As "Your Molotov Kisses" opens, Victoria lounges suggestively on a cream chaise wearing only black lingerie. Just as the sexual tension mounts between Victoria and her husband Daniel, she pulls a thermometer out of her mouth and shakes her head no. She is not yet hot enough.
They are trying painstakingly to have a baby boy, and they've been promised that Victoria's temperature is key. Through its frame of sexual humor, this opening scene immediately establishes the contradictions that truly drive the couple's life.
"Kisses," the latest production at GALA Hispanic Theatre in Columbia Heights, draws on physical humor and superb acting to powerfully depict the prejudices that unravel our lives. The play is staged in Spanish with English subtitles projected above the stage.
Victoria (Menchu Esteban) and Daniel (Timothy Andrés Pabon) are a young, rich couple and very much in love. Their life seems to be one of easy contentment. She is a relatively famous news anchorwoman, and he's a high-paid lawyer at an illustrious firm. Even their swank, urban apartment with the feel of a tasteful bachelor pad - decorated with cream couches and vivid, red rugs - gives a succinct suggestion of the image they think they are projecting to the world.
While literally trying to conceive a baby, however, FedEx arrives with a mysterious package from the FBI for Victoria, containing a backpack she lost a decade ago while young and restless in New York City. This package from the past floods the couple's calm contentment with explosive secrets. It turns out that Victoria had been in love with a Palestinian who she finally confesses was in Hamas. They had even been married, though the truthfulness of this recollection is later tested.
Their successful and happy life becomes fragile. After her husband leaves, their apartment- once a beacon of their place in life - seems suffocating as Victoria paces across its tiny interior. Their prejudices soon fill their lives with a mundane, but no less omnipresent, terror.
"Kisses" weaves melodrama and physical humor to achieve its powerful point. Well-placed comedy punctuates even the most passionate and darkest of scenes. For example, explaining her secret past to her shell-shocked husband in a scene of heartbreaking betrayal, Victoria remarks with levity that she had fallen in love with her former husband for the sex, describing herself as a groupie of a rock band. "That's why I joined," she says. "For the ride."
The comedy becomes almost a part of the setting: Through rapid dialogue it establishes again and again that this is a married couple very comfortable and in love with each other. The comedy acts to remind us that this married couple, though driven apart by prejudices, could be any married couple.
However, the acting is the true highlight of the show. Since Victoria and Daniel are the only characters on stage, their physical energy and deftly delivered humor gives the play much of its passion and power. Esteban, a veteran GALA actress, expertly developed Victoria's many layers. She brings a vulnerability to the character, whether humorous and absentminded or intelligent and aware.
Pabon, a Washington theater scene mainstay, also appeared in the Shakespeare Theatre's "King Lear" and in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at Arena Stage. He, too, brought complexity to Daniel's character, veering from lighthearted lover to young professional to an impassioned and enraged husband.
Delivered in Spanish, "Kisses" poses challenges for non-Spanish speakers. Electric English subtitles are certainly easy to read, but it gets frustrating to keep turning your head up and down to see the acting and keep up with the rapid-fire dialogue. The non-Spanish speakers in the audience seemed to always laugh a beat before or after the actual humor unfolded, depending on when they finished reading the subtitle.
However, the language barrier is what makes GALA such a worthwhile theater experience. Its unwavering authenticity is especially valuable as Columbia Heights becomes yet another sight of gentrification. GALA makes every concession to the English speakers in the audience, and so the frustrations of not speaking the dominant language are all the more illuminating. English-speaking theaters rarely go as much out of its way to make their productions accessible to non-English speaking audiences.
Authentic and physical, "Kisses" is a powerful and visceral story of the fears that can shatter us. It is above all a thought-provoking production, and its questions linger long after the curtain drops.
