STAGE REVIEW : Honor Among Outcasts : Manuel Puig’s ‘Kiss of the Spiderwoman’ Offers Lesson in Morality of Love

It is not his only novel, but the late Manuel Puig’s “Kiss of the Spiderwoman” may be his best known, not the least because he himself dramatized it into a play and because William Hurt won an Oscar as the overtly gay prisoner Molina in the movie version a few years ago.

“Kiss of the Spiderwoman,” which opened Saturday at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage in Costa Mesa, has a title that sounds deliberately like the B movies on which it so heavily relies, but is a skillful dialogue for two voices about the politics of honor among social and sexual outcasts.

The locale is an unidentified prison cell in an unidentified repressive society. Although Puig was from Argentina and no doubt had it in mind, he chose to universalize the situation by keeping matters in a kind of artistic never-never land. What interested him was not placing blame, but examining the mechanisms of survival within the confines of oppression and oblivion. How is it done?

Puig’s protagonists are imprisoned for different but equally vague offenses. They share the space uneasily. For Molina, whose only crime appears to be sexual preference, survival depends on his wide-ranging focus on the B movies of his youth and a careful routine of nurturing his much more nervous cellmate. For that cellmate, Valentin, a jumpy radical incarcerated for participating in a subversive political movement, there seems to be no mechanism for dealing with his present situation--other than, in due course, to learn about endurance from his more adept companion.

Love? It plays the role that it always does, as a key to enlightenment and survival--with evenhanded emphasis on both. It is a part of what transpires between two human beings who can share little else. Through love comes tolerance and understanding. The unbearable is made bearable. That is the “Christian” as well as the political lesson.

Puig’s play, seamlessly translated by Allan Parker, is deceptive in its simplicity. Director David Chambers, who first staged it at the Yale Repertory Theatre (and who must be remembered for his stunning production of Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy” last year at South Coast), has the gumption not to overstate it.

He is not afraid to keep the stark cell in which the men are confined either plunged in darkness or drenched in white light (Ralph Funicello designed the set and Tom Ruzika lit it). He is also not afraid to let this vulnerably raw play take its time; to let John Snyder start out craven and unpalatable as the irascible, intense Valentin; to let Richard Frank’s uninhibited Molina win us over slowly, just as he does his recalcitrant cellmate, with fussy ministrations and his passionate recounting of the movie “Cat People,” about other kinds of outcasts.

Chambers and his fine actors sustain a subtle rhythm. Momentum builds for the most natural and valid of reasons: because it is written into the dialogue and allowed to unfold. Nothing is forced. An intermission that had been part of the plan was eliminated after the programs were already printed. A wise move, since this fragile play has a tenuous arc that should not be interrupted by anything as mundane as a run to the restroom.

It all works in mysterious ways, and by play’s end we have been morally cleansed and energized, even if, in these days of outspoken political and sexual contention, we have not necessarily learned anything very new. But in a city as embattled as Costa Mesa was last year over what is acceptable on stage and what is not, a play such as “Kiss of the Spiderwoman” takes on an urgency one might otherwise tend to discount.

When all is said and done, this holding of a mirror up to nature is a lesson in spiritual healing and generosity. And there just might be some souls out there who could use the stretch and be moved by it to a more perceptive and more charitable embrace of the human condition. Warts, aberrations and all.

‘Kiss of the Spiderwoman’

Richard Frank: Molina

John Snyder: Valentin

Producers David Emmes, Martin Benson. Director David Chambers. Playwright Manuel Puig. Translator Allan Baker. Set Ralph Funicello. Lights Tom Ruzika. Sound David Budries. Costumes Joel Thayer. Production manager Edward Lapine. Stage manager Andy Tighe. Assistant stage manager Randall K. Lum.