Flying high: Five Flights is breathless fun--and bravura art too.

Five Flights * Written by Adam Bock * Directed by Kent Nicholson * Starring Jason Butler Harner, Matthew Montelongo, and Alice Ripley * Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, New York City (through February 22)

Adam Bock's Five Flights features file best gay male kiss I've ever seen on the stage. It s a long, juicy, passionate smooch between Ed (the charismatically nerdy Jason Buffer Harner) and Tom (the studly Matthew Montelongo) that builds huge tension in the theater, shifts just enough to let the audience laugh a little, then keeps on going.

The kiss is only one step in a mating dance that Bock depicts in all its awkward glory. Ed and iris two siblings must decide what to do with the aviary their recently deceased father built in a vacant lot as a tribute to his dead wife. Jane (Joanna P. Adler), wife of Ed's brother Bobby, wants to sell the properly to a developer. Ed's sister, Adele (Lisa Steindler), and her best friend, Olivia (Alice Ripley), want the aviary to house Olivia's birdbrained Church of the Fifth Day.

That's where Ed meets Tom, a pro hockey player who's attracted first to Olivia's gospel and then to Ed. They approach, they avoid, they date--then Ed backs away. Someone hurt him once, and he doesn't want to risk that again. Tom counters with some gentle advice: "Rejection bounces us out of our bodies, and we have to find a way back in."

If it were only a portrait of an up-to-the-minute gay relationship, Five Flights would be a winner. But it's a lot more. It's amazing how much Book packs into a 90-minute play--hilarious character studies, inventive bits of writing, keen observations of life, swerves into wild theatricality. Book switches scenes in an instant: "Here we are. Different place. New moment. Same story." And they're off.

Suddenly Tom and a gay-friendly teammate (Kevin Karrick) are batting a shampoo bottle around a locker room with hockey sticks. Suddenly Adele, the good listener, has a 10-minute monologue. Kisses come out of nowhere, with varying results. Five Flights is a comedy about faith--in visions, in the tales, in the body. Most dangerous of all is faith in nothing.

Five Flights is a breakthrough for Bock, the 42-year old Canadian who studied playwriting with Paula Vogel at Brown University and won a 1999 Best Play award from San Francisco Bay area critics for Swimming in the Shallows. He's found his ideal director in Kent Nicholson, whose inventive staging drives the play at screwball speed and elicits sensational performances. Ripley (best known for musicals) especially shines, playing Olivia as a mix of a holy roller, Marilyn Monroe, and a chicken. Book and company break all the rules of conventional playwriting with Five Flights, but fans of quirky, soulful comic playwrights like Craig Lucas and Harry Kondoleon will feel fight at home.

Shewey writes on theater for The New York Times.