We are in New York, at the end of the millennium. In this hostile environment, not to say violent, very little conducive to human relationships, and even less to budding love, we discover the tender and cruel story of Callie and Sara, two women in their twenties, respectively a columnist for circulation and third grade teacher. stop kiss premiered at the Public Theater in New York in 1998. The play, which launched the career of Korean-American Diana Son, is here translated by Maryse Warda and presented at La Petite Licorne by the company Tableau noir. The actress Kim Despatis signs her first staging.
At first, we are delighted to discover a relatively recent American piece, taken from a repertoire which we continue to be surprised that is not more present on our stages. Remember that the memorable first show of Tableau noir, the burrowpresented at the Salle Fred-Barry in 2016 and revived at Duceppe in 2019, was based on an excellent text by David Lindsay-Abaire premiered on Broadway in 2006. stop kisswe are also enthusiastic about the idea of having access to a score that revolves around lesbian love, a reality that is also little portrayed in our theaters.
Gaps in the text
Unfortunately, Diana Son’s piece disappoints. First, because the story of Callie and Sara, two women who thought they were straight until their trajectories crossed, is rather banal. But mostly because the ins and outs of the real issue, namely the brutal homophobic attack they face when they kiss in a West Village park, are not sufficiently dissected. As if the playwright had felt modesty at the idea of embracing the tragic dimension of her story. The form, where the past and the present constantly intertwine, is not uninteresting, but several scenes seem superfluous, redundant, even futile. The same goes for the three secondary characters, so poorly defined that they deserved to be cut out.
Unimaginative, undermined by problems of rhythm and by a tedious recourse to the various doors of the room, the representation does not compensate for the shortcomings of the text. While seeking to bring together in the same room the various places—from the bar to the hospital via the police station—and the few temporalities—before, during and after the drama—the staging does not manage to free from a distressing realism. Admittedly, there are between the luminous Célia Gouin-Arsenault and Rose-Marie Perreault some moments of tenderness, several frankly comic moments, but the two actresses deserve to tackle more substantial scores.