100A Theater Productions, a new live theater project at the Tobin Center, presents a series of recitations called Industry Night Readings, which invite the audience to witness dry runs of seminal works with actors reading directly from scripts and stage direction given out loud.
The latest offering, which will take place Monday, June 3, is Kiss of the Spider Woman (El beso de la mujer araña), based on a 1976 novel by Argentine author Manuel Puig.
The story is told mostly through dialogues between a poor, middle-aged gay man (Molina) and a young, upper-class socialist revolutionary (Valentín) sharing the same jail cell. The two clash at first but eventually forge an unlikely friendship that becomes sexual.
Adapted into a film in 1985, the novel itself is revolutionary in that the characters are written with tenderness and depth that transcend stereotypes. Kiss of the Spider Woman is both a hallucinatory fever dream-like work of magical realism and a poignant denunciation of political and sexual repression.
Tickets $13.50-$15, 7 p.m., Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 100 Auditorium Circle, (210) 223-8624, tobincenter.org.
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This article appears in May 1-14, 2024.