Produced by The Public Theatre
May 1995

A STUDY GUIDE
Prepared by
Martin Andrucki
Professor of theater
Bates College

The Public Theatre and Professor Martin Andrucki
own all rights to this Study Guide.
 

I. PLAYWRIGHT

A native of Atlanta Georgia, Craig Lucas attended Boston University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1973. He then began his career in the theater as an actor and singer, appearing in a variety of roles on the New York stage during the mid and late 1970s. These included appearances in such productions as On the Twentieth Century and Sweeny Todd. During the course of the latter, Lucas became acquainted with the composer, Stephen Sondheim, whose songs form the musical basis of Marry Me a Little (1980), his first produced work as a playwright in New York.

Lucas has continued writing for the musical theater even while developing a reputation as a the author of non-musical plays. In addition to his collaboration with Sondheim, he has also worked with the composers Craig Carnelia, Gerald Busby, and Stewart Wallace. His work with Carnelia includes the musical, Three Postcards (1987), originally produced in California and recently revived (1994) in a revised version in Portland, Maine.

His non-musical work includes Blue Window (1984), a bitterwsweet study of the life of young professionals in the Manhattan of the mid-80s, and Reckless (1988), a comic-grotesque adventure that begins with a woman leaping out her bedroom window on Christmas Eve to flee the hitman her husband has hired to kill her.

Prelude to a Kiss (1988), Lucas's best known dramatic work, enjoyed a long Broadway run, after which it was made into a motion picture. Like Blue Window, it is a knowing exploration of the pitfalls of life among young Manhattanites who face the challenges of finding and sustaining love in the big city.

In addition to his work for the stage, Lucas has written two screenplays: Longtime Companion(1990), and the film adaptation of Prelude to a Kiss (1991).

II.  THE SETTING

The action of Prelude to a Kiss takes place in contemporary Manhattan, its New Jersey suburbs, and the Caribbean island of Jamaica. The various settings are suggested by a few details of lighting and furniture, the better "to provide," as the playwright suggests, "a fluidity of motion and to stress the imaginary leap required
to make sense of the story." Indeed, the background on stage represents not a thickly-detailed social world, as is the case in much modern realistic drama, but rather a zone of "magic," a combination of space, light, and sound that might indicate, again in the playwright's words, "that things were more than they might seem."

These suggestive locations include the bar where Rita works, Rita's apartment, the city streets leading to and from these places, Rita's parents' house, and the hotel in Jamaica where Rita and Peter spend their honeymoon.

III.  THE PLOT

Peter and Rita, young New Yorkers in their twenties, meet at a party in Manhattan. Their immediate attraction develops over the next several weeks into love, which culminates in a wedding at Rita's parents' house. At the reception following the ceremony, Rita is approached by a strange Old Man who asks her for a kiss. Rita consents, and a miraculous change occurs. They trade souls, hers entering the body of the Old Man, his entering the body of Rita--a transformation of which only Rita and the Old Man are aware. Rita, trapped in the Old Man's body, wanders away from the wedding, while the Old Man, wearing Rita's flesh, leaves for a honeymoon trip with Peter.

Once in Jamaica, Peter soon begins to sense something peculiar about his new wife. She uses different words and phrases, expresses different social and political opinions, eats and drinks differently; she seens to have forgotten books she has read, conversations she has shared with Peter, and even her father's profession and the fact that she is an only child.

Back in New York, Peter's conviction that Rita has changed in some fundamental way grows even stronger, despite her determined efforts to imitate her old self. Finally, Peter arrives at a seemingly impossible conclusion: Rita has literally become a different person. Some unknown being has taken possession of her body. "Where is she," he demands to know, "Please. I won't be angry. . . . Just tell me where Rita is and we'll pretend this never took place."

This confrontation precipitates a change in the action, as the pseudo-Rita (actually the Old Man) flees from Peter, taking up residence with the real Rita's parents in New Jersey. From there, false-Rita initiates divorce proceedings, hoping by separating from Peter--the only one who knows the secret of the switched souls--to insure the indefinite and unchallenged possession of Rita's healthy young body. Meanwhile, Peter encounters the Old Man in the bar where Rita once worked, and
quickly realizes that his wife's soul is living inside this aged flesh. Peter and the real Rita decide to return to Peter's apartment to confront the false Rita and effect a second soul- transference, returning each spirit to its rightful body. However, they arrive only to find that the false Rita has fled to New Jersey.

As Peter and the real Rita try to devise a means of setting up the essential confrontation with the false Rita, they learn that the body of the Old Man is suffering from a number of terminal ailments, including lung cancer, and has only a year to live. Now, the urgency of the soul-switch is literally a matter of life and death. Finally, Peter
persuades Rita's mother to cooperate in a deception aimed at bringing the newlyweds back together again. She will bring her "daughter" to the apartment to collect her remaining possessions, assuring her that Peter will be away. Peter, of course, will be waiting for the false Rita when she arrives, as will the "Old Man." Finally the confrontation occurs, Rita and the Old Man exchange a second kiss, but their souls remain in place, still stuck in the wrong bodies. It is only when the Old Man
explains why he longed to leave his body, and when Rita admits that she too yearned to be transported out of herself--when they confess their hidden motives--that their souls are returned to the bodies they were born into. The play ends with Rita restored to herself, and her and Peter reunited with each other, each now fully appreciative of the extraordinary gift of existence. "Oh, Rita," Peter says, "Never to be squandered. . . the miracle of another human being."

IV. THE CHARACTERS

Peter. In many ways, Peter is at the center of the action. He is, for example, the "narrator" of all the events in the play, directly addressing the audience to inform them not only of what is about to happen, but also to fill in the emotional coloring surrounding the incidents. For example, after his first meeting with Rita, Peter turns to the audience and says, "I tried to figure out . . . what her life might be like and why she couldn't sleep. . . . The spell was cast." Thus, with his last sentence, he introduces the note of the magical or the paranormal that is to be central to the rest of the play.

Peter is also a character drawn in sharp contrast to the other personages in the drama. We learn that he has had a very unhappy chlidhood, having been rejected by both his divorced parents and their new spouses. Finally, he ran away from home at age sixteen and took up residence in Europe, where for ten years he earned his way as a cook and an English teacher. Despite his harsh past, however, he looks toward the future with hope as well as trepidation. It is he who raises the possibility with Rita of having children. When she resists, pointing out how much misery the world holds for everyone, and how much Peter himself suffered as a child, his laconic response is, "I survived. . . ."

This capacity to survive shows itself in Peter's persistent efforts to rescue Rita from the Old Man's alien body, and in his promises to Rita on the day of their wedding to persist in his love for her despite whatever ravages time might inflict on her beauty.

Of course, Peter is not a naive optimist. He is also aware of the terrors life can hold, as we see early in the play when he realzes he is falling in love with Rita. He turns to the audience and says,

I love the little sign when you buy your ticket to the roller coaster: 'Ride at your own risk.' As if the . . . entire contraption is about to collapse, and . . . there are supernatural powers out there just waiting to pull you . . . into . . . your worst, cruelest nightmare. . . . They want you to believe that anything can happen. . . . And they're right.

Rita. Most well-constructed dramatic works focus on at least one pair of strongly contrasting characters: Oedipus and Jocasta, Lear and the Fool, Othello and Iago, Laurel and Hardy, Stanley and Blanche, and, in this play, Peter and Rita. If Peter is the man who chooses to take the risks offered by the roller-coaster of life in the hope of happiness, Rita is the character who lets her fear of danger inhibit all of her choices. As she tells Peter during their courtship,

I'll be lying in bed late at night and I'll look at the light in the room and suddenly see it all just go up in a blinding flash, in flames, and I'm the only one left alive. . . . I can't look at you siting there without imagining you . . . dying . . . bursting into flames. . . . The world's a really terrible place. It's too precarious.

As she explains at the end of the play, when she saw the Old Man at her wedding, she was drawn to what seemed the safety of old age: "let me skip to the end of all this hard part. I wanted to be [him]. For one second of one day, what would it be like to just be. And . . . . not be afraid. . . . My whole life would be behind me." By skipping the "hard part"--raising children, experiencing the loss of parents, of friends, perhaps eventually of Peter--she hopes to escape the suffering that is an intrinsic part of human experience. But, to evade pain is to evade life. Thus, it is as if her wish is answered by some perversely wise fairy who
rewards her unnatural desire by transferring her soul to the Old Man's dying body.

The Old Man. In a sense he is the mirror-image of Rita. Having lived his whole life, he longs to return to the beginning to recapture what time has taken from him: "Where are they now? My wife. My mother." Dying of cancer, he is drawn to the wedding by the simple desire to escape from the world he had always known, the world that now held only reminders of mortality--his own, and his loved ones. When he saw Rita, he longed to "shine like the light of that girl over there," so that "My whole life would be ahead of me again." The intensity of his desire, combined with Rita's contrasting fears, create a moment in which each one's wish is fulfilled.

V. THEMES

This play has many of the qualities of a fairy tale or a myth. The story of souls lost or stolen, of succubi and incubi, of vampires and zombies, of possession and demonic impersonation are are as old and as extensive as human culture itself. In many of these stories, the one whose soul is possessed or displaced undergoes a profoundly transformative experience--perhaps a spiritual journey, or an ecstatic vision, or a moment of epiphany--that results in a changed self. Sometimes this change takes the form of a cure, sometimes of augmented wisdom, sometimes of the acquisition of uncanny powers. In any case, the stories of spirit possession or soul migration-- like most myths and fairy tales--have a clear moral to convey, a message about the meaning of life.

This is certainly the case in Prelude to a Kiss. Here the moral has to do with the folly of trying to escape the fundamental constraints of human nature. We are born, we live our lives in the teeth of risk and in the hope of fulfillment, and when the time comes, we die. There is a sacred wisdom in that cycle of life and death, and there is no happiness to be found in trying to circumvent it. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift tells the story of the Struldbruggs, a race of men that never die. "When they came
to fourscore years . . . they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. . . . Those objects against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger sort . . . and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament and repine that others are gone to an harbour of rest, to which they never can hope to arrive." And so they go on living for ever, growing older and more inconsolably miserable with every year that goes by. Swift's tale affirms the wisdom of nature in setting a limit to human life. So does this play. And just as the characters in myth and fairy tale acquire some deeper understanding from the experience of possession, so too do Rita and the Old Man. They both come to accept the necessity, and even the melancholy beauty, of the cycle of life.

The White Hotel, a novel by D. M. Thomas , presents another version of this moral vision. It is the story of a woman who overcomes her neurotic fears of life through her therapy with Sigmund Freud only to be exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War. Given the world's cruelty, should she have refrained from seeking help, from pursuing a cure? What was the point of all her efforts to find health if she was only to die so soon after acquiring it? The pla suggests that we cannot, indeed should not, govern our present lives by our fears for the future. We do not know what life holds, but we do have the capacity to make choices in the present that can make us happy in the present. The classical expression of this theme, carpe diem, or "seize the day," is the subject of countless poems and stories in the western tradition.

VI. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Is Rita right in seeing the world as a terrible place to live?

2. Should she let her fears prevent her from having children?

3. Why is Peter so much more eager to embrace the possibilities of life?

4. What does Rita learn as a result of her experience?

5. What does the Old Man learn?

6. What does Peter learn?

7. Which of the main characters changes most in the course of the play?

8. Which of the main characters changes least?

9. Why does the Old Man agree to reenter his own body?

10. What attracts Peter and Rita to each other, given the fact that they
have such different outlooks on life?