When girls collide.

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

Callie (Jessica Hecht) is a traffic reporter and longtime New Yorker;, Sara (Sandra Oh) is a schoolteacher newly transplanted from St. Louis. As soon as they meet, they seem both transfixed and terrified by