I chose to do these scenes from Stop Kiss with Rachel because I saw this play my junior year of high school and it stuck with me. The awkward flirting and the insecurities on full display in these tender moments between Callie and Sara hit home for me, even as a high schooler still coming to terms with my own sexuality. For this performance, we read through the scenes, talked through blocking and staging elements, gathered props from my dorm, and then did the scenes in one take each. It’s funny how immediately we decided that Rachel would play Callie and I would play Sara– something about Callie definitely made me read her thinking of Rachel. We only practiced the kiss once.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JB2yajGM2oTREt0CgMp47bJD6EZe61bN/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EO6Iw-ZVHS-qfjqaxdzYu529Qh_uHTKD/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e9C03OL5NJSEqNgs0WDPhs6QRLBoIXaE/view?usp=sharing
ASGP @ TDM97 
Pingback: Amanda Gonzalez-Piloto and Rachel Share-Sapolsky in Stop Kiss – TDM97
Dear Amanda,
The point of this exercise is not really for us to see your acting ability, but to work on a realistic play in order to understand why realism is so important to the telling of this story. Stop Kiss is an interesting choice — the play pivots around a budding relationship between two women and the “kiss” itself focuses on queer/lesbian sexuality, but Son allows other complex relationships to play out too. While the acting is “realistic” — and the play pivots on a realistic kiss — it doesn’t play chronologically and the dramatic set up is more like a television sitcom even though the brutal attack is at the heart of the play (see Ben Brantley’s review; https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/07/theater/theater-review-comic-in-spirit-serious-at-heart.html). Brantley argues that the “realistic” acting here is more like the acting one would see on a sitcom that focuses on young adults “sentimental education.” What he doesn’t write is that realism here allows for a more complex exploration of attraction in minutae. The part of the prompt that you didn’t consider, and which would be helpful going forward is about the form of the drama — who relates to it (realism historically has been a white bourgeois dramatic form) and in this case, how it can be used to show subjects who have been excluded from realism’s generation of empathy and identification — and how that inclusion allows for acceptance here of queer desire and complex relationships.
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So, are you saying this isn’t a realistic play/drama? I’m confused by the last sentence. As for the “form of the drama” aspect of the prompt, we actually did discuss at length the way that the play was written (in terms of the chronology of the scenes we chose and of the aftermath of the attack that we didn’t play), but that was part of our discussion re: why we chose “Stop Kiss” and not really part of our acting preparation. That is, if I understand the idea of the “form” of the play. If I’m off the mark with that definition, I’d love to know! Forms as a concept are things I’ve been struggling with since my music tutorial last semester, as no instructor has yet to be able to give me a definition of what a “form” really is, if such a neat definition exists. I just wanted to assert that I actually very much did consider that part of the prompt, and apologize if that wasn’t answered in my brief (as was requested) response to the prompt.
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