In a play with lesbian leanings, one doesn’t expect to like the supporting male characters as much, but here they’re extra supportive. She comes off as Karen-esque yet likable. Winsley, delightfully drawn in two too-short vignettes by Cara Giambrone. Winsley ), Damian Leone (Detective Cole), and Jess Rawls (Callie) in ‘Stop Kiss.’ Photo by Heather Regan Photography. Even without words, Sara’s voice beams back. “They want me to speak truth to power, and I don’t know what that means!” Callie exasperatingly pleads to a comatose Sara. Sara not only challenges Callie to right her rudder but stands up for them both in the face of danger. (More touching than the actual kiss was a scene, mostly ad-libbed on opening night, in which Callie dresses Sara.) She’ll root around in Callie’s closet, openly. Confident in her wardrobe, she’ll don a flaming orange pillbox hat with matching orange hose and shoes if she wants to. Rearick’s Sara, though coquettish and flighty, proves the more dauntless of the two. She’s continually dressing and undressing, deciding what to wear as if not quite comfortable in her own skin, at times judging another’s outfit, experimenting with identity - with black-leather warrior boots her only thread of consistency. Callie works begrudgingly as a traffic reporter, hovering between searching for purpose and love. Rawls, a director herself and master chameleon, is exceptional as Callie, anchoring every scene while unstuck in time. Although spared having to witness the hate crime play out, anyone watching can easily testify that society has no business interfering with Callie’s choice of whom to love. Society plays the outsider to Callie’s inner journey of self-discovery. Quick scenes tumble forth out of order like jumbled memory, documenting the pair’s stages of infatuation and connection against the reactions to the assault from their friends/lovers, an investigator, a witness, a nurse. She has a pussycat whom she can’t keep at her place through a friend of a friend, Callie agrees to board it. Louis, which takes its own unfounded abuse in the piece - to the Bronx on a teaching fellowship. Sara has moved from flyover country - well, St. One way she does it is by holding the reins not only of a pliable, playful cast but of the set, costume, and properties design, for which she’s triply credited.Ĭallie (Jess Rawls) meets Sara (Susan Rearick) in the privacy of her disordered walk-up. How Kimberly Leone, in her Reston Community Players’ directorial debut, layers the work’s built-in froth with a solemn, binding commitment to cast out “othering” is where the true magic lurks. “Have you ever …?” “I can’t imagine any woman who’s never felt …” Yet what bubbles up from the page is often awkward, slumber-party titillation of girl-on-girl action - underlined by Magic 8 Ball consultations and prattling pillow talk. Susan Rearick (Sara) and Jess Rawls (Callie) in ‘Stop Kiss.’ Photo by Heather Regan Photography. Sensationalizing by the media.Įlements of modern-day outrage are all there in the subtext of Diana Son’s stop-action Stop Kiss script - first received amid controversy off-Broadway in 1998 - about two women in New York whose slow dip into love, manifested by a first kiss in public, incites violence by an onlooker.
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