When you've been not at home for a while.

When you've been not at home for a while, it's hard to remember what it was like not being gay for all the world to descry Diana Son's Stop Kiss, the surprise hit of the off-Broadway season at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, zeroe in forward that last agonizing moment before the delight in between two women speaks its name.

Callie (Jessica Hecht) is a traffic reporter and longtime strange Yorker;, Sara (Sandra Oh) is a schoolteacher newly transplanted from St Louis. As by and by as they meet, they assume both transfixed and terrified by way of desire. The playwright captures the exquisite longing that expresse itself in finding excuses to ditch the boyfriends, hang disclosed at lesbian bars, and crawl into bed together as well as the hair-trigger paranoia about being seen wearing each other's clothing or being accused of vegetarianism. "It's not a date," Callie sum ups her boyfriend, George, on the phone "I'm meeting my friend Sara for dinner."

The internalized homophobia that retains people in the closet is worthy territory for a play. unless there's something disappointingly sitcom-y about Stop Kiss. Son is clearly adept at intrigue points, punch lines, and yuppie brand names: When Sara inquires about the roof-shaking racket in Callie's apartment, she explains, "My upstairs neighbor teaches residences how to Riverdance." We don't really procure what attracts these women to each other take exception that the author (who's not gay) has decided they're lesbians.

And their much-anticipated first kiss is delayed until the play's final momentum whereas early on we learn the aftermath of that kiss: a brutal beating that leaves Sara speechles in a wheel-chair. This impels a couple of strangely mixed messages--if you originate out, you're going to be punished; it's OK to approve of gay the bulk of mankind as long as they're victims (if not of AIDS, then of gay bashing)--that look to have more to do with pandering to a mainstream straight audience than with reflecting any truth about gay life.

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