Stop Kiss
May 1-3 & 8-10, 2009

About The Playwright

A first generation Korean-American, DIANA SON's father and mother raised her in Milford, Delaware, bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Her parents wanted Son to grow up to be "very American," she says. But like many parents, they had reservations about a career in the arts. "They would not let me go to the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University," Son says. "So I got a bachelor's degree in dramatic literature. It had to be New York University of course, because it's right near the Public Theatre."

But it was Diana Son's senior class trip that changed her life. "You know how most high school seniors love Catcher in the Rye? Well, I loved Hamlet in that way. I was enthralled by it."

"And we were going to see it in New York! Then I found out a woman, Diane Venora, was playing Hamlet. I was sure she was going to ruin it for me. But when the show started, (this was at the Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre), I was enthralled. I didn't know what was happening to me. Eventually I was fearful that it would end. I didn't want it to end, ever."

By the time she was in the fourth grade, Son knew that she was not meant to be an actor. Writing since she was in grade school, she felt that "writing would be my way of getting into the (theatre)."

Flash forward 18 years. Son is now a successful playwright. Her drama Stop Kiss played to standing-room-only houses at that very same Public Theatre in which her life suddenly veered toward playwriting. The sometimes implacably picky New York critics were fulsome in their praise. Stop Kiss, has been optioned by film director Robert Greenwald as well. Productions have been seen throughout the country in regional, university and community theatres.

Over the years, Son has written half dozen plays. She continues to have a day job to pay the bills. But she seems to be at the point at which she can sustain herself by writing her own creations. She will do the screen adaptation of Stop Kiss. As well, she is working on a new play for the Public Theatre, and is writing a movie for Meg Ryan's production company as well.

Son once worked as a writer for Aaron Sorkin’s popular TV drama, The West Wing. When Stop Kiss opened in New York and won raves, she was writing Star Trek trivia questions for the Sci-Fi Channel. "On the day I should have been the toast of New York I was writing things like 'In what episode did Gene Roddenberry's wife become Captain Kirk's nemesis?' Everyone I knew was calling me to congratulate me. The phone was ringing every 20 seconds. And I had to let the machine answer it. I was busy with 'Spock says, "That is not logical!" a total of how many times?'

Son feels at home in New York City, where she and her husband, Robert Cosaboom have an East Village rent-controlled apartment. "His family has been in this country for a long, long time," she says. "We have a sort of back-and-forth, New York / Los Angeles relationship."

What The Critics Said

"Manhattan growls like an underfed pit bull in "Stop Kiss," a sweet, sad and enchantingly sincere play by the young American writer Diana Son. The sounds of the city are edged in threats, signs of violence that has happened or is waiting to happen. Yet it's all so irresistibly exciting, isn't it? In this delicately balanced comic drama, falling in love with New York or in New York is risky. Only the brave need apply.

As directed, the production captures the heady feelings of falling hard for a less than cuddly metropolis in ways that musicals and plays like Wonderful Town and Barefoot in the Park must have for other generations. But this particular valentine comes equipped with warning lights. The problems of urban living aren't just cute and eccentric here, though it might seem that way when the evening begins. Cutting back and forth in time, before and after a random act of violence that is the work's center, the production generates an underlying ominous tone in even its lightest moments." Ben Brantley, The New York Times

"Canny structuring and a welcome lack of cheap manipulation." Linda Winer, Newsday

"Scintillating and exquisitely acted. Brilliant. A beautiful play." Clive Barnes, New York Post

"Stop Kiss jangles and crackles like a clangorous New York street on a summer night" Francine Russo, The Village Voice

"Vital and exciting. A first rate production." David Kaufman, Daily News

The Off-B'Way Production

Joseph Papp Public Theater / Susan Stein Shiva Theater, NYC

Opening Date: November 17, 1998
Closing Date: December 20, 1998

1999 Outer Critics Circle Award Nominations:

Outstanding Off-Broadway Play
John Gassner Award, Diana Son

Opening Night Production Credits:

The Public Theatre, Producer
George C. Wolfe, Producer
Rosemarie Tichler, Artistic Director
Mark Litvin, Managing Director
Diana Son, Playwright
David Van Tieghem, Original Music
Jo Bonney, Director

Opening Night Cast:

Kevin Carroll - George
Jessica Hecht - Callie
Rick Holmes - Peter
Saundra McClain - Martha/Nurse
Sandra Oh - Sara
Saul Stein - Detective Cole

Original production photos copyright: Michal Daniel, NYC

In The Playwright's Own Words

"(Stop Kiss is a political play) in the sense that politics is a way of looking at events that happen to people. I would never personally say 'This is a play about homophobia. This is a play about gay bashing. This is a play about the civil rights of gays and lesbians in America.' I would describe the play as a love story."

