'Kiss' shocks, thrills

By the end of Kiss of the Spiderwoman, we realize finally that Molina (Blake Edwards, SM '02) is the spiderwoman of the title, and that his kiss spreads an entangling web of love around his cellmate Valentin (James DuRuz, BR '03.) For two and a half hours, Molina has cooked, cleaned, and slept his way into the soul of Valentina, but it is only at the end that we finally realize how wide and deep that web is—and how powerfully it has captured the audience.

This deft production of Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, directed by Meiyin Wang, DC '02, is bound to shock, but it is for the integrity of the romance between Molina and Valentin and the chemistry between Edwards and DuRuz—and only slightly for the explicit homosexual sex scene.

The play is set in the late 1970s in Villa Devoto prison in Buenos Aires. DuRuz's Valentin is a 26-year-old radical Marxist, and Edwards' Molina is a 40-year-old drag queen who works as a window dresser. At first, Molina goes out of his way to pamper Valentin, whose comrades are struggling to start the revolution without him. But at the end of the first act we learn Molina is working with the government, trying to unearth Valentin's clandestine comrades. Molina's coy pampering remains the same throughout, but its meaning changes drastically in the second act as he continues to fall in love with Valentin, who—with his Marxist exterior and bourgeois sentimentalist heart—finally reciprocates.

The acting is uniformly excellent. Edwards seems occasionally to question just how much of a queen he should be, but despite a few out-of-character glances at the audience, he controls Molina in all her various roles: as provider, love-starved romantic, informant, confidant, and ultimately martyr. And the failures of Valentin as a character contribute to the success of DuRuz as an actor. He takes clichés and makes them his, stealing a great show in the process.

The pace of the romance is the highlight of the play. DuRuz and Edwards gracefully build tension, sexual energy, and a reservoir of empathy. Valentin almost breaks Molina's prized stove, and then makes him a ham sandwich to apologize for the near-miss.

The feat is partly Puig's and partly Wang's—for every meal the two make for each other is prepared with love, illustrating with philosophical subtlety the carnivorous human need for love, the aching pain to care and be cared for. Valentin is a revolutionary who has trouble accepting his hard-ons and diarrhea, and Molina is a momma's boy who has no greater professional aspiration than to be a home decorator, but all their anxieties are somehow soothed in the spider's web they weave for each other.

"Women like us come to sad ends," says Molina, and in a sense he is right. From the brutal prisons, to the poisons, to the deaths that await both characters, the spider web encompassing the show is one of despair, but that is just the window dressing. The kiss is on the inside.

Back to A&E...