The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 1996 Humana Festival

REALLY STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
"Everything I do is based on something that is extremely personal to me," John Patrick Shanley has said, "Every single, bloody thing I do." That sense of intense commitment is probably what makes Shanley’s writing so distinctive. His plays move. They have been described as "mythic journeys in emotion-packed arias," with characters that spill their life-truths in often hilarious, always entertaining "sustained solos." In keeping with their tough exteriors, Shanley’s characters frequent urban settings—bars, tenement stoops, subway platforms, elevator shafts, street corners—the grittier, the better. And wherever they are, they insult, threaten, cajole, ruminate, philosophize and wisecrack their way through their own calloused defenses toward enemy lines. In a Shanley play, the big questions dominate—love, fate, identity, and the possibility of true human kinship.

Strange Encounters is the umbrella designation for Shanley’s paired one-acts. They are aptly named—though "strange" could also read as "surprising" or "marvelous" encounters. In both plays, the characters attempt unpredictable journeys into the terra incognito of each other’s souls.

Set in a Thai restaurant, Kissing Christine chronicles one evening in the brief liaison between a dispirited married man and a single woman with a low tolerance for duplicity. Already we are on the battlefield waiting for war. But having met at a lecture called "The Study of Meaningful Chance," Larry and Christine opt for a more philosophical approach. Destiny guides their conversation through a variety of revelations, both funny and profound. But can these potential lovers junk their pain and skepticism sufficiently to experience the "kiss" of real connection?

In The Rival, the question is: Can real men share a baked chicken? Terry has dropped by Eli’s apartment to announce that Marisa (Eli’s ex-wife who left him for Terry) has now left Terry for somebody else. Something of a tangled web and highly ambiguous to boot. Who was that hang-up on the phone? Is Marisa Eli’s mystery date? And just WHY won’t he offer Terry any chicken? A comical expedition into the jungle of male competitiveness, The Rival also takes a satirical stab at the tenuousness of trust in the presence of obsessive passion.

A play is a dialectic, Shanley has stated, "a conversation between two people about an idea or an emotion." It’s really a series of transactions, but through those transactions the characters express who they are.

Their ideas, their emotions are meant to be, according to Shanley, "reflections of who we are." The personal transformed into the universal. In Kissing Christine and The Rival we find vintage Shanley: dialogue that is active, dramatic and funny coming from people concerned with the big questions of life. And it’s nothing if not personal.

—Val Smith

The Rival was retitled Missing Marisa after the newsletter went to press.