Kiss of dread

Jane Dutton's sequel to Hugger Mugger

amplifies the original's sins

by Steve Vineberg

KISSING BOOTH

Written and directed by Jane Dutton. With Susan Nest, Kathleen McGrath Jordan, Linda Oroszko, Kathleen Quinlivan-Beck, Gail Swain, and Victor Kruczinski. Set and lighting designed by Tom Saupé. At New England Theatre Company, Paxton, through September 23.

Kissing Booth is a sequel to local playwright Jane Dutton's 1997 comedy-drama Hugger Mugger. In the earlier work, set in Worcester, we met three sisters in the aftermath of their mother's death -- stiff-necked, puritanical Barbara (Linda Oroszko); mentally challenged Lucy (Susan Nest), who had lived nearly into her 40 under her mother's care; and Ros (Kathleen McGrath Jordan), a gay woman and recovering alcoholic who'd moved all the way to California to escape her father's disapproval. Hugger Mugger was a feel-good evening that sounded more like pop psychology than drama, but it was a try. In Kissing Booth, however, Dutton -- who also directed the NETC production, with the Hugger Mugger actresses repeating their parts -- seems to have given up any attempt to discover dramatic structure. The play is a series of conversations with no forward movement and almost no shape. It's equal parts Rosie O'Donnell and group therapy.

Among the characters in the earlier play was a psychologist, Ros's lover Carol, who served as a crude device for getting Barbara and Ros -- who didn't get along -- to reveal themselves. But by the time Kissing Booth, which is set in Ros's L.A. home, begins, Carol has been dead for more than a year (a car crash took her). So Dutton simply substitutes a young lesbian veterinarian named Maddie (Kathleen Quinlivan-Beck), who happens along because Lucy befriended her, to enact Carol's role. With astonishing presumptuousness, Maddie delivers a lecture to Ros, whom she's known for about 10 minutes, on the subject of moving on and rejoining life after her year of grief.

Remarkably, instead of kicking this unconscionably rude stranger out of the house, Ros is not merely grateful for her intervention but romantically drawn to her. So they initiate a relationship, while Lucy experiences, at 42, her first camaraderie with and sexual attraction to a man, Richard (Victor Kruszinski), who works for Ros's AA friend Helen (Gail Swain). Richard is similarly handicapped; it's his potential romance with Lucy that brings out the worst impulses in Barbara (who is otherwise a much more open and likable person at this point in her life) when Barbara lands on Ros's doorstep to surprise her on her birthday.

Kissing Booth is awash with good liberal sentiment. It practically crows with self-congratulation at being on the right side of every issue. And for a theatergoer it can be a little much -- like being force-fed maple fudge for two and a half hours. Moreover, without anything to play, the actors are stuck. Most of them don't really give performances. They just read their lines with a lot of clarity and zeal. I never believed for a moment I was watching real human beings, but that's not the actors' fault, because Dutton hasn't written a single plausible interaction. The characters just sit around and express Dutton's views -- or (in Barbara's case) the opposite of her views, so that the play can correct her. It's mouthpiece dramaturgy.

Nest and Kruszinski are exceptions: they act all over the stage. But you can't blame them either. Dutton wants to award Lucy and Richard the right to lead their lives as "normal" human beings do. That's the issue here -- at least in Act Two. (Act One is about Ros coming out of her shell; the play is more like two shorter plays strung together.) But the author doesn't extend them the dignity of presenting them as imperfect, like the rest of us. They're like saintly bunny rabbits. We're meant to laugh at their cute malapropisms (like "constipated" for "concentrated" -- now there's a plausible one) while adoring them for their inability to hurt anyone, ever. And in Lucy's case we're also meant to marvel, as we were in Hugger Mugger, at her insights about how everybody should live. Dutton hands Lucy her most painful bons mots, like a description of God as a couch potato with a cable remote in his hand and an insistent plea to her sister Barbara that though retarded she may be, she doesn't have a retarded heart.

Kissing Booth drove me crazy -- not just because I hate being preached to at the theater, not just because a play that doesn't dramatize anything can seem to ramble on for a century, but because it's so damn condescending to Lucy and Richard. I'm sure that's not what Dutton intended, but she falls straight into the Boys Next Door trap of claiming to advocate for the human rights of the characters while making sure that we respond to them as if they were adorable pets. Nest plays down to her role in exactly the same way she did in Hugger Mugger, while Kruczinski, a canny actor with terrific timing, essentially does a vaudeville impersonation of a mentally handicapped person. There's nowhere else for either of them to go.

And having compounded all the mistakes she made in Hugger Mugger, there's nowhere for Dutton to go either -- at least, not along this path. If she wants to write plays, she needs to look at about a hundred classic texts to see how they're put together. Kissing Booth has dialogue spoken by actors on a stage, but that doesn't automatically make it drama.