Stage Kiss panel curated by Sarah Ruhl at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons presented the panel discussion On Kisses and Chemistry: A Discourse on Stage Kiss featuring Stage Kiss playwright Sarah Ruhl, actor Hamish Linklater, psychologist/expert on couples & sexuality Esther Perel, and actress Kathleen Chalfant, moderated by psychiatrist Tony Charuvastra, livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Monday 17 March at 3:30 p.m. PST/ 5:30 p.m. CST/ 6:30 p.m. EST/ 22:30 GMT. To submit questions for ending Q&A and participate in online conversation, follow @PHnyc and use hashtag #stagekisspanel.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Stage Kiss (Playwrights Horizons, Goodman Theater); In the Next Room or the vibrator play (Broadway, Lincoln Center Theater, Pulitzer Prize finalist, premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, subsequently at Victory Gardens); The Clean House (Lincoln Center Theater, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2005; The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2004, premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre, also done at the Goodman Theatre); Passion Play, a cycle (Pen American award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center, a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Best New Play, premiered at Arena Stage, also produced by the Goodman Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Epic Theatre in New York); Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Playwrights Horizons, Steppenwolf Theatre, premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre); Melancholy Play (premiered at the Piven Theatre Workshop); Eurydice (premiered at Madison Repertory Theatre, then at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Second Stage, Victory Gardens); Orlando (premiered at Piven Theater Workshop, subsequently at Classic Stage Company and Court Theatre); Dear Elizabeth (Yale Repertory Theatre); and Late: a cowboy song (Piven Theatre Workshop). Her plays have been produced across the country as well as internationally, and have been translated into Polish, Russian, Spanish, Norwegian, Korean, German, French, Swedish, and Arabic. Originally from Chicago, Ms. Ruhl received her MFA from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006.  She was a recent recipient of the PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright in 2010. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Psychologist Esther Perel is recognized as one of the world’s most original and insightful voices on couples and sexuality across cultures. The New York Times, in a cover story, named her the most important game changer on sexuality and relationships since Dr. Ruth. Her critically acclaimed viral TED talk reached more than 4 million viewers in just a few months. Esther is the author of the globally best-selling and award-winning book, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, translated into 25 languages. Fluent in nine of them, the Belgian native is a celebrated speaker, therapist and teacher invited around the globe for her expertise in emotional and erotic intelligence, work-life balance, cross-cultural relations and identity of modern marriage and family. 

Hamish Linklater is currently starring in the CBS comedy, The Crazy Ones, having just completed the role of Jerry Dantana in Season 2 of HBO’s The Newsroom. At Playwrights Horizons he has appeared in The Chemistry of Change (co-production with The Women’s Project), Recent Tragic Events, and The Busy World is Hushed. He was seen last summer at the Delacorte in Much Ado About Nothing  (NYSF). His play The Vandal premiered at The Flea in 2013, under the direction of Jim Simpson. Recent notable movies appearances include: Lola Versus, Battleship, 42, and The Future, opposite Miranda July. Linklater can next be seen in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, and Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, both to be released in 2014.

Kathleen Chalfant is well known for her portrayal of Vivian Bearing in the Off-Broadway, Los Angeles and London productions of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit, and for her performance as Hannah Pitt in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America on Broadway.  Recent additions to her long list of theater credits include Somewhere Fun (Vineyard), Red Dog Howls (New York Theatre Workshop), Dead Man’s Cell Phone (Playwrights Horizons) and Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide (Guthrie Theatre).  Selected film credits include Isn’t It Delicious?, R.I.P.D., Duplicity, A Perfect Stranger, In Bed with Ulysses, The Last New Yorker, Kinsey, Lackawanna Blues, Dark Water, Random Hearts, A Price Above Rubies, The Last Days of Disco, Side Streets, Company Men, and The Pornographer.  She co-starred in the NBC series “The Book of Daniel” and has appeared in HBO’S “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight,” the CBS drama “The Guardian,” HBO’s “The Laramie Project,” Steven King’s mini-series “Storm of the Century;” “Voices from the White House” (PBS), “A Death in the Family” (American Masterpiece Theatre/PBS), with recurring roles on the critically acclaimed “House Of Cards,” “Rescue Me,” “Prince Street” and “One Life To Live.”

Tony Charuvastra is a child, adolescent & adult psychiatrist. He is an Assistant Professor of Child Psychiatry at the NYU Child Study Center, where he teaches medical students and psychiatrists-in-training. His class at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences “Children of Divorce” provides a socio-historical-biological approach to marriage, divorce and mating. In an earlier incarnation of his academic life, he was an NIH funded post-doctoral researcher studying traumatic stress and its impact on social bonds, with a particular focus on the Oxytocin system of attachment bonding. He has published scientific papers in the areas of gender & inter-sexuality, addiction, ethics and post-traumatic stress. He also maintains a full time private practice in Manhattan. In his free time, he is married to Sarah Ruhl.