Review: KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN at A Noise Within

I'm not going to bury the lede for the review aggregators on this one. If you are Queer, I cannot fully recommend Kiss of the Spider Woman at A Noise Within. Unfortunately, it has little to do with what is playing out on the stage. The production is solid. It's hard to go wrong with such a solid text. Though Michael Michetti's staging has some extraneous elements, Adrián González and Ed F. Martin shine through in fully-developed performances. They carry dense dialogue through nuances of tension, desire, and discomfort in a journey that belies the tight space of the cell in which the entire discourse takes place. Up until the final moment, the production soars, and in that final moment, it seems apparent this team knows something needs to happen, but they aren't exactly sure of what to do. Rather than a dramaturgically-founded final image, they settle for a finale in which the set moves. The effete closing seconds limply flop and fail to satisfy the build-up of the prior two hours. Oh well. Still a good show.

Here's the issue: A Noise Within is selling this show like it's The Odd Couple, running haywire with the tagline, "two polar opposites discover that love may spring in the most unlikely of places." There's a lot we could pick apart in that statement. I question how much Valentin and Molina are really crafted as "polar opposites". Sure. One is very manly and the other is extremely feminine, but it becomes obvious immediately that they share more than those base analyses could encapsulate. Can we really say the two "discover love"? They move toward a mutually-beneficial relationship, but I'm not sure the interactions between the two fully satisfy the romance the tagline suggests.

Before you crucify me for pulling apart the press copy for the show, I want to explain that I believe the audience on opening night was prepared to see The Odd Couple staged in an Argentinian prison cell. They were promised The Odd Couple in an Argentinian prison cell, and that's what they were there to see. Because of this, the people I sat amongst collectively sought out any excuse to laugh at the characters on stage. I will set aside two facts in their defense. First off, Martin is giving a funny performance as Molina. Molina is a witty character. Molina delivers funny snippets of dialogue. Molina and Valentin misunderstand each other sometimes in funny ways. When that happens, we laugh. Like any good play, this one has lighthearted, joyous moments and I am not advocating for it to be a self-pitying dirge from beginning to end. Secondly, we laugh in moments of discomfort. Intimacy director Carly DW Bones has crafted sequences of intense awkwardness between the two prisoners. Audiences laugh when they are uncomfortable. It is an unfortunate breaker of tension, but it is nothing new.

The issue with staging Kiss of the Spider Woman in 2023 and selling it to audiences as The Odd Couple is that, though the language never explicitly states it and Molina's gender is really only discussed through the lens of sexuality, in contemporary terminology, Molina might be a trans woman or other gender-expansive identity. It is not easy to read a modern construction of gender politic onto a fictional narrative from 1976, so we can't put Molina into a convenient box. Gay men have historically reclaimed feminine pronouns (or names like Molina uses with friends, Greta and Marlene) without feeling the need to identify outside of the term 'gay'. Anyone who has recently visited Paz Errazuriz's "Adam's Apple" exhibition at the MOCA, however, also knows that, by 1976 there were enough trans women living and working in Chile for an entire retrospective of prints. When audiences repeatedly laugh at a character with a penis proudly proclaiming, "I am a woman", it is a jarring reminder that, even in liberal spaces, trans people are still subjected to hostility, ridicule, and overall lack of acceptance. Suddenly, Michetti's claim in the program that, "We have made tremendous strides in the past 50 years in terms of civil rights and our understanding and acceptance of such things as sexual and gender roles and identities," feels uncomfortably and unfortunately contested.

I'm not certain that I can fully blame A Noise Within for the fact that the audience on opening night forced laughter at any explicit mention of Queerness in the play, and even mustered chuckles for a beautifully tender sexual encounter. I am repeatedly reminded when I talk about audiences that, as a reviewer, my experiences are skewed. I attend opening nights with board members, members of the press, and major donors. Because of that, I'm usually seeing performances (not just at ANW, this is true of regional theatres nationwide) amongst a crowd of geriatric white people. (If you want proof, look no further than the fact that every time I approach the press table at a Center Theatre Group opening, they take one look at my not-grey hair and point me toward the box office.)

A Noise Within is not helmed by fools, and I do not envy the challenges of their work. They have a mission of presenting classics on stage. Amidst calls to diversify their offerings and better represent their communities on stage, theatres across the country with a mission to regularly stage Shakespeare or locked-in to an annual production of A Christmas Carol are at a disadvantage. ANW formally states that they are, "striving to be a theatre that better serves the entire community." They probably have the most thorough land acknowledgment of any major theatre in LA, and staging Kiss of the Spider Woman- a play by an openly-Queer Argentinian writer about radical dissent- is inarguably cool for a theatre which regularly prioritizes canonized white works. On April 8, the show is partnered with a performance by the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles, performing pieces inspired by the text. The program includes an extensive timeline of Queer history in Argentina that begins pre-colonization and ends with an overview of modern progress. A Noise Within is not helmed by fools. They know their Pasadena audience and they know that The Odd Couple will sell to them. But does sliding Queerness into the programming like a dog's pill in a slice of bologna really accomplish anything?

I can't recommend the show to Queer audiences without the warning I've expressed. This is a tough one to stomach and it is hard to watch surrounded by laughter. I will say this, though; tickets start at $25 ($18 with a student ID). If you can find the least sold-out show in the run and get the Queerest and most radical people you know to buy tickets en masse, maybe this piece will soar in the way it should. The truths Puig lays out in his text deserve to be heard, but not as the medicine for the Shakespeare crowd, rather by those who know these truths and deserve to know they were written down nearly fifty years ago.

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