 Yeah, yeah, of course. You're on a leash. Hi, everybody. Welcome. There it is. Hi, welcome. My name is Adam Greenfield. I'm the director of New Play Development and Player of the Horizons. Thank you so much for joining us today for this panel discussion about Sarah Rule's Play Stage Kiss. This is the third panel in a new series that we started this year. Basically, we ask each playwright in our season who they would most like to speak to about the play that they wrote, and then we make that happen for them. Also, I'm very happy to mention that this discussion caught the interest of HowlRound, which is a website that offers many platforms for the discussion of theater ideas and practices, and they're live streaming this event tonight. So there's a camera up there, and if you all wave to it, somebody at home, sitting in their living room, is probably going to wave back. So I'd like to really quickly introduce our wonderful panel. And while I'm doing that, maybe take a minute to make sure your cell phone is turned on. On the stage at the left end of the table is Hamish Linklatter. Hamish is an actor all over town and on both coasts. He's currently in the TV show The Crazy Ones and the newsroom. This summer you can see his Benedict in What You Do About Nothing in Central Park. And later this year you'll see him in Woody Allen's film Magic and the Moonlight. He's also a playwright. He's played the vandal from last year at the fleet. And earlier today, Clarence Horizons held a reading of his play, John and Ian, upstairs on the fifth floor. So Hamish is right as Kathleen Chalfont, and we were to list Kathleen's acting credit to him to take up the full hour. You may have seen her in the play Wit, An Ancient America, Somewhere Fun, or Dead Man's Cell Phone, here on this stage. We may have seen her on both the big and small screens, and Rachel from films Kinsey and The Last Days of Disco, to TV series Storm of the Century and House of Cards. To my left is Anthony Taro Loster. Anthony is monitoring today's panel. He's a child... He's a fully grown man. He's a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist. He's an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the NYU Child Study Center. He also maintains a full-time private practice in Manhattan, and in his free time he's married to Sarah Rohl. In the middle of the table is Esther Perrell. Esther Perrell is a psychologist recognized as one of the world's most original and insightful voices on couples and sexuality. You may have seen her enormously popular TED Talk, or you may have read her book, Meeting and Captivity, Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, which has been translated into 25 languages. And right here, of course, is Sarah Rohl. Sarah's plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play, Queen House, Passion Play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Melancholy Play, Ritise, Orlando, Dear Elizabeth, Late A Cowboy Song, and of course, Stage Kiss. These guys are going to talk to each other for a little while, and then at some point we'll turn the discussion over to questions from you guys. And I'd like to thank the panelists for being here today, and thank you all, and also thank the people on the internet. And I will stop talking now and sit down. Thanks. Thank you, Adam. And thank you again for your time tonight. And so, just to kind of jump right into it, I wanted to ask each of the panelists if you have a story about a Stage Kiss, a kiss you did in performance. I'm sure that for Hamish and for Cassie, you probably have more than one, but Esther and Sarah, you may have one or two. And I thought it might be a good way to get the discussion going to if you could share perhaps your best and or your worst story of a kiss in performance. And I see, like, Hamish, when... I'll give you a moment to gather yourself. I did a play right here on this very stage called The Busy World Is Hushed, and I had like a big embrace of the very hot young man named Luke McFarland. And on my 30th birthday, I was given probably the performance of my life because it was sort of like, you know, it was an important day. I was acting the shit. I mean, I was like transcended. I was so in the zone. I understood what Michael Jordan was doing all those years. And then we had this little kiss that we had at the top of the second act, upstate it in front of this window. The stars and the moon are out in front of it. And the kiss was, you know, it was in deep mouth. We were lovers. We loved each other and there was a deep loving kiss. But it was, you know, a very close mouth kiss. But for my 30th birthday, he had told all the crew that he was going to French me. And so everyone was waiting in the sides there and he stuck his thick tongue in my mouth right up there. And I was shot out of the zone. And that performance was lost forever. Was that your best or your worst? Combo. I haven't talked on stage they don't necessarily do tongue. Well, I think it's a conversation. I mean, formally, if you're having a formal, you have a formal conversation before sometimes where you're like, well, how would you like it? And what are you comfortable with? And so we're, oh, let's just go for it. And you know, it's the same with sort of, you set ground rules, I think, if you're professional, but actors are very rarely professionals. So a lot of different things can happen. But I, you know, you're like, well, in this rehearsal, are we going to do it? Are we going to get it started? Or maybe we just do it in the first stage, and yeah, so it's nebulous. Kathleen. I'm very old, you may have noticed. I prefer to say that the reason, one of the reasons I wanted to become an actor for two reasons, about the time I was seven years old, which was lost now in the midst of time, but one of the reasons was that I wanted to ride horses. And the other reason was that I wanted to be kissed, because I imagined that in the natural course of things no one would ever kiss me. So in an odd way, in some way, I never got to, I've never, either in the movies or the television or on the stage, ever gotten to ride a horse. And on the stage, I realized after it had been going on for some time that I have been mostly kissed by other women. All the deepest and most passionate experiences on the stage of my life have been kissing other women, which is not something that I do a whole lot in real life. So it was very interesting, and I began, you know, you wonder why that is the case. And then finally, you just lean back and enjoy it. And I have to say that one of the most enjoyable versions of that which went on for many, many years, because Ellen Loughlin and I were involved in Angels in America one way and another for six years. So it was a while for Paris Troika to get