The coming
of age story of two “broken” kids, the story of friendship and love in their
beauty and ugliness, Kiss it, Make it
Better is produced by Theater 4 People and can be viewed in the New Ohio
Theater (which is located in Manhattan, NOT Ohio). Raw and poetic, the play
falls upon you as a tsunami of engrossing pain, untamed passion, and tenderness
that is confused with cruelty.
Photo by Yvonne Alloway
Three
black hooded figures wait in the shadows of a scaffolding construction as the
audience enters the theater. Nothing
good can come from them; the air is filled with tension and florescent blue
light. When two kids, Nadia (Erika Phoebus, who also wrote the play) and Ty (Brian
Miskell) storm into the place, it brightens up with their laughter and silly
childish games. The construction sight becomes a playground where two kids play
pretend. Who could know at the time that the house at which they play will
transform into a game of a different sort when they become teenagers.
The
director Isaak Byrne, with the help of the set designer Joshua Rose, made the
process of Nadia and Ty growing up a spectacular show with well timed costume
changes and smooth transitions. The three-unit “rollercoaster” set is spun by
black hooded figures by 180 degrees and reveals a porch of a house on the other
side. In the beginning of the first act, as other characters get introduced,
the changes happen every few minutes which gives the show a nice, fast
phase.
The
sight of the action is supposed to be an abandoned fairground, which I only
found out towards the middle of the show from the text of the play. I am not
trying to say that Joshua Rose did a bad job designing it, quite the opposite.
Taking the design into different direction was quite brilliant. The set looks
like abandoned scaffolding which suggests the process of building something. But
the abandoned scaffolding illustrates stagnation, the point of no development,
in which the characters will find themselves trapped eventually.
The
imagination of Nadia and Ty and some plastic sheets helps them to transform the
skeleton of construction into a “home”. It seems symbolic that the house where
Nadia and her mother live is just on the other side, so close and yet so far
away. As a troubled teenager she can’t connect to her mother. Amy Higgs plays
the role sincerely, although the decision to cast an actress of the same age for
the mother as the daughter is an odd one.
It reminds me of a school theater production. This is disappointingly
neglectful, especially since the rest
of the production looks professionally polished.
Chris
Cornwell makes a very good Bradley, a seductive babysitter from the kids’
childhood. The cast is topped off with the hooded figures (Tom Walsh, Will Van
Moss) called the ‘boy chorus’, almost like in a Greek tragedy. Besides helping
around as stagehands during the transitions, and creeping in the dark in the
back of the stage indicating a nearing danger, they make noises enhancing the
dialogue and the sound design of Andy Evan Cohen. He also wrote the haunting
guitar riffs, reminiscent of the Twin Peaks, soundtrack for the show.
The
atmosphere of a deserted place, where the kids are playing their passionate and
cruel games by themselves, is conveyed by the lighting design by Joshua Rose. You
might think that the intense florescent colors of LED lights are more appropriate
for a club or a concert but they actually worked perfectly for Kiss it, Make it Better denying the text
sentimentality which it tends to fall into sometimes. The use of gobos (a physical stencil or template placed inside or
in front of a lighting source, used to control the shape of emitted light) created the interesting dynamic
lighting. The shadows of other constructions fell unevenly on the actors’
faces: as Nadia and Ty moved around, their faces were lit partially. Think of a
Hollywood close-up where the eyes of a diva are placed in the strip of light
and the rest of her face disappears in shadows. Joshua Rose
achieved a similar effect in a more subtle and appropriate way; what a bold and
innovative decision!
The
parade of the technical achievements of the show is concluded with the video
and projections design by Maxwell Bowman, featuring trippy surrealist
sequences, ‘nets’ of abstract patterns, and video ghosts of people and
buildings. The daring lighting design and projections complimented the play
very well and managed to not take away from the actors, which delivered performances
that gave me goose bumps at times. Sometimes the text loops for longer then
needed but, ultimately, Erika Phoebus did a great job evoking the memory of the
dirt and poetry of teenage years.
Even
if you are not in the mood for an evocative story of the blooms and thorns of
teenage love, come anyway to appreciate the exquisite production and to support
a good cause. All tickets are pay-what-you-can, 10% of all box office and concessions sales
goes to the organization called RAINN,
Rape Abuse Incest National Network (https://rainn.org).
Kiss it, Make it
Better runs until June 18th at the New Ohio Theatre at 154 Christopher St
#1E, New York. All the performances are “pay what you can”. For schedule and
tickets visit http://newohiotheatre.org/.
For more information about Theatre4People go to the website of the company: http://theatre4thepeople.com/
