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by Guillermo Calderón, directed by Ashlie Corcoran

Theatre Smash & ARC with Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto

March 30-April 16, 2017

Il Padre: “E come possiamo intenderci...?” (Luigi Pirandello, Sei personaggi in cerca d'autorei, 1921)

Theatre Smash and ARC in association with Canadian Stage are presenting the Canadian premiere of Kiss by Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón.  The Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus commissioned the play where it had its world premiere in 2015.  It has since had productions worldwide.  It is a wickedly funny satire of the naïveté of artists and audiences living in lands of peace and plenty who believe they understand works from impoverished, war-torn countries.  Calderón argues that good intentions are no substitute for first-hand-experience and that some works are so embedded in their cultural background that they cannot be translated. 

The play begins with a performance of Boosa (translated as Kiss) by female Syrian playwright Ameera Al Diri.  The action takes place on a lovely sand-coloured set by Jung-Hye Kim that depicts the living room and dining room of the well-off owner Ahmed.  The Persian carpet on the floor and the repeated ogeed arch motif on the back wall lend the room a general Middle Eastern look.  It is, however, only a projected title over the stage “Damascus 2014” that gives us certainty as to the time and place of the action.

Hadeel (Naomi Wright) is the first character we meet.  Costume designer Jackie Chau has clad her in a flowing, sleeveless jumpsuit, hijabless, hair flowing freely over her back.  Soon a nervous friend Youssif (Greg Gale) appears at the door.  We learn that Hadeel, Ahmed the boyfriend she lives with, Youssif and his girlfriend Bana have all planned to meet at the apartment to watch their favourite Syrian soap opera together.  What we don’t quite understand is the obvious tension between Youssif and Hadeel.  She warns him to keep his distance but Youssif can’t help but confess not only that he loves Hadeel but that he wants her to marry him. 

In response Hadeel admits to Youssif that in spite of living with Ahmed that she, too, loves Youssif and has been imaging Ahmed to be Youssif to help her through her days.  She agrees to marry Youssif.

Suddenly there is a knock at the door and it is Ahmed (Carlos González-Vío).  He is as agitated as Youssif was.  It turns out that he has finally decided to propose to Hadeel himself.  Youssif tries to delay him, but eventually Ahmed does see Hadeel and proposes.  Much to Youssif’s surprise and humiliation, Hadeel also says yes to Ahmed.  At this point, Bana (Dalal Badr), hair also uncovered, arrives.  She says she is late because a stranger gave her a kiss.  Before anyone can inquire too deeply into what she means, she is plunged into the discord among her friends.  After much outpouring of emotion from everyone, we wait to see who Hadeel really intends to marry.  After she announces her choice she falls into what seems a faint but has no pulse. 

From what we have seen, the play Boosa seems to be a witty farce built on the irony that friends who are gathering to watch a soap opera are actually living one themselves.  The set and costumes have been lovely, though more Westernized than we might have suspected.  And the performances have all been excellent with all four cast members adept at comic timing.  What gnaws at the back of our minds, however, is what a farce like this has to do with Damascus in 2014.  Hasn’t Syria been involved in a deadly civil war since 2011 that is still ongoing?  Perhaps, we think, the play is the kind of light entertainment that people seek out in times of stress.  We also wonder about the play’s odd ending.  Has Hadeel just fainted or is she supposed to be dead?  If the latter, is it simply convenient way for the playwright to wrest Hadeel out of her dilemma by leaving both men unaffianced? 

“Bana", who we learn is the director, comes forward to tell us that her theatre company came across a translation of Boosa on the internet and because of the strife in Syria decided to stage it to make people aware of Syrian culture.  The troupe could not locate the author during rehearsals, but as luck would have it, they have just found her at a refugee camp in Turkey and will finish the evening with a discussion with her via Skype about her play. 