written, to be kissed by, and then have an orgasm caused by this kiss, by a gigantic angel flying out of the sky in great black wings. It was a pretty amazing stuff. So that was pretty great. I have to say, I think maybe that was, and then in an odd way, when I finally was kissed by a man, it didn't go well. Not the kiss itself, it was fine. This was on a television show called The Guardian, and it was decided by the writer that I should have an affair with Alan Rosenberg, who was on the thing, and who was a little bit younger than I, but not a whole lot younger than I. And this was 10 years ago, so I was 59, and not beyond, you know, not a lot. So he wrote this whole thing, and it was all great. We're going to have a love affair, and they sent, as they do in the case of this, the script up to the people, upstairs at CBS, who essentially went, and I went to the writer, who was a friend of mine, who was the creator of the show, and I said, they went, ooh, didn't they? And he said, yeah, they did. So we had one rather chaste kiss, and that was the end of it then. Then Alan went crazy in the show, and I was entirely, I should have been wearing a burka. Don't let the kiss anybody. So I think that that was my worst example, and it was the world around, not the kiss itself, because it was nice, the kiss itself. I ended a non-accus, I have stories of performing a kiss that are a bunch. Well, I mean, at first you said a kiss on stage, so I thought, you know, a kiss that is in a performance, but then I thought every kiss is a performance. It is a performative act. So then I began to go from age 12, very quickly, what has been the best, what has been the worst, what have I acquiesced to, what did I wish would never stop, and what did I wish would never have started? I had every kind of kiss in that sense, but I did have one that stayed a little longer in my memory zone here, which was the first, I don't know where you got the idea that it's a French kiss, you know. It's like French fries, you know. It's like, first of all, they're Belgian, if you didn't know. But, you know, so that first, what you call here, French kiss, was utterly terrifying. It was like, oh my God, this, like, I was utterly terrified. And I just remembered, you know, what it's like to have sexual ignorance as part of your sexual education and how much things sometimes start out in a terrifying way and it takes really a while until you actually discover the delight of it. And then, when you, for the first time, actually have that same experience and it becomes something utterly blissful, you understand that in sexuality and in kissing lies two opposites, disgust and delight, depending on how it takes place. That's amazing. I believe it or not had one sort of stage kiss. It was, I guess you could call it a rehearsal kiss. It was in a scene study class when I was 13 and I'd never kissed a boy before. And it was with Joyce Piven, who was my teacher, she's a wonderful acting teacher and many people know her now as the mom of Jeremy Piven. But in her own right, she's a wonderful acting teacher. So Murphy and I were doing, it was Murphy Monroe with the boy and I for a long walk to forever I think it was and we were doing the scene and then Murphy just promptly stuck his tongue in my mouth and I must have had a look on my face and Joyce just said, oh Murphy, you have to ask permission. And clearly I wasn't really cut out for acting in any way, but I did have one kiss. I feel like Esther's comic really frames the polarity between Hamish's story on the one hand and the 30th birthday of Kathleen's story of being kissed by an angel and the way in which the kiss is both disruptive but also transporting. And I was wondering about being an actor and particularly thinking about Kathleen doing this night after night for six years or more or less six years. How much of it sort of happens organically? Is your experience falling good or do you really think about it? How technical is it? Well it's a very interesting thing that I've begun to discover now more and more. I've long suspected that there's a time when you get the whole play inside you and then you don't have to think about it anymore and I've long suspected that it's stored not in the regular memory part but in the muscle memory part because when it's inside you like that you've finally gotten what's going on on the stage up to the speed of human thought because that's the enterprise actually. You begin, you know, it's just endless forever and ever and when it's up to the speed of human thought and it's stored properly in your muscle memory it's great because you can subvert it and get control of it and that usually messes it up or you can do it, it's like you were saying like Michael Jackson, like downhill skiing you just jump off at the beginning and go all, just go through it and it unfolds and it's not as though you're unconscious, you know you control over it but it unfolds like as though it's something in your muscle memory. How long does muscle memory take on stage? Would you say a year? No, it doesn't. It takes, I think, it's odd now because I'm just now at this stage because I'm just about played that I mean is just about to open on tomorrow and so we've finished all the horrible stages and we've just been through the judging which is the bad stage, the judging and then after Wednesday when they say what they thought it won't matter anymore and then we can really do the play but the muscle memory now for me kicks in sometime after the first week of previews when you play it once you get the thing in your head and the great thing about doing the play over a long period of time even if it's in development or especially if it's in development is that there are sections of it that are in your muscle memory or in your lizard brain, you know, back here that you can, you know, that act as a kind of touchstone for the rest of it but it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful moment when you realize you don't have to think about it anymore you can just start and the thing will come out which is not to say that it will always come out in the most stunning possible way but the best thing to do is let it come out because once you get close to that place and you try to control it you get in the way that it starts it doesn't, it's bad you slow it down in the same way that you see that a lot in sports people get in their own way you just have to believe at some point that it's okay and if it's all been prepared properly and you've been properly directed and all like that and the other person that is alive in the same way then it's great and you don't, you know, the events unfold as though they, as the way they unfold in life but only shorter Can I have another question to you about the