Theatre review: Stage Kiss

Sarah Ruhl takes a decidedly metatheatrical stab at romantic comedy, a genre that over the years has seen many stage and screen couples emulate their characters' relationships in real life. Whether the stars actually managed to recreate their happy endings, though, has never been guaranteed. The unnamed leads in Stage Kiss are actors cast in a regional revival of a forgotten 1930s romance; only when She (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) and He (Patrick Kennedy) arrive for the first day of rehearsals do they discover they've been cast opposite someone they had a tempestuous relationship with two decades earlier. As they go through weeks of rehearsal and performances, kissing each other dozens of times a day, the lines between play and reality start to get blurred.

Theatre review: I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard

A disturbing little piece at the Finborough in Halley Feiffer's I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard, another American play about writing but dealing with a different popular opinion about the profession than Sex With Strangers did: Laura Eason's play was about the writer as part of some noble calling; Feiffer's subject is the writer as damaged goods, the Hemingway model of the alcoholic genius and the idea that the better the writer, the worse the human being. By that logic David (Adrian Lukis) must be an amazing writer: A celebrated playwright, he has a single daughter, Ella (Jill Winternitz,) whom he had late in life with his second wife. Ella is an actress who's just opened as Masha in a prestige revival of The Seagull, but her father wastes no opportunity to mention that getting any role other than Nina makes her a failure. It's Press Night but instead of waiting with the rest of the cast for the reviews, she's getting drunk at home with David.