New York plays tend to come in two kinds: the harshly tough or the wistfully tender. Diana Son's Stop Kiss is very much one of the latter: a gentle study of slow-burning love between two women that soothes and caresses without ruffling any feathers.
Callie is a traffic reporter for a local New York radio station: Sara is a gauche newcomer from St Louis who is teaching third grade in a Bronx public school. They meet through mutual friends and Callie offers both to shepherd Sara round the city and look after her cat.
But, through a jump forward in time, we know that they are jointly assaulted one dawn in the West Village and that Sara suffers life-threatening abrasions.
Despite the concern shown by their ex-boyfriends we sense that the attack is somehow prompted by their intimate closeness.
Son has a shrewd eye for the sexual tentativeness of the physically shy. Callie and Sara bond instantly, swap secrets and are clearly drawn to each other; but some natural inhibition stops them lunging at each other as they clearly long to.
Even when they share a bed they remain as impeccably chaste as Laurel and Hardy. And if the play has any wider point to make, it is about the ruinousness of restraint: it is precisely because they are unable to express their passion in private that Callie and Sara risk disaster by exchanging a public kiss.
The play is tender, compassionate, sincere: my only complaint is that it courts sentimentality by making its putative lovers so exhaustingly nice.
Sara does not just teach in the Bronx but is adored by everyone in her class; and, although Callie is stuck in a dead-end job, she naturally wins a prize for best traffic reporter. Even Callie's boyfriend is deeply understanding, and an investigating cop exhibits exemplary patience. Is this New York, I kept wondering, or Brigadoon?
But, sugar-coated though it is, Son's 90-minute play slips down easily. And Abigail Morris's production catches exactly the dual heroines' mix of wariness and longing. Though she looks more like a Wasp princess than a one-time klutz, Holly Aird excellently conveys the suppressed yearning of the cautious Callie, and Georgia Mackenzie is all brooding dark-eyed watchfulness as her would-be lover.
Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. Now there are no second acts in American plays either. But this one, though it has a touch of the fairytale, makes its point about the danger of closeted lesbian love with pleasantly economical compassion.
Until July 22. Box office: 020 7478 0100. This review appeared in some editions of yesterday's Guardian.