"I've had the title for several years. I half-wrote a one-act many years ago in which one female friend kisses another when a tear is running down the friend's face. The friend is surprised, and the other woman says she was kissing the tear to stop it, to stop her friend from being upset. But the friend thinks it was more than that. And the question becomes, does the friend 'want' it to be more than that? Do both of them? I never finished that play. But I continued to be interested in the blurry line between the emotional engagement two women can have and how it can be crossed into sexuality. The title as it applies to the current play called Stop Kiss means everything you think it means. I take that back. It does not mean they should not have kissed. Some people have interpreted it that way and I'm just stunned by it. Never crossed my mind it could be seen that way."

"I just wrote what scenes I thought would be in the play. Then after I had about 8, I lined them up in sequential order (I always knew the structure would go back and forth). I wrote the first draft in 6 weeks. I knew I wanted Callie and Sara's relationship to start at the beginning. But I was worried about how to write that scene. You know, a "getting to know you" scene where characters ask each other "So, where are you from?" and stuff like that which is terrible playwriting, terrible. I teach playwriting and I'd never let a student write a scene where the exposition was as obvious as that. So I thought, "How can I make this scene more interesting?" The first scene of the play used to be the scene where Detective Cole interviews Callie about the attack for the first time. It is now Scene Two. We changed the order of the first 12 scenes in previews."

"A lot of people assume I'm gay from the play. A lot of people assume I'm gay because I have short hair. A lot of people assume I'm gay because in the presence of gay women, I don't feel the need to establish my difference from them. I'm more interested in how people are alike and not different. And that expands to ethnicity, gender, etc. I was very honored to receive the GLAAD Media Award for Stop Kiss. But I have recently encountered, now that the play has been out there, that there are some people in the gay and lesbian community who think that the message of Stop Kiss is "If you come out, you will get beat up." And I find that unfathomable. And I can't help but feel that this interpretation, which is more of an accusation really, would not be aimed at me if I were gay. There is suspicion of me, of what I'm using the play to say, because I'm not gay and therefore they assume I'm not responsible to the gay and lesbian community. The irony is that I DO feel responsible to the gay and lesbian community. In the sense that I consider carefully how I portray gay characters. If I had written a play in which a Korean American woman was beaten by a racist, would people think the message of my play was "If you're Korean American, you'll get beat up?" It's dramaturgically unsound. Because unquestionably the last beat of the play is: love wins."

"I set out to write a romantic, not sensational female relationship and that's the spirit with which I wrote the play and it's incredibly gratifying when I hear that that's how people experience it. There have been a few dissenting voices from the gay and lesbian community that this play isn't gay enough or political enough, or that I'm not gay enough to have written it. They are by far the minority voice but it's hurtful anyway. It's been interesting for me to see subsequent productions of the play, (I've seen 6 so far), particularly when I haven't been involved in rehearsal. There was one production directed by a man in which the kiss at the end was quite short. The lights faded on it quite quickly. And I had to say, "Hey. We need the kiss. We've earned it. Give us the kiss!"

"The premiere production was directed by a woman, Jo Bonney, and she staged a really lovely, yummy kiss. And tons of women, gay, straight, whatever, would say to me afterwards "GREAT KISS!"

"Every producer I met with who was interested in making the play into the film said to me "You know, you can't keep the structure." They'd say film audiences aren't savvy enough to make sense of it. The funny thing about the screenplay adaptation… the ironic thing is everyone kept saying how the structure of the play was so cinematic. And I thought it was so uniquely theatrical. The marvel of seeing it live is watching the actors, particularly the ones playing Callie and Sara, make those breakneck emotional transitions. You enjoy the actor's virtuosity, which you can't in film."

Sources: Joe Adcock, Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
"Playwright's Early Start Pays Off"
Sarah Raskin, American Theatre,
"Love Wins: An Interview with Diana Son"

Defining Hate Crime

Hate crimes (also known as bias-motivated crimes) happen when an individual or group targets a victim because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation.

A "hate crime" can take two forms: the first refers to a criminal act which has been motivated by a hatred of one or more of the listed conditions. The second kind is hate speech, which is speech defined as crime. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse, or offensive graffiti.

Concern about hate crimes has become prominent among policymakers in many nations and at all levels of government in recent years, but the phenomenon is not new. Examples from the past include Roman persecution of Christians, the Nazi "final solution" for the Jews, and more recently, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and genocide in Rwanda.

During the past two centuries, some of the more typical examples of hate crimes in the U.S. include the lynching of African Americans, cross burnings to drive black families from predominantly white neighborhoods, assaults on gay, lesbian and transgender people, and the painting of Nazi swastikas on Jewish synagogues.

Of the nearly 8,000 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 1995, almost 3,000 of them were motivated by bias against blacks. Other frequently reported bias motivations were anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-gay, and anti-Hispanic.

Stop Kiss Dramaturgy © 2009, Ross Harmon: The Barn Players

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