Peter, the ingenuous hero played by Alec Baldwin in ”Prelude to a Kiss,” loves the sign at the roller coaster: ”Ride at Your Own Risk.” It promises a journey into ”the wild blue” in which anything can happen. The same sign could be posted at ”Prelude to a Kiss,” for Craig Lucas, the author of ”Reckless” and ”Blue Window,” has again written a play that propels the audience through hairpin emotional turns, some soaring heavenward and others plummeting toward earth, until one is deposited at the final curtain in a winded and teary yet exhilarating state of disorientation.
I loved this play and the dreamy, perfectly cast Circle Repertory Company production, directed by Norman Rene, that is inseparable from it. But as the man says, ride at your own risk. ”Prelude to a Kiss” takes a most familiar genre, romantic comedy, in directions that are idiosyncratic and challenging.
The play’s title comes from the Duke Ellington song sung by Ella Fitzgerald that perfumes the evening, and Mr. Lucas follows its prescription that ”just a simple melody with nothing fancy, nothing much” can blossom into ”a symphony, a Schubert tune with a Gershwin touch.” The playwright also takes a cue from his characters’ favorite book, ”The White Hotel,” because ”Prelude to a Kiss,” though only a prelude compared with D. M. Thomas’s novel, is also a psychoanalytic fairy tale that rises from a maze of transference into a cathartic conflict between sex and death.
Prelude to a Kiss Movie Trailer. Mr. Lucas is not pretentious, and his play is as airily composed and, at first, as funny as the old-time Hollywood confections it sometimes paraphrases. Peter, a microfiche specialist at a scientific publishing concern, and Rita (Mary-Louise Parker), a bartender aspiring to be a graphic designer, meet at a Manhattan party, fall under the spell of love and are married at the bride’s family home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. It is a fine romance, with lots of storybook kisses – most of them executed by Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Parker, an enchanting young stage couple made for each other as well as for audiences.
The romance consummated, the trouble begins. During a honeymoon in Jamaica, Peter finds himself increasingly at odds with the wonderful woman he thought he had married. Once he returns to New York, he is convinced that Rita isn’t Rita at all. Through a magical plot device that could happen only in a movie – and frequently does – Rita’s soul seems to have migrated to another body. The body is that of an old, bespectacled, pot-bellied man, played by Barnard Hughes, who is dying of lung cancer.
”I’m not equipped for this!” Peter cries. While he had sworn to Rita that he would love her even more in old age, when her teeth had yellowed and her breasts had sagged, he had not expected to be put to so blunt a test so soon. Can he love a woman who now looks like an old, decrepit man? What makes ”Prelude to a Kiss” a powerful, genuine fairy tale rather than merely a farcical exploitation of the form’s narrative devices is that Mr. Lucas insists on playing out Peter’s outrageous predicament for keeps. The scenes in which the souls of Peter and Rita merge despite the impediment of Mr. Hughes’s undesirable body are as tender and moving as those in which Mr. Baldwin and Ms. Parker strike erotic sparks.
It is not difficult to figure out the genesis of ”Prelude to a Kiss.” Mr. Lucas is also the author of ”Longtime Companion,” a much more conventionally written feature film about AIDS that is to open in May, and this play can be taken as an indirect treatment of the same subject. The epidemic is to Mr. Lucas what Babi Yar was to D. M. Thomas, and Peter’s fidelity to his true love’s soul, even as that soul is trapped in a dying male body, is a transparent metaphor.
Yet Mr. Lucas never betrays his play’s fantastical tone or sense of humor; its setting is a unspecifically ”precarious” New York, and AIDS is never mentioned. The result is a work whose anguish excludes no one. The questions that Mr. Lucas addresses are timeless ones about the powers of compassion and empathy in a brutal universe where everyone is inevitably abandoned by parents, children and lovers and where the only reward for that suffering is to disappear to ”no one knows where.”
The script’s lyrical alchemy of bright comedy and deep feeling is matched by the staging of Mr. Rene, whose nearly decadelong collaboration with Mr. Lucas and a poetically minded design team has grown into one of the true joys of the American theater. All the performances are excellent, including those of Larry Bryggman and Debra Monk as slightly off-center suburban in-laws and Joyce Reehling as a sad-eyed middle-aged daughter who helps shift the entire play’s emotional key in her own confrontation with mortality. Mr. Hughes, repressing a bit of his customary Irish twinkle, turns a role that is not that large into an indelible specter of love lost and found.
For Mr. Baldwin, Peter is a complete, and completely successful, switch on the scurvy contemporary men he has played so amusingly on stage (”Loot,” ”Serious Money”) and screen (”Married to the Mob,” ”Working Girl”). It is no easy achievement, I’m sure, for an actor with such slick good looks to convey generosity of spirit rather than narcissism.
Mr. Baldwin, whose character also serves as the evening’s witty narrator, does so with natural ease, never resorting to charming tricks of the leading man’s trade. Ms. Parker, recently seen as Jane Hogarth in ”The Art of Success,” is going places as surely as her co-star is. An uninhibited (but not undisciplined) comic actress whose pouty mouth and big eyes break into unexpectedly radiant smiles, she transcends her own attractive looks to imbue Rita with a soul for which a man might well sacrifice everything.
Such is Mr. Lucas’s gift that he makes life’s sacrifices seem its affirmation, not its burden, even as he by no means underestimates the courage required to make the leap. The leap is not merely figurative. Like ”Blue Window” and ”Reckless,” ”Prelude to a Kiss” is dominated by the image of a window. Mr. Lucas often demands that his characters jump through it, leaving home for the unknown of a starry night and the arduous prospect of selfless love, just as he demands that audiences take the leap out of a literal reality and into the imaginative realm of an adult fable.
The amazing part is that if you can go the esthetic distance with this playwright, you may find yourself inspired to take the other, more intimate, much more dangerous leap, too. Though ”Prelude to a Kiss” is never more than a heartbeat away from the fearful nightmare of death that inspired it, the experience of seeing it is anything but defeating. Mr. Lucas opens the window on love -true love, not fairy-tale love – so wide that, even in this cynical time, it seems a redemptive act of faith to take a free fall into the wild blue.
Prelude to a Kiss (1992)
Directed by: Norman René
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Meg Ryan, Kathy Bates, Ned Beatty, Patty Duke, Sydney Walker, Debra Monk, Stanley Tucci, Annie Golden, Sally Murphy, Frank Carillo
Screenplay by: Craig Lucas
Production Design by: Andrew Jackness
Cinematography by: Stefan Czapsky
Film Editing by: Stephen A. Rotter
Costume Design by: Walker Hicklin
Set Decoration by: Jennifer Chang Binns, Cindy Carr
Art Direction by: W. Steven Graham
Music by: Howard Shore
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language. (sex related dialogue)
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: July 10, 1992
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