There’s a fine line between a fairy tale and a rabbit-hole nightmare.
Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss” wants to be a romantic comedy about lovers who become tangled in a seriously freaky Friday. It plays out more like a creeptastic episode of “The Twilight Zone” – albeit a mostly well-played one.
This now-familiar 1988 love story (don’t read on if you don’t already know) involves a bride named Rita who allows a strange, sickly old stranger to kiss her at her wedding party. After which, boom: He’s her, she’s him, and confused hubby Peter is one mopey dunce.
Lucas’ overly praised play gets to the very precipice of becoming a deep and emotionally complex rumination on the nature of love, attraction and the masks we all wear to impress the ones we love the most. Until we get them.
Instead, it devolves into a pedestrian mystery with only two objectives: How long before Peter figures out his wife isn’t really his wife? And when he does, how will he get her back?
Presciently, the best part of “Prelude to a Kiss” is the prelude to that kiss – both on paper and on the stage at Golden’s Miners Alley Playhouse. Chris Bleau and Courtney Hayes play the winsome, intentionally unremarkable young lovers who meet at a party and forge such an instant, intense connection they impulsively marry just a few months later.
But these endearing actors make it feel just right. Their interplay seems effortless, their flirty dialogue staccato and conversational, always as if two real people are talking, connecting. When our pretend couple marries – the real audience applauds.
The coming twist is a joke as old as marriage itself: Only when you get married do you learn what kind of a person your partner really is. How much you can ever really know a person?
The easy answer here is, well enough. Enough so that once Peter whisks “Rita” to their tropical honeymoon, it’s obvious she’s not a Girl Gone Wild but an Old Man Gone Mild. If only the physical differences between Hayes’ wobbly old man and her adorably uncertain Rita were less obvious, we might see what Lucas wants us to see – that perhaps, in the rush, this marriage might have been – gulp – a mistake.
The last time we saw the great young Hayes, she was part of an awesome ensemble of mortals getting chain-yanked by bored and capricious gods in “Metamorphoses.” Here she’s subject to a similarly random display of omnipotent high jinks. Lucas wrote this play at the height of the AIDS crisis, when lovers were cavalierly ripped from one another by an equally insidious higher power. You never feel the weight of that tragic societal undercurrent from director Brenda Cook’s staging. And you should.
The old man’s kiss is where the play really begins, and here, begins to crack. Soul-swapping stories from “Big” to “Freaky Friday” require a suspension of disbelief and inevitably end with swap-ees somehow better people for it. That’s fine. How the swapping happens matters not. It’s what the swapping is meant to elucidate. Here the issue centers on the possibility of Rita’s subconscious complicity. But if Rita is being punished for having a fleeting moment of doubt, that should send chills through the audience, because what couple hasn’t experienced doubt as it transitioned from lovers to spouses?
The clarity we await never comes because the disappointing second act is as inevitable as it is incredible. Any possible deeper thematic exploration gets sidetracked by the chase.
It’s never not interesting to watch Hayes juxtapose Rita with her “Metamucil Man,” but it gets messy in spots. When she’s playing the old coot, for example, she’d never know how to so easily and adroitly tie her sarong. It ought to be harder to tell the two apart. Still, the bulk of the work here falls to Hayes, and for the most part she comes through just fine. Dell Domnik is a little tougher to buy as a confused young woman inhabiting an old man’s infirm, broken body. Just raising his voice and bending his wrist isn’t going to do it. There’s no sense of consequence for getting what she wished for, now that she’s really inhabiting a body this close to death. Several strong support performances help stabilize things, though, notably a joyful Sally Coldfelter as Rita’s eccentric, romantic and sympathetic mom.
This is a play that very much always wanted to be a film (and it became one in 1992), as evidenced by the multitude of scene changes. Cook covers them nicely with a witty soundtrack of songs that cover pop hits from bands like The Police and Prince, a winking commentary on the masking of what’s real on the inside, I suppose.
But at the two most important moments in the play, Cook interjects herself with jarring effects that contradict her earlier, expertly established mood of rhythmic naturalism. A little directorial subtlety would have gone a long way. There are other messy stage moments as well – like staging the kiss that propels everything that happens afterward at a spot on the stage where not everyone in the audience can even see it. And there’s a late, moment of rudimentary actor-circling that’s a little 101.
The strong performances (especially in the first act) make “Prelude” fun to watch. But, as fairy tales (and nightmares) go, this is a horrible thing that’s happened to these two — so for all of us, midnight doesn’t strike a moment too soon.
“Prelude to a Kiss”
DRAMA | Miners Alley Playhouse, 1224 Washington Ave., Golden|By Craig Lucas | Directed by Brenda Cook | Starring Chris Bleau and Courtney Hayes | THROUGH SEPT. 16 | 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays | 1 hour, 50 minutes | $18-$20 | 303-935-3044 or
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