STAGE KISS

23 January - 15 February, 2026
Director: Robert Chapel

FOUNDERS THEATER JANUARY 23 - FEBRUARY 15 Live Arts is pleased to present the charming and profound comedy, Stage Kiss, by Pulitzer Prize finalist and MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient Sarah Ruhl. This witty play-within-a-play explores the hilarious and often messy lines between professional performance and personal passion, asking: when is a kiss ever just a kiss? The story centers on two actors, identified in the script simply as "He" and "She," who, by an unlikely twist of fate, are cast as long-lost romantic leads in a forgotten 1930s melodrama. The catch: He and She are also former lovers who haven't seen each other in years. What follows is a delightful and fast-paced exploration of love, fidelity, and the theatrical life. The boundaries between their characters' fictional romance and their own complicated reality rapidly blur, impacting their current offstage partners—She's earnest husband, Harry, and He's schoolteacher girlfriend, Laurie—and She's cynical teenage daughter, Millie. Ruhl's affectionate homage to the theater is both a satire of bad playwriting and a genuinely romantic look at the possibility of second chances. Through farcical situations and Ruhl's signature poetic dialogue, Stage Kiss captures the universal human desire for "combustible romance" while also contemplating the quiet dignity of a stable, long-term marriage. It's a smart, warm, and highly entertaining comedy that reminds us we are all, in some way, performing the roles of our lives. "Wickedly clever…Ruhl's unique, breezily elegant dialogue is fully present, as is her pleasingly loopy logic." — Variety “Stage Kiss…points out how silly acting and theater can be, but at the same time, how wonderful.” - Maryland Theatre Guide