Daniel Sullivan.

Director Daniel Sullivan steers the ethereal love story Prelude to a Kiss into the American Airlines Theatre.

An interview by Misha Berson

It is somewhat surprising that Daniel Sullivan has never staged the Craig Lucas play Prelude to a Kiss. The work's deft balance of realism and fantasy, romance and drama, comedy and poignancy appears tailor-made for Sullivan, one of the most prolific and respected directors in the American theatre. The keynotes of his directing style are a subtle dexterity conveying text onstage and a knack for getting the maximum emotional payoff from his performers with minimal pretension or flamboyance.

Sullivan's artistic gifts have been celebrated with a Tony Award® (for the Broadway production of Proof) and with four additional Tony® nominations (the latest in 2006, for David Lindsay-Abaire's acclaimed Rabbit Hole). Regular Roundabout patrons know him as an artist who is equally adroit mounting Shaw's Major Barbara as he is guiding the recent award-winning production of Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel, which christened the Laura Pels Theatre.

Content to “push the actors forward,” and not fond of shining the limelight on himself, Sullivan (who began his career as an actor) has forged close working relationships with many leading performers. And he's been a trusted director-dramaturg for such contemporary playwrights as Wendy Wasserstein, Jon Robin Baitz, Donald Margulies, and David Hare. (The latter's political drama Stuff Happens was another 2006 New York triumph commandeered by Sullivan.)

So why has it taken Sullivan so long to get around to Prelude to a Kiss? Just happenstance. Back in 1988, when the play had its world premiere at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Orange County, California, Sullivan was at the artistic helm of the Seattle Repertory Theatre-a company he ran with great distinction from 1981 to 1997. And Prelude..., which traces the courtship, wedding, and surreal aftermath of a modern marriage, was initially directed for the stage (and later on film) by the late Norman René, a longtime Lucas collaborator. It took nearly 20 years for Sullivan to have the opportunity to create his own interpretation of a play he has long admired. Naturally, when Roundabout offered him the chance, he seized it.

FRONT & CENTER: What moved you to mount Prelude to a Kiss now?

DANIEL SULLIVAN: It was on a list of plays that Roundabout approached me with, as things I might do. I said this is a play I love, and find mysterious and very funny and very moving. It hasn't had a big production in a while, so I felt that it was time to look at it again. I hope this revival will ignite others around the country.

Did you have any casting in mind when you decided to tackle it?

It just happened to be that (stage and TV actor) John Mahoney had been approached to play the old man in the production. And that was the best casting I could think of.

The play was first done on Broadway in 1990, with Mary Louise Parker and Alec Baldwin playing the ardent young couple Rita and Peter. It seemed very true to the tenor of the times then. Can it be as fresh to audiences today?

Yes, I really think so. There are certain plays that seem very much of their period, and this play doesn't. Although it's a love story, it's also about death and how we deal with it. It feels timeless because of the larger, metaphysical aspects.

Does the context of 2007 change anything about the play?

When it was first done, Rita's fears, her anxieties, seemed sort of eccentric-this all-pervasive fear she has, that the world will collapse. It's not eccentric any more. Now many of us identify with that fear, particularly here in New York after 9/11. That event changed and deepened the play, I think.

“One of the things you have to do is make sure that this
magical event somehow is in the air of the piece
from the very beginning.”

---

As a director, how do you deal with the plot's more mystical elements? In the first scene Rita and Peter are bantering and flirting in a very realistic manner. Then, at their wedding, a sick old man who is a stranger kisses Rita and sets off a swapping of souls that could seem completely outlandish.

You deal with that by creating this world of romantic naturalism to support the transmigration of souls idea. One of the things you have to do is make sure that this magical event somehow is in the air of the piece from the very beginning. It can't just suddenly appear, as if flown in from the heavens. The reality itself has to be slightly skewed all the way along.

To get inside the play, did you need to identify for yourself a specific reason why the old man and Rita switch identities? Or did you just accept it as a leap-of-faith plot device?

I think Rita's intense feelings of panic at her wedding bring it on. I'm following her lead in this production, because the old man is such a curious figure that Rita's part in this can be obscured. But what also causes this event is the deep need of both of these people, a young woman and an old man, to become each other at this phase in their lives. I'm fascinated by how you do that onstage.

A number of films that came out in the early 1990s also focused on young lovers forced to deal with death in a mystical manner. The most popular was Ghost, released the same year Prelude to a Kiss came to New York. Is there a link there?

There have always been stories about the desire to leave one's self, to become somebody else, to break free of who you are. But in Prelude to a Kiss the supernatural event feels somehow truer and domestic, more honest in the simplicity of the idea than in the more sentimental movies that came out at that time.

Speaking of movies, a film version of Prelude to a Kiss starring Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin was released in 1992, but wasn't a hit with critics or at the box office. Was it simply that this is a story meant for the theatre?

I don't think the movie was particularly good. As a translation to film it was pretty leaden. There could have been a way of doing it that got closer to the experience of the stage. But there's also something about the artificiality of live theatre that lends itself to the large, rather risky idea of this supernatural happening.

The playwright Craig Lucas is involved in the Roundabout production of his script. Has he altered the text in any significant way for this revival?

Craig is making some little changes here and there. There are some late '80s cultural and historical references that will change. But it's just little stuff, nothing substantial.

This is an intimate work, and though the American Airlines Theatre is one of Broadway's smaller houses how do you make what is essentially a three-person play seem large enough to fit the space?

My tendency is to ignore the whole scale question. I just find that with a great text and a good cast who has stage chops, if you can work out the right connections and chemistry between the actors, they'll fill the stage. The audience will go toward them. You won't have to go out and get them.

Misha Berson is the theatre critic for the Seattle Times, a frequent contributor to American Theatre magazine, and a regular commentator on Seattle public radio station KUOW-FM.

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