Stage:

...There is the party itself at which Elliot refuses to be comforted and, then, after Joanna belatedly arrives, becomes furious when she charms his friends by being whatever best suits them...

...Were Feiffer, the cartoonist, and his visual colleagues trying to tell me something that the words barely hinted at...

...Shock in the theater works best when it grows out of character and theme...

...Like those figures who stand alone in Feiffer cartoons, revealing themselves as they talk, he has angst, not an income...

...Go see for yourself...

...The last scene is a telephone conversation in which an angry and tearful Elliot and an angry but relenting Joanna manage to keep connected, if just barely...

...Elliot has found the perfect woman, but she does have a tendency to repeat grating taglines ("Don't let it get to you...

...There is a moment in Jules Feiffer 's Elliot Loves when an exasperated Elliot walks across the room (upstaging the conversation that is irritating him), pours a tumbler of whiskey, and hands it to his alcoholic friend Phil, demanding that he drink it and cease being the bore that AA had made of him...

...There is some joking about how Joanna and he met, having to do with a complaint that he pretended to rectify, but he does not need a career...

...We are all used to the amiably bibulous host who insists on pushing drinks on guests who do not or cannot drink, but this is a gesture which pulls the cover off Elliot's distress and shows the murderous possibilities buried within the nice guy-Elliot is a typical Feiffer character, baffled by love and the complications that it entails...

...piece of cake...

...it is a plot device...

...these provide too easy laughs as the play goes on...

...Prelude offers a positive answer to that Old Beatles' question about will you still love me when I'm sixty-four...

...Tony Walton's impressive sets and Paul Gallo's lighting contribute to the effectiveness of the scenes, but I am not sure I understand the design of the last one...

...We are in fairy-tale land...

...STAGE ASPECTS OF DESIRE 'ELLIOT LOVES' & 'PRELUDE' There was a time when avant-garde aggression was popular in the theater, when a light in the eyes, a discordant noise, an invasion from the stage was supposed to shock the audience into awareness...

...He is middle-class, reasonably affluent, articulate, witty, but what it is that he actually does for a living I cannot remember...

...There is more wonder than pain on Phil's face, as David Pierce finely plays him, but in the audience there is a mass intaking of breath...

...GERALD WEALESLD WEALES...

...The true lover, on the other hand, can recognize his beloved in whatever guise and-since Lucas's romanticism is not hobbled by Feiffer's doubts-can love her in whatever form...

...Beyond that, as Lucas's AIDS film Longtime Companion (directed, as most of Lucas's plays are, by Norman Rene) indicates, it need not be age that changes the beloved...

...There is an hilarious scene that a momentarily confident Elliot and a very nervous Joanna (Christine Baranski) play at the elevator before she decides not to go to the dinner...

...In Prelude to a Kiss, "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds...

...Rita and the old man exchanged selves during a kiss he gave her at the wedding, and it is not until Peter can bring himself to kiss Rita by kissing the old man that the body switch reverses itself...

...Even so, he is going to introduce her to his old school chums, and that event (test) fuels the rest of the play...

...More often than not, they were annoyed rather than enlightened...

...Anthony Heald, in another of the excellent performances he has been piling up in the last few years, does a marvelous job of the set piece-its uncertainties, its sudden bursts of enthusiasm, its indications of self-pity and self-flagellation...

...There are undertones, however...

...Did I imagine the effect...

...Separated from his new wife, Peter goes to the bar where Rita used to work and sees, at a table, an old man-who had appeared uninvited at their wedding-sipping at what has already been identified as Rita's tipple...

...The revelatory glass of whiskey in Craig Lucas's Prelude to a Kiss has nothing to do with character...

...One of the nicer touches in the play is that Rita's parents cannot see the difference between the two Ritas, their perception of their daughter having always been a touch muzzy...

...Even if there is no stained-glass window, you will find a fascinating play with a decidedly Feifferian view of love...

...In fact, Elliot Loves begins with such a separate figure, Elliot, in a spot, delivering a long monologue about the wonderful woman with whom he has fallen in love (perish the word...

...Elliot would have a little trouble with that...

...In contemplating the marvelous Joanna, he indicates how his ability to love is beset by doubt, guilt, and the suspicion that nothing can be as good as this seems...

...Above the heads of the couple, there is something that looks to me like a stained-glass window...

...Following this clue, Peter discovers that Rita is inside the body of this old man and the old man is presumably the unfamiliar person who made a stranger of Rita on their honeymoon...

...On the surface, Prelude to a Kiss is an amusing comedy with a happy ending...