automatic and time because I remember you and I were talking once about oxytocin maybe and the idea that the rehearsal period usually is about three to four weeks which is what the natural period I can't remember what this conversation was exactly about but it had to do with science and neurobiology and I was interested that you said it becomes bodily and it becomes automatic and I mean I wonder if there's a sense in which the rehearsal period mirrors the time of first love where your hormones are kind of raging and then you go into a year to six year run and it becomes automatic in a way that a marriage does and automatic not in a bad, I think not in a bad way in the best way and not even automatic just that it's stored in a different place so there are things you don't have to think about Yes, but you are emphasizing unfolding and not repetition Unfolding is erotic, repetition kills it Right It's thin That's the difference between the stage if it unfolds, if every day it unfolds then it's not repetition that's growing But I do think in a plan I mean I think a way of thinking about kissing is like language or like any movement but you're trying to if you think of it in terms of intention and trying to pursue your objective and this being a tool that your character has been given to achieve something story-wise in a scene night after night and if you are every night investing in your intentions and trying to get your characters what your character wants across then that kiss is one of your tools I mean it is, I'm trying to achieve my objective with this kiss and so it isn't, I mean it isn't, I mean you're working every night to tell your character's story and find that thing Can I ask that? It's also been about, I'm not a writer who works with objective and intention at all and I'm fine if an actor decides that's how they like to work but it's not how I work when I'm writing I mean do you think there's a difference between desire on stage and objective and also in your work do you think there's a difference between desire and a certain kind of intention? Do you get like planning or like goal oriented? Goal oriented, a goal oriented intention Well I think it's really hard to try to perform desire I mean it's very hard to try to perform a result you know, it's very, it's, you know to be gobsmacked, to be, you know like just like stuck, to play a state is very hard to do But I think Do you agree with that? Yeah, but desire you see is not a state Desire, desire by its very nature is forward moving and is a process it's desire for something and people who are overwhelmed with desire for whatever it is they're overwhelmed with desire for behavior in a particular way So I think, I think however it, however it people act, people move forward through time and I think sometimes it's reductive to say just objective or just desire it is we, the characters are the people who do this thing you know, they say this and do it I think it's just very hard I mean there's a lot of short hand sort of things but if you say someone, you need to say to an actor you need to act like you're more in love with that person that's hard, that's hard and also if you do it really good once chances are it's hard to repeat night after night after night that's gonna be hard On the other hand, if somebody says to you you don't love them enough then that's, that's some way you, it's a different it's a different way because it doesn't matter the director is saying, what I'm getting from you is that you don't love that person enough it doesn't matter, you know, the actor's intention they will be, they love them more than life itself but whatever it is they're doing is not expressing that thing so you can be told that you haven't pulled it off and then you try to figure out oh I see what the problem is and then we try to solve it You have something about tell us that sort of desire that you talk about I mean, your question about the difference between desire and objective is actually a day go hand in hand desire is to own the wanting so if you want you are propelled towards something and you can never force people to want you can force them to do but not to want this is certainly true in fact and, or in kissing for that matter and so it always has the implication of acting as you is implied and desires desideres I mean they are completely intertwined from an experiential point of view I'm not talking now neurobiologically and all that but experientially they are completely intertwined and they have a movement towards I mean in desire there is a movement but what's more interesting that's why the sentence you don't love enough work for when is that desire is intensified by obstacles that is actually and in the case if you want you could say that attraction plus obstacle equals excitement that's the erotic that's an erotic formula for you our job you know is love our job is not actually to feel that it's to make you think that we do and so it doesn't matter how you do it well and how often do you feel like well it depends on who's on the other end as a woman who has been married since the beginning of the midst of time often but did you have the feeling that when you do it onstage in a way even if you have become part of your muscle memory and you inhabit the role there is a way in which it's never acquired right? it's never acquired it's never taken for granted so that is the difference between the stage case and the offstage case is that it's never acquired onstage because you never know for sure if you will have succeeded in inducing that feeling in the spectator so every time is the first time yeah and at home it's not like that because of the spectator I was wondering do you think that as actors can you take this erotic experience and this sort of intelligence home does it enhance your life option I mean an honest answer very tricky the line between what you do here and what you do at home as you see in the play yeah I think you have a really lovely line about the difference between what is it and it's so perfect that I've forgotten it the difference between romance and there is a romance to the romances on stage and it does become part of your muscle memory actually the longer you do it the more times you do it you're like on going through these stages of this contained thing which is it's a thing but it does exist in a snow globe and then snow goes pop sometimes I guess then you get a mess on your desk but but they are they are sort of like different I love the image of a snow globe though the idea that it's sort of self contained you can have it well no, not at your playwright should have it yes it is I was thinking when you were talking about the snow globe and all that the time that it becomes dangerous as a workplace thing is