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Who gets to enact the story of someone else’s suffering? Is it worthwhile to enact situations you have no knowledge of, through belief in some common, shared existential state? Global citizens, denizens of the internet, aren’t we free to access whatever speaks to us?
Whatever else you can say about it, Kiss, by Guillermo Calderon, now at Yale Repertory Theatre through May 19, is not your typical two-couples play. For the first act, we might think that we’re watching a somewhat offbeat romantic comedy in which two men — Ahmed (Ian Lassiter), the boyfriend, and Youssif (James Cusati-Moyer), his best friend — are both interested in marrying the same woman, Hadeel (Sohina Sidhu), who may or may not be interested in marrying each of them. Bana (Hend Ayoub), the girlfriend of Youssif, arrives late, seething about his mistreatment of her.
The situation, set in Damascus (an overhead subtitle tells us), plays out with laughs at these young people who profess to love each other and who gather regularly to view the soap opera that Bana stars on. As the awkward situation develops, first Youssif, then Hadeel squirms under the pressure of what seems to be a passion neither can deny. There are some telling bits about trust and honesty and believing in love.
The play’s point of reference seems to be the melodrama the quartet might like to imagine they’re in early on. Youssif and Hadeel act out a scene from a soap very amusingly. But the tone of Kiss, under Evan Yionoulis’ direction, is a shade mordant, which keeps things lively, and slightly askew. All four land some comic moments, particularly Cusati-Moyer who seems nonplussed by his own feelings, and Lassiter, who, when those feelings begin to come to light, plays pained comically. Hend Ayoub is the one who airs grievances the loudest, but then Bana is an actress. Meanwhile, Sohina Sidhu’s Hadeel seems a stately mess of contradictions. Her most definite statement is that she doesn’t want anyone to be hurt.
Well, too bad. Because, as Bana says at one point, “life is suffering,” and this is Syria, which has been suffering epically, as a humanitarian disaster, since 2013, when the play was written. That fact, without giving too much away (as we critics have been requested not to do), makes itself felt in the second half of the play. Suffice to say, there’s a seismic shift in register to reveal a play with very different intentions.
There’s a touch of Pirandello in Calderon’s manner of motivating that shift, in the sense that the characters are also actors, and they are trying to understand the play they’re in. The audience’s efforts to understand corresponds to the depth of our sympathies for them. Settled into one kind of play, we suddenly switch gears and motor through a play that plays at relevance to our distressing times, while also toying with the big question of appropriation.
What do we need to know about the state of war-torn Syria in order to understand and find the proper tone? And what, in any case, is the point of pretending to be someone you’re not? We’re all human, and “everybody loves,” as Youssif says, partly in his own defense. Is that enough?
The final scene plays out as if a screwball comedy had been put to the screws. It’s jarring, and not entirely successful, as the characters come to seem ciphers Calderon has created to bear witness to events most of us choose not to witness. The appropriation angle returns to plague the inventor as his play — developed in Germany in consultation with a Syrian refugee friend, according to the playbill — makes gestures it doesn’t fully sustain, if only because it’s difficult to accommodate the play’s radical break. The Rep’s production is not quite as menacing or menaced as it needs to be.
But that criticizes the play from the point of view of some supposed criteria for what makes theater work or not work. The work this play does is striking and very worthwhile. For the experience it provides — which might inspire greater concern for war refugees — there’s nothing quite like it. You must see it for yourself to consider its effect. Kiss ends with a scathing line that puts a spotlight on everyone who tries to live a normal life under a despot — and even someone who wishes he were one.
Kiss runs at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., through May 19. Click here for tickets and more information.
