In Kurt Vonnegut’s delightful 1961 short story “Who Am I This Time?,” a shy, bumbling small-town clerk named Harry Nash transforms into an electrifying lothario whenever he’s onstage at the community theater. Helene plays Stella to his Stanley and falls madly in love with him, but realizes that their onstage passion can be sustained offstage only if they keep throwing each other lines from famous plays. Thus Vonnegut captures the dilemma of living in the quotidian world when make-believe promises so much more.
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Known only as He and She, the pair take up where they left off decades earlier. She leaves her financial-wizard husband and surly teen daughter, He dumps his perky kindergarten-teacher girlfriend—who (paging Noel Coward’s Private Lives) moves in with She’s husband. But the same irritations and conflicts that punctured their first romance have remained evergreen. The scales finally fall from their eyes with a crash in the second act, as they rehearse a god-awful drama about a hooker and an IRA operative, I Loved You Before I Killed You, or Blurry. (The crack-up is foretold by Scott Jaeck’s long-suffering husband, who tells the adulterous pair, “It’s not love. It’s oxytocin.”)
But unlike that sometimes lumbering affair, Stage Kiss keeps it light—which is both a blessing and a curse. There’s a certain kind of fun in the running jokes about wobbly scenery, gormless understudies, and a clueless director (Ross Lehman, who’s mastered the seemingly paradoxical art of underplaying with histrionic gusto). But the comedy also keeps the romantic stakes low. It just doesn’t seem to matter whether He and She end up together.
There are plenty of laughs here, and Thebus mines most of them to great effect with the help of a solid cast. But Stage Kiss feels like a half-baked theatrical souffle: it collapses under the weight of its sweet concept.
Through 6/5: Tue-Sun, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $25-$78.