when it goes bad and the play is over and that that is when your craft is called upon yeah, there was this one time in Maine when I was a boy and there were a couple nights from Julie I really fucking hated Romeo it was bizarre the play doesn't work so well and you were Romeo it's good well in another situation how do you recover sometimes sometimes Portland has a bad run people say I saw it early on it was great I don't know what happened because I wonder I wonder if Esther is listening to the two actors talking about channeling an erotic sense with success or failure on stage does that resonate with your experience with people around the world who are struggling in relationships to channel it while on stage or to be able to bring the energy off stage well I guess both I wonder are there ways that it seems like what they're channeling on stage is what people aspire to oh yes of course that's why we go to the theater that's why we go to the movies that's why we read novels romance comes from Homo it's the plot that unfolds over time and you want that plot to unfold really slowly you don't want to get to the end so fast because then it's over you just want that suspension you want to go with it you want all the disappointments all the almost but not really but it could have been come on you are bringing like this but you know but I think that to bring that energy off stage is a different story this is an act of the imagination and the people who bring it the best off stage are the people who are able to understand that thing called the erotic as an act of the imagination it is the central agent of the erotic and sometimes we have a harder time maintaining that imagination in our everyday life we go outside of our everyday life to throw ourselves to surrender to that imaginative space we don't bring it into the ordinary when we do it's magnificent how do you do it I mean how do you tell your patients to do it what's the nitty-gritty well I often suggest there's lots of things but I'm very influenced by theater in that way because I believe that it is a production, it's a pretend, it's a play and so I think one of the most freeing things sometimes is just to change names I mean you know to be called the same name by the same person for decades it's just like it doesn't open up many possibilities and sometimes just to change names you know it's like theater you play a character the children know that from the beginning they understand the idea of leaving themselves to enter another another self or other parts of oneself that we don't typically access that's why people go and find other lovers in the first place not so much because they're looking for another person they're looking for another self they're looking to be something else than what they have become which often can be rather stifling so anything that's disruptive of the everyday anything that's subversive anything that breaks rules proper responsible management ink kind of thing anything of that that is playful utterly playful I think the two key experiences are playfulness and curiosity because the absence of imagination is the depth of curiosity well you know that's a lot to digest but it makes me I did reverse this stifling from the after you live with this thing in there but the scene of like a playfulness of imagination I mean this is I guess it really seems central to the structure of stage kiss that in the first act there is this loving bunny farce about staging love in imagination on stage and then the second back shifts and it's much more about the serious work of trying to love someone in real life and I wonder what that contrasts is about crew this is by my husband I love that I mean I think the first act is silly purposefully and I sometimes liken my place to mixed genres because I feel like laughter opens people and if you crack them open a little bit then they might be ready for a second act where there might be more seriousness of purpose not that I don't think laughter is a serious onto itself but I think for me the end of the play is about this question of marriage being a non-narrative expression of love that has a dailyness and a repetition and so it's not like what we often see on stage the unfolding of plot because by definition romances end and of course marriages end because somebody dies and they can end in other ways too everything has a natural end but I was thinking about marriage as in a certain sense inherently anti-theatrical or unstageable and so that was the question that creeps in at the end of the play after this whole play where you're laughing and watching illusions get created and sort of the absurdity of how we create illusions on stage how do you live with a very simple way with another person over time but the greatest twist in the play is that the husband stages through the theatricality the total ordinary deadness I mean the fact that he actually engineers it and that they then lend you know leaving the stage and becoming the marital boredom but created by him in the theater that twist is just really beautiful thank you I hope it's surprising I never really know how I'm going to end the play until I end it so I'm always hopeful that in the act of discovering it while I'm reining there's some sense of discovery for the audience over time I wonder for you to characterize it as anti-theatrical because I wonder more about this because when you're wearing you just don't have time to talk about it it's great what the husband says at the end is will you take me to a theater? I mean in that I think people really find that very uplifting that there is something about the magic of how you keep love alive in that line and I wonder I guess I wonder from Esther's standpoint does that work? like can that work in marriage? could you in your experience do you think that people can sustain this sort of exiting and entering into the fantasy into the imagination? for some, I don't think it's the majority but yes but the first thing is it's willful it's intentional, it's premeditated it's not something that just happens to you in this kind of unbeknownst way there's a sex machina that falls from the heaven while you're folding the laundry it's much more you really need to make the effort to remain attentive to the other person, to remain curious not to think that they are inside of your pocket to actually imagine that you don't know them that they're just unknown with an option to renew but that's about it and that is an anxiety that people are willing to tolerate in the artifice of theater and art and that they don't always want to tolerate in the reality of their everyday life they like to think you're there, like a comfortable piece of furniture and I can just kind of collapse and I don't have to do anything anymore