Director’s Note
by Tim Harris
Kiss of the Spiderwoman, a reworking of his novel of the same name, was Manuel Puig’s first play and it remains his best-known one. It is an intricately wrought work that juxtaposes the story of two prisoners with the story of the film about the ‘pantherwoman’, Irina, which the gay Molina tells to the political prisoner, Valentin. But it presents some peculiar difficulties in performance, principally because Puig, who knew an enormous amount about film, tended to think more in terms of film than the stage. This accounts for the abruptness with which scenes open, and particularly for the brilliantly arresting opening, with Molina, who is a master-storyteller, describing the first shot in the movie about Irina, before we know who she is, and then proceeding from shot to shot. The play’s scenes are discontinuous, rather like cuts in a film; the action of the whole takes place over about twelve days, and between each scene there is an interval of (stage-) time in which various things have happened, things that inform what transpires in the following scene. This filmic approach turns out to be very effective on stage, but requires great sharpness and focus from the actors. Since he was thinking more in terms of film, however, Puig didn’t really address the problem of naturalism on stage, the fact that it collapses stage-time into real time: an egg doesn’t boil any more quickly because it’s in a play!
Kiss of the Spiderwoman is a love story, and tells of the love and respect that develops between two very dissimilar, and very brave, men who happen to share a prison cell. It involves sentiment, certainly, but it is not sentimental. Nor is it confined to a particular time. I have small time for the buzzword ‘Relevance’; good artistic works always have a relevance, which is not something that smacks you, or is made to smack you, over the head, but instead is a quality that moves you to feel and think more deeply about aspects of life. We hope that this is what our production will do.