The Play Within A Play
Bill English, Artistic Director
How we love the play within a play. Shakespeare loved them, Midsummer and Hamlet containing the most famous ones. And Kiss Me Kate does the Bard one better by slipping Shrew inside. In The Fantasticks, a band of players are hired to stage an elaborate seduction. Noises Off takes us backstage to watch the mayhem of putting on a show. And The Seagull begins with a play within a play.
In the theatre, we love to investigate the point where illusion intersects reality, where “pretend” meets “real”. We know that even in life, the boundary between real and imagined can be a slippery slope; the boundary between false and sincere, between madness and sanity. We know that “all the world’s a stage,” and that we, the players, will play many roles.
The very term, “stage kiss,” implies that it is not real. And yet, a kiss is still a kiss. Lips meet. Moisture is exchanged. Warmth is felt. It is the actor’s job to kiss. How does one kiss professionally? In my first high school play, I, a sophomore, had/got to kiss a senior. I was somewhat less than expert, and she suggested that her boyfriend give me pointers. Behind the theatre, he showed me and then said, “Now you try it.”
Throwing myself into it on opening night, I worried I might anger the boyfriend, but received his thumbs-up at the cast party. How easily we slip from illusion to reality. How easily illusion becomes delusion, and a lie told over and over becomes more real. Stage Kiss is a love poem to the theatre, a dance that seduces us by stepping deftly across the line between real and the unreal, on stage and backstage, illusion and reality. It is an existential play, a piece of fluff, a love story wrapped in a love story, wrapped in a love story.
All the best,
Bill
San Francisco Playhouse
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