InterAct's "Kiss of the Spider Woman'

A victim of its own success

DAN ROTTENBERG

Back in the bad old days of repressive right-wing South American dictatorships and closeted homosexuals, the Argentinean Manuel Puig wrote an allegorical novel in which the state claps two of its ostensible enemies into a claustrophobic prison cell, one for his political beliefs and the other for his lifestyle. On the surface they seem the oddest of odd couples: Valentin, a macho socialist revolutionary, cares only for “the ongoing political struggle”; Molina, an effeminate gay window dresser, yearns for a very different goal: “Since there’s nothing better than a good woman,” he reasons, “I want to be one.” Eventually their survival needs obliterate the line between one man’s politics and the other’s sexuality, endowing both prisoners with the rare human blessings of mutual respect and even wisdom.

This profound and original concept struck such a responsive chord that in short order Kiss of the Spider Woman evolved into a play, then a film and then a Broadway musical. In the meantime, South America’s right-wing dictators went the way of the manual typewriter, to be replaced in many cases by left-wing populists spouting the same sort of simplistic rhetoric championed by Puig’s Valentin; and the gay lifestyle was embraced not only by Broadway and Hollywood but by the governor of New Jersey and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, not to mention Congressman Mark Foley of Florida and apparently much of the Roman Catholic clergy.

Puig’s two revolutionary protagonists, in short, are no longer all that revolutionary. Which means that what was once the inspiring experience of sharing their enlightened company in the midst of grueling inhumanity has now become, to my mind at least, stale and hackneyed. When Valentin declares, “My greatest pleasure is knowing I’m part of the most noble cause,” his cellmate today might well ask, “What cause? Shining Path? Castro’s Cuba? The Khmer Rouge?” When Molina observes, “If all men were like women, there would be no torturers,” I half expected his cellmate to reply, “Jeeze— you sound like a character in Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Any two-man prison drama places heavy demands on both audience and actors alike (whom the script requires to simulate, among other bodily functions, diarrhea and anal intercourse). The peripatetic Frank X, as the film fantasist Molina, once again successfully compels our attention with virtually every vocal modulation and nuanced bit of body language; but the one-note shrillness of Vaneik Echeverria— and this for two hours and 20 minutes— wore me down. Kiss of the Spider Woman remains a work that’s well worth experiencing— once. Me, I may have overdosed.



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