numbers,
or plays with songs that were not
originally composed for the theater. The
Last Kiss, Ruhl’s play-within-a-play,
falls within this genre. A prime real-life
example of a play with music is Lynn
Riggs’ 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs,
now best known as the play on which
the musical Oklahoma! is based. Green
Grow the Lilacs features traditional folk
songs that enhance the atmosphere of
the piece, setting it firmly in the western
territory that would later become
Oklahoma. They do not, however, move
the plot forward or provide insight into
the characters. Famously, Rodgers and
Hammerstein adapted Riggs’ play into
a musical that synthesized storytelling,
song and dance into one cohesive
whole—but that wasn’t until 1943. In
the 1920s and ’30s, audiences were still
accustomed to plays in which characters
could inexplicably burst into song, and
Sarah Ruhl takes full advantage of this,
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