The playwright (Bahareh Yaraghi) appears in a projection of the laptop screen on the back wall.  She has some English but is much more comfortable in Arabic and has brought along a translator (Liza Balkan).  “Bana” and the actors who are excited to meet the playwright and eager to her approval become increasing dismayed when they learn that they have got virtually every aspect of the play wrong.

They ask her how she likes the set, but she tells them that the original production had no set because all the theatres in Damascus are closed.  Instead it was performed in someone’s actual living room in one of the apartment blocks still standing and gunfire could be heard outside during the performance.  The troupe has not understood what Hadeel’s cough means nor has it understood that the “kiss” that Bana mentions means a sexual assault by the secret police. 

These revelations and others leave the troupe totally mortified.  How they respond makes up the third part of Calderón’s play and I will leave that for audiences to discover themselves.

What emerges is that the acting troupe with their good intentions of bringing Syrian culture to a non-Syrian audience has succeeded only in misunderstanding the author’s intentions and in misrepresenting life in present-day Syria.  Calderón has implicated the audience too in this misrepresentation.  We laughed at what, despite certain signals to the contrary, we assumed was a farce.  We laughed also when we learn that almost everything the troupe assumed about the play is contradicted by the playwright.  We laugh, that is, until we realize that we ourselves have also not understood the background, and worse, from our comfortable situation in a stable country, will likely never fully understand the play’s background.  Calderón thus takes the bold step of chiding us for our ignorant enjoyment of the troupe’s production.

Our experience of the play, like that of the performers in Boosa is one of chastening.  To achieve this result the director and cast of Kiss have to be very sensitive to changing genres and acting styles.  They are admirably adept at both.  Director Ashlie Corcoran directs the initial play-within-a-play with ideal pacing and verve. 

Naomi Wright makes the seemingly impossible task of Hadeel’s accepting both proposals believable enough that we assume Hadeel simply finds the situation of men adoring her overwhelmingly attractive.  Greg Gale, hilarious as Youssif, courses through through his wide range of emotions from rejection to self-abasement, bliss, pride and compassion for Ahmed to amazement and uncomprehending rejection again.  Carlos González-Vío covers more broadly and quickly the same emotional arc from distress to joy and back again as Gale.  Dalal Badr’s Bana ably shifts from surprise to outrage to cold rationality.  In the second part of the play, all four show us more relaxed versions of themselves, retreating into quiet rather than outbursts of anger when see how foolish their misinterpretation of Boosa has made them.

Calderón’s Kiss is meant as a provocation to debate, especially to debate the topic sizzling right now of who should be allowed to tell whose stories, with its codicil of who best understands a work of art – its creator, its intended audience or an outsider.  The initial implication of Calderón’s play is that the author and its intended audience are the only ones equipped to understand Ameera’s play fully.  But then we have to realize that Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed by an all-white male cast with boys playing the roles of young women.  Today we are not only happy to break from that original production scheme but to insist it is absurdly limiting.  How is it consistent to claim that interpreting a play in one’s own way is wrong in the case of the Syrian play and right in the case of Shakespeare?

Here, of course, Calderón’s play throws us for another intellectual and aesthetic loop.  His play Kiss is composed of both the play-within-a-play Boosa and the assumed playwright’s response to it.  That response is obviously also written by Calderón, who takes on the voice of a female Syrian refugee and even has the original English of her remarks translated into Arabic (by Salma Al Atassi) to lend them a false authenticity.  Thus, one fiction labelled as “truth” overturns another fiction labelled as “error”. 

Corcoran understands this double whammy by having Liza Balkan film Bahareh Yaraghi taking off the wig and sunglasses of her character and walk from her dressing room to the stage of the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs.  Calderón is like a present-day Pirandello, who asked in Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), “How can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself?”  This is why Calderón’s Kiss is essential viewing for any real lover of the theatre – not merely because it is so well directed and performed, but because it it has as its central question “What constitutes authenticity in the theatre?”

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Naomi Wright and Greg Gale; Carlos González-Vío and Dalal Badr. ©2017 James Heaslip.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.