and that is the least engaging thing so they do a lot everywhere else in their life but when they come home they plop they take off their nice clothes which they have in the world they take off their nice behavior which they have when they go out in the world and they leave the leftover for the person that they're with and that's not particularly engaging so if you turn it around what happens often in long-term relationship is that the romance kind of stops when the commitment begins the plot is over, the story is over it's like I don't have to make the effort anymore I don't have to romance, I don't have to seduce I don't have to, I don't have to because you're there, because I got you so it's that thing that is very difficult to be willing to be committed to that no, you could lose that person any moment if you don't do what it takes to really keep them involved, engaged I mean there's so much to say about that act itself but I think other people there was another part of the play that has to do with I've been married to the same person since 1966 so I just realized that in two years I will have been married 50 years, I've been married since I was 21 to the same person and as they say in line in winter every family has its ups and downs so there are all of those things but one of the things that I found from this and I'm finding that this part of it is working better than the other part, the part before I like this part the last few however many years but one of the things that I found so moving in the play was the thing that did happen to her which was that all of a sudden in the middle of all the romance and everything she missed home and there are some people who are meant to be married and I think some people who aren't and it was the moment in the play when you knew that the pull however strong the erotic pull of romance and the adventure and all like that was that there was some deep thing in here that that had in which she was attached to Danny's character and to the truth of their family that lived no matter what the romance was and I just so my heart left and it was odd because I was seeing it with my daughter who's in the middle of her life she's been married and has a child we responded to it in different ways because she's in a different part of the history of this thing because marriages if you're lucky enough to have one that goes on for a long time or no I'm lucky whatever as we say it's ups and downs has there are ages of it shapes of it the whole purpose of it changes after a while you know if you think and what constitutes romance in it and what constitutes working at it changes as it goes on I say that most of us today in the West are going to have two or three marriages or committed relationships in our lifetime and some of us are going to do it with the same person I think that's exactly it Well I risked just thinking about the passage of time and I guess maybe the last question I'll ask you guys before you open it up to the audience is I was wondering about what it's been like over your careers as you've also grown up to be kissing or to be performing sort of sexiness it has a kind of meaning and a kind of quality or at least a stereotypical quality when you're younger but what's it like to be 20 and then be 30 and then be 40 and then be 50 and then on you just sort of try to perform that because I think that is this real challenge for people in long term relationships too that nature of that passion shifts over time Well I think the lucky thing is that when you're an actor in your 20s in your early 20s you're really trying to have sex with every actress that you're working with and probably every character you're playing in your 20s really is just trying to have sex so the quality of that kiss is very appropriate to the play and to the character at that time and then your romances and your relationships do become more nuanced in your 30s and 40s and so you do acquire that you can do that, you can step back and you can actually try to actually you become more ambitious frankly in your 30s and 40s and it's more like I'd really like to put on a good show about we run out of Portland this time I'd like to have a bit more career success so maybe I'll have a longer view before I step into this embrace and it's an issue as people always say for women because as the people and it's more of an issue on the TV the people on the TV decided that I was hopelessly out of the game by the time I was 60 and it was grotesque to think that I might be but paradoxically since I don't care anymore people are saying things to me now that I've killed everybody on my block and the next three block to hear that I never did because in a way as you're trying to argue you have another agenda you know so there's a kind of peace if they still let you do it in any way at all I'm finding that I've liked I've really liked this part of my life I was just 69 this year so I've liked it a lot certainly for the last 10 years I mean after they told me I couldn't kiss Ella Cosley to come to grips with that um um and it is different the objective is different in a weird way you get more all the things they tell you that you're supposed to do when you're young in order to succeed in the world but that only Tilda Swinton seems to know how to do which is to be completely comfortable in yourself and just kind of move forward only just as you're teetering the distinction that they give you this present thing here but then there's Tilda Swinton who is the exception of Tilda Cosley and a friend who lived in by the way who has had a crush for many years then you have the new movie of Catherine the new coming out and uh I don't know what they call it in English but hopefully as this society matures an older woman kissing will become just as sexual um because it actually I think the story that is often not told is that it gets much better with age it gets much better because the quality of the kiss and the experience of the kiss goes hand in hand with our experience of ourselves our level of self acceptance of self-worth our willingness to be able to ask to give to take our experience you know and that these experiences come with maturity promiscuity or libido is one thing but the quality of an erotic experience has everything to do with how you experience life as a whole and that I think comes with experience and maturity and a few heartbreaks so um I would say um that the difference also is what my own book making in captivity is organized around our need for security and our need for adventure and that one of the challenges of modern love is that it's the first time that we want to reconcile in one relationship two basically fundamentally opposed human needs they were never meant to be together in one place the same