Woolly’s ‘Kiss’ Ends Up as a Slap in the Face

In the waning days of the 2016 election, which seems fraught with both danger and the feeling that we’re being offered a diet of thin, hard-to-swallow political gruel, it’s hard to pay notice to periodic offerings of authenticity, of the sense of being in the whole world, not just in its bellowing belly.

Check out the Woolly Mammoth production of “Kiss,” a play by Chilean writer Guillermo Calderón that operates like a canny thief, one who comes in and steals your attention, getting you to laugh a little here, chuckle a little there, then, quite suddenly, turns around and gets in your face, demanding that you pay attention to something else entirely, something urgent.

This U.S. premiere, directed by Yuri Urnov and running through Nov. 6, is a smartly acted little bomb of a show, which starts out looking like an exotic item, a kind of romantic, over-the-top farce about two couples sorting out their affections in front of us, often in hilarious, knowing ways — in the manner of Syrian television soap operas, which apparently still remain popular in that devolving, tragic state.

In “Kiss,” a quartet of American actors appear to have gotten hold of one of those soap operas and are acting it out in a brightly lit living room set. It goes like this. Hadeel, an intensely fierce and funny Shannon Dorsey, loves the flustered, handsome Ahmed, a bewildered Tim Getman, but suddenly discovers that she also loves the ardent Youseff, pushy and smart Joe Mallon, who is affixed to the impassionate, busy Bana, the terrific Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey. Not only that, but only moments later, while Youseff is out scouring for cigarettes, Hadeel accepts Ahmed’s proposal of marriage.

Things, you might guess, fall apart as secrets come out, are redacted and retracted, and the couples pummel each other in the aftermath of emotional truth-telling. It’s all too much for Hadeel, who … well, see for yourself.

Not that it matters. Because, all along and in the end, this isn’t about young people in love, it’s not screwball comedy, it’s not anything you think it is at all (a good time on a Friday night, for instance).

It’s about Syria. It’s about death and violence and destruction, it’s about kids and dying children and smoke and dust, and people adrift in Europe, and blowing up in the streets of Aleppo, and the mordantly threatening face of Assad on a flying poster and about not being silent, but trying to wrestle with the world and losing.

The characters, the actors in the soap, get the bright idea of skyping a woman — a Syrian refugee in Jordan — who they think is the writer of the soap. Talking through an interpreter with the woman, a deeply haunting, gray presence played by Lelia TahaBurt, they discover that just about everything has been lost in translation, that this was not a soap but a real-life story about four people navigating their lives in Syria; what they thought was a character saying “I kissed someone” is actually that character being detained while coming home to them.

What emerges are scattered, fragmented details of a disintegrating nation, of normalcy, of anything resembling what the soap characters are talking about like love, who loves whom and why and all that.

Calderón, who’s known as something of a political writer, tackles a singularly difficult theme here to powerful effect: how do artists grapple with fear, with politics, with war, with justice in a way that is about art and life itself. You might suspect he doesn’t solve the issue entirely — how could he, contemplating people nobody knows? — but he’s thrown himself in the trenches.

What he and the designers have done is to rearrange and strip the stage and put it back together in a different form that suggests passion and chaos, and something both grand and horrible. It is a suggestion, but noise and sound can bring it to fruition, as well as all the actors, who have thrown themselves into the play as if naked, with bared teeth and full voices.

In many ways it’s an amazing play, when you really start to think about it. I was going home to smug Bill Maher on Friday night and thought about the fact that, for a week or so, we’ve been talking about nothing but groping and polls as if they were breakfast food. Except for the valiant picture of that little boy, we had nothing to digest about anything else of any substance.

But here in the cramped arena of Woolly’s Melton Rehearsal Hall, you think, what a kick in the head. “Kiss” is not by any means, in the end, easy. It’s discomfiting, head-scratching, a kiss as a slap in the face. But then you remember that it’s also, characteristically, a Woolly choice and play, something the folks there have been for a long time. “Kiss” pretends to be playing, putting on a play, but they’re not playing here.