"Kiss" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Ben Krantz Studio

I thought this was going to be a really simple write-up, because I'd seen the show as a reading last year. But apparently I neglected to blog about it at the time, so I won't be able to just refer back to that text. Alas!

The current offering at Shotgun is a really interesting play. Thematically and spiritually, it's as if someone decided to mash up Shotgun's 2016 production of Christopher Chen's play Caught with last season's rendering of Sarah Kane's Blasted to produce a consciously self-negating and unnervingly experiential exploration of cultural miscommunication and the horrors of war, all rolled into one.

The Play

As with any play that intentionally undercuts itself, I find it hard to write much about the plot or structure of the play without giving a lot away. Suffice it to say that much like Chen's Caught, each of the four scenes in the play serves to subvert in some manner the audience's understanding of what has gone before. In this case, we start with a pretty straightforward, rather melodramatic rendering of a group of friends gathering in war-torn Damascus to watch their favorite soap opera. We eventually come to understand that this is a play within the play, that a group of actors found a script on the Internet and decided to perform it. When they finish, they treat their audience to a live-via-Internet video chat with the playwright, who is in a refugee camp.

As the discussion with the playwright continues, it becomes clear that the actors have severely misunderstood the script they read, and have a lot of trouble getting clear just what they do and don't understand about the situation in modern Syria. Based on their new understanding, the revisit the script in ways that genuinely amazed me. The artful performance of essentially the same words with an entirely different context is probably the single most impressive aspect of the show. It continues even beyond that, but more I shall not say, for fear of revealing too much.

Suffice it to say that what starts as a pretty simple-seeming little soap opera scene turns out to me much, much deeper when read in the right light.

Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón wanted to write a play about the situation in Syria, but since he knew almost nothing directly about the conflict, he also decided to write about that: the difficulty of learning and understanding what truly happens in another place, another culture, without first-hand experience. In that sense, the play is quite successful. By depicting artists earnestly trying to convey a message about a situation that they do not themselves comprehend, Calderón suggests the limitations of his own art and abilities, and causes the audience to question what they think they know about such situations, and how they might have learned that.

All in all, it's a very clever piece of writing. I wasn't entirely clear on what Calderón intended from the last scene, but even so, I came away impressed.

The Production

As noted up top, I saw this play in a staged reading at Shotgun last year, so had a pretty good notion of what the play was about. But a full staging made for a much more effective and viscerally satisfying version of the story. Just as one example, having the playwright and her interpreter actually appearing projected on the wall, rather than just sitting on the other side of the stage, is quite satisfying. Similarly, setting the play in a purpose-built living room, rather than adapting the set from some other play, really helps to convey what the actors are going through.

I have to single out actors Rasha Mohamed and Jessica Lea Risco, as the playwright and her interpreter, for managing to act literally behind the scenes and still manage to convey coherent characters when projected on the wall. The fact that they also function in both English and Arabic is impressive, and adds to the general feeling of cultural awkwardness.

The four American actors, played by Roneet Aliza Rahamim, Elissa Beth Stebbins, Wiley Naman Strasser, and Phil Wong, all bring distinct degrees and types of their own biases and misunderstandings to their roles. They manage to represent the earnestness of their endeavor as well as the splintered, inconsistent levels of misinterpretation they all carry. Director Evren Odcikin coordinates all of this chaos quite masterfully. I can see where it would be easy to let this play devolve into a terrible, confusing mess, but Odcikin manages to keep the audience off balance without completely coming untethered.

There's a bit of uncomfortable messing around as we move from the initial presentation to the online session, but that ultimately feeds into the awkwardness of learning that what seemed to be a well-intentioned attempt to convey a political message was in fact not even understood by the messengers. There was definitely a sense of disquiet between the scenes as audience members had to decide for themselves what was really going on.

Bottom Line

I would say this is a good, not great play, but it does some things very well that are difficult and probably necessary right now. Making people question what they think they understand and why, especially across cultural boundaries (that need not be ocean-spanning) is valuable. Perhaps if people start to analyze the kabuki aspects of the way facts and their alternatives filter around our own country, they might feel less certain of their stances in a polarized society that is part of a fragmented world.

In short, the play's not perfect, but it's doing something important, and is really well worth seeing. And as luck would have it, the run as been extended through September 30th, so you still have two weeks to catch the show. It's definitely worth your time.