person giving us security and giving us excitement giving us predictability and giving us edge and um I think that there are periods in your life where you attend more to your erotic needs and then that's that actor in his 20's and then there is a period in your life where you attend more to your security needs, to your emotional needs but they're not always aligned what is emotionally satisfying is not always a bit eternal so it's that dance that you do throughout life and then there comes a place where you don't care anymore and then you can actually be really free well on that note of liberation um care about doing the right thing what's expected, what society told you and all of that stuff liberation is what you do with aspiration and um 30 years with the same age I've been kissing in a long time with the same age um so maybe I'll turn it over to the audience and we'll take some audience questions so um we only have one microphone because we are a non-profit so um what you're going to see is a member of the literary staff will run the microphone to you if you have a question and I'll pick it up from you after your question um so any questions from you guys oh here we go I have a question for you Sarah that's a playwright when you write about a kiss do you give a stage direction that says there should be a passionate kiss or do you say they kiss and leave it up to the director or indeed the board direction I'm trying to think exactly how I phrased the kisses in this play in the stage direction I tend to be fairly precise with stage directions and fairly non-adjectival um that is to say I care about the noun and the verb more than I do about the adjective so I doubt I would say they kiss passionately I don't think I do I don't do it I think I say they kiss at the most I think you say they kiss is awkward or something like that yeah I think I do leave it very open for the actors and the director and I think there was only one point in this process where the director had to say actually I think there's more tongue here and that was for the two women another question yeah this goes to the whole panel what do you think is so special about a kiss as opposed to anything else that might be part of an erotic experience and part of that question do you think that we sometimes get too hung up on kissing as opposed to anything else that might go along physically well on stage almost any other form of erotic activity just looks ridiculous whereas you can actually kiss convincingly in a variety of ways I'm in a play now that has a whole lot of simulated sex in it done in a very tasteful and beautiful way in Vienna in 1920 and it has taken those amounts of time with the choreographer and everybody to make it it's quite beautiful I think but I don't know because we just hear it we just hear it on backstage what's the name of the play? it's called Tales from Red Vienna meaning Cubbies? yeah nobody was here but anyway Vienna had a socialist socialist was a socialist republic from 1919 to the Anschluss but anyway so it's there and the thing about kissing is that kissing is understood as a symbol of all the rest of it and is filled with possibility and they're all different kinds and it's not grotesque whereas actually trying to they're sort of almost all other forms of sexual activity as a public action unless you're really doing them which you shouldn't probably be doing in the theater hard to make people laugh and they get all wonder about where their clothes are and what if they put clothes on do you take your clothes off and how could you button your hands quickly enough and where is the sheet and all like that so kissing is a wonderful Iraqi shorthand it's a very good parallel between sex and violence on stage that is too violent or too scary like the view of sex on stage seems too real the audience gets taken out of it so there's like this level of stage combat and stage kissing where everyone can be appropriately on the edge of their seat titillated and not be worrying about the actors and then the actors instead of concerned with the characters so I think that the whole thing is a continuum the whole sexual experience or erotic experience and you can have a healing kiss you can have an affectionate kiss you can have a sexual kiss and you can have an erotic kiss and they have very different meanings and very different relationships to the person that is kissing and is being kissed but it is often in sexuality the first invitation inside the boundaries of another person it's the first orifice that you actually enter and it is enormously powerful it connects to every other orifice for that matter if these lips open so do these in the case of women and it just sends an energy all over throughout your entire body and that invitation that permission to come in to be allowed in and it is also the only experience of being inside in the physical sense that is mutual where two people are inside each other like that at the same time be it to men, to women or men and women for sure it's the only time when it actually is utterly mutual physiologically utterly mutual and then driving us in a sense yes, that's what I mean one can say a lot more but that is why the kiss is so symbolic and so significant but any act can be made too big a deal of or too little a deal of that also I actually was curious because you were both talking about stage kissing and simulated sex on stage I know there's a part in the play where the characters are talking about stage and film I was wondering maybe you could expand a little bit more on if you've noticed a difference between the two mediums or if you feel if you could expand a little bit more on what you were saying in the play about how it's received differently by the people performing the act and by the people observing it Well it has a little bit to do with what Kathleen was saying about the kiss as symbolic as standing in for everything else on stage on stage I think you have traffic with metaphor in a very direct way and in film you don't necessarily so you have to see all the machinery I'm actually curious what you would say Hange because you said you had a sex scene with Miranda July where you were wearing a marquing No, she was wearing a marquing Okay She was like we have this sex scene and I don't know but you'll be naked and I'll have the merkin and my cape and so I didn't get a cape but it was fun but this is like an example of something because what we did was we then worked really hard on this sex scene and we were like let's make a really real let's get a good sex scene up here and so we were like oh well that naturally transitions into that oh well yes and then you go into the double axle and then the half Nelson and eventually we shot this ridiculous elaborate sex scene and and then she got to the rough cut and was watching a movie and then all of a sudden there was a porno that started playing which was the sex scene and the point of the movie was that our characters didn't have sex and we had sort of forgotten this the way I mean she had written this and she wrote they have sex or something like that and it's not good but we sort of put on a different show but it was like the coldest saddest simple, miserable, frustrating thing, shooting it because then you have all those people walking over your market and trying to get good focus on your cake and it's really terribly unsexy it's about story, ultimately all these acts are about story and about character and if they're not really helping you I think one of my favorite sex scenes film is have you seen that movie where Paulie take this waltz and there's this beautiful long extended sequence where she leaves her sort of ordinary domestic partnership to have this affair and they're in a room with no furniture in fact but I thought after I wrote this play and so they have sex with no furniture in all kinds of positions and then other lovers are added and all kinds of permutations and positions and then they're bored and they've completely replicated what she just I was the reason that Kinsey almost got a triple X when I was in my seat and I cut some frames out of it and it was I wasn't allowed to have a merkin actually I was the person with the I forget what they were called the shotgun orgasm so you can't exactly see my face though my children and their friends did recognize wait look but it was why everybody was so nice the first thing about it was that they three, no four people told Bill Condon the director that I would do that oh can't they do that wait when you say shotgun orgasm do you mean female ejaculation no no I mean yes but I did the sound effects you didn't see oh I see so so four people said oh yeah I can't they'll do that I'll be fine well and Bill Condon is a wonderful man no one else could have made this movie but Bill because he managed to make everybody feel very comfortable so I went out into New Jersey where it was going on and the day I was in a play so I had to leave at a certain point and the day as they do and movies went on and on and on so finally it got to be the time and they were so they had to be done this thing was going to be done with great delicacy clearing the sad and all that stuff didn't happen because there was no time so we all went up into the attic and I had I was naked and the person who was on top of me was naked and I was quite significantly older than he and we were there and there came a moment when he realized that he was my clothes and that if he got up between tapes I would be completely exposed to all the people in the thing so we lay there like this in the movie it's a movie that Liam Neeson is showing but actually Liam Neeson was standing in the room while he was going on being Dr. Kinsey but we did about three takes of it not because it was always the technical thing the camera breaks right at that moment or there's a hair in the cage or some other thing and so in between tapes because he couldn't get up we would sit and talk to each other about our family and so it wasn't anything else to do it sounds like making a sex scene is actually deeply unerotic it's deeply, deeply unerotic I suppose that there is a circumstance in which that's not true but it's such a public event even on the famous clothes there have to be at least 10 other people in the room in order to make the thing work not to be in the room they're down in the hall at the monitor watching the pictures and listening to them sound and saying that's not working out so well I think I want to ask about that it's just because what you were saying earlier Esther about the spectators creating a vitality and erotic energy on the stage Kathleen you're saying that the spectators on the set create exactly the opposite because they're not spectators they're involved in it it's a professional the thing that you're supposed to be doing is to create a thing that does exactly the same thing that causes erotic feelings or whatever in the audience but you know the people who are there shouldn't feel that way but I think it's also the nature the difference between doing a plane and doing the stop start of making a movie which is just I mean I think the reason that perhaps a lot of romances that start on stage don't continue afterwards is they start as a three way I mean these people are part of that relationship and when you do that offstage there's no there's no witness there's no third party there's no you're not telling a story anymore with that kiss it's a different it's a very different game and so I think that's why I call it the shadow of the third yes but the movies it's just like on the other hand from a spectator point of view I think that what you described before that if the stage is too violent or too raw sexual that the screen gives you that kind of exactly that it screens between you and the action and so it allows you to actually surrender much more to what goes on than you can do in the theater I doubt that people get turned on watching a play like people get turned on when they watch a movie and perverse I mean like when you're talking about whether you use tongue and the kissing and stuff like that it's just not necessary on stage you can't see it but in a close up when you see that sort of darting tongue it's like oh they really like each other and that's sort of like it's part of the currency because that's what the medium is but it's less sexy actually making that than you would think so we've been talking a bit actually all night about the pleasures and joys that come from kissing and sex and so on and then I guess I was just sort of curious what information or what information exists about what happens when people who are too young like children kiss or have sex you know my instance tell me that there's an age before which kids shouldn't be having sex but I'm curious if there's research that's been done that informs us about what dangers within exist when that happens and then if there is a sort of break off age which isn't when the human psyche can safely engage kissing and sex and stuff like that I'm just gonna refer this to Tony as a child I wonder if another way to maybe paraphrase that question is to ask about you know what is the difference between playing and love and doing it because I think it's certainly true that children are physical or sensual you know kids when they're in kindergarten and in the first grade play the kissing game and the kissing band and they sort of enact sort of chasing each other around and and so there's something about so it seems that I think one way to think about your question is that there's something about being able to play which requires safety and that when an act stops being playful it also sort of stops being safe and you know I think that one of the continuities between the experience of children and of adults that could be good if this sort of ability to have a sense of playfulness can be sustained but so I wonder maybe to shift this to thinking about like ask for his word and I think also in terms of thinking about theatricality like how do you make it safe to play like how does that happen for married couples or how does it happen on stage when you're asking people to do things that are really difficult like what's important what facilitates playfulness and an emergency well maybe we should understand what does it mean when we say that safety produces play right you can look at it in reverse one thing about your question we do all kinds of sexual things long before we know they are sexual we touch ourselves we play with ourselves, we soothe ourselves but it doesn't have that meaning yet so what changes it is the meaning of it what changes it is when adults who are meant to make you feel safe actually violate you that's all of those things so what is the is to enter a state of unself-consciousness is to enter a state that has pleasure for its own sake is to enter a state that is very liberating because you are able to step outside of your boundaries outside of your familiarity of who you are this is true at all ages in order to be able to do that you have to feel safe so safe means that you know that when you've taken that when you've gone off into flight into fantasy land into imaginative space that when you come back reality still holds if you don't know that reality will hold when you've gone off a little bit then you don't leave it then you stay glued to the home if you want to the base because you don't know that if you leave you can come back you have to imagine play is a departure from and in order to leave you have to know that you can safely come back that's probably one of the best way to say it if you are in a state of vigilance if you feel scared if you worry that something bad is going to happen to you to the people that are meant to make you feel safe all of that then you stay like this then you stay on guard then you stay in that you know because if I let go of being worried of being watchful of being careful of being vigilant because I'm going off to play something terrible could happen so by definition the antidote of play is anxiety worry, fear, vigilance you cannot do both at the same time I cannot be making sure that everything is okay and go off because once I've gone off something could have happened here that could have been not okay it's that tension and how do we learn to play some of the ways you know to play somebody says go kid there's a great thing out there the world's a fascinating place go to explore and to discover playfulness goes with exploration and discovery it's that side of our needs and as an adult it's the same go have fun you know have a nice time tonight that's very different than if you go out and the other one says again you have to go you know what's so interesting out there you never want to be worried why don't we ever do this that's not a playful place and it's you know play is not playing with toys play is not about sex toys play is not about tricks play is a state of mind it's really being unbounded and for some of us that means being completely inside ourselves and for some of us it means totally leaving ourselves it goes in both directions I mean that's just that we saw the playlists we can loved it had time to digest it which is another mark of a good play so there are the tale the two levels of this erotic woman who is just so powerful and almost shocking to the environment ends in many great plays and movies with the woman going off to pursue whatever the romantic thing is in this story she's brought back rather partially even to be turned a whore in the third mini play and I was just wondering you know if you thought about the choice of which way cause I genuinely didn't know which way this was going to go at intermission and I'm just wondering if you made a conscious choice or if this is where it felt it had to end I too didn't know which way it was going to go at intermission when I had no idea what actually would be and I think in terms of what Esther was saying about play being freedom from self-consciousness I don't know I don't make a conscious choice I follow the character hopefully talks so somehow they landed in a whore play I'm not a great fan of whore plays there's like so many whore plays so I thought I'd write my own you know in a dolls house Nora slammed the door and it was the great sound of the door slam that was heard across the world that sort of leave taking of the home and this does a totally different thing where she goes back home but I was so happy in this production to have found that she she leaves the site of the whore play and she's supposed to be killed in a rain of bullets and she just walks out partly because I do think rains of bullets and blood on stage are so funny but in answer to your question you were asking me was it a conscious choice to have her go home I suppose it was I suppose I was trying to say something about illusion and love and I think that he, the guy she's with for most of the play we see her be with he is the kind of projection and fantasy and person from her past and the past kind of walks into her present and rematerializes but that actually she's quite in love with her husband so the happy ending for her is to go back and be with her husband and sometimes I like a happy ending and sometimes I like a sad ending but what I tend to not like as much are ambivalent endings where it ends and the link goes down and the character sort of hopping on one foot and even though I love the mixing of genres sometimes I think something we can learn from genre is the satisfaction of and the lack of fear of a truly happy ending or a tragedy where there's no happiness there's no hope to be found I think narratively both are deeply satisfied and I wanted to give this woman a happy ending It would have been interesting if the man went home we are accustomed to the women going home more so there is a gender story here as well you know, ultimately she goes safe but we don't know if she goes home because it's home and safer because she actually realized that the other stuff is an illusion and that, you know if you replace fiction with reality you just replace one illusion with another That is a great way to end your panel Good Yes, thank you all so much for joining us tonight, thanks for a great play and a great panel, thanks, have a great night