85 East 4th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues 3rd Floor, no wheelchair access

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       After its recent tour to the Initiation International Festival in Singapore, The Stolen Chair Theatre Company , one of NYtheatre.com's "People of the Year 2005," returns home to the East Village's The Red Room to present a follow-up to its critically acclaimed sold-out run of The Man Who Laughs (hailed as "Utterly tremendous" by TimeOut's Trav S.D. and "A triumph" by NYtheatre.com's Martin Denton).

       In a significant departure from the company's last piece, a heartrending wordless melodrama, Stage Kiss is a collectively created gender farce in Elizabethan blank verse, freely inspired by John Lyly's Gallathea and written by Kiran Rikhye.

       Two doting single parents independently disguise their chaste young daughters as men and send them off into a nearby forest to bide time until Neptune has had his fill at the village's annual sacrifice of young virgins. Gallathea and Phyllida, each believing the other to be a man, fall deeply in love…and lust. In their quests to obtain the objects of their affection, the two newly gender-questioning protagonists learn, with a little help from the goddess Venus, that love is many gendered thing, puncturing a Pandora's box of sexuality and desire.

       In this ode to the Ridiculous aesthetic of the late Charles Ludlam , director Jon Stancato, draws on drag styles ranging from the Elizabeth boy-actor tradition to modernday drag queen performance, with each member of the ensemble cast transforming from male and female characters in a matter of seconds. With the two lead female protagonists played by a mixed gender duo (company members Alexia Vernon and Cameron Oro ), this production picks up where single gender classical ensembles like Cheek by Jowl and The Queen's Company leave off, provocatively blurring the lines between artifice and reality to create a carnal feast of comic delights.

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