Stage Kiss

“A gift and a rarity: a superb new romantic comedy that’s moving, smart and flat-out hilarious... You will have difficulty breathing. Stage Kiss is that funny.” — Jesse Green, New York

“In Stage Kiss passion and fidelity engage in a kind of elegant pas de deux…At once a knowing send-up of the hazy half-truths of stage naturalism and a meditation on the nature of desire and sexual fantasy, the play manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable.” — John Lahr, New Yorker

“A knockabout farce that channels Noël Coward and Michael Frayn.” — Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

“Wickedly clever... Ruhl’s unique, breezily elegant dialogue is fully present.” — Steven Oxman, Variety

“A lively blend of romantic comedy and backstage farce... Stage Kiss reminds us of how the artifice of theater can stir real emotions not just for those who create it, but for those who attend it, too.” — Charles Isherwood, New York Times

When estranged lovers are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, the line between offstage and onstage begins to blur. Here, Sarah Ruhl, one of America’s most widely produced playwrights, brings her unique mix of lyricism, sparkling humor and fierce intelligence to the world of romantic comedy. The play asks us to consider what is real, both in love and in art.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room or the vibrator play (Tony Award nominee, Best Play) and The Clean House (Susan Smith Blackburn Award), as well as Passion Play, a cycle; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Dear Elizabeth; Eurydice; Melancholy Play and Late: a cowboy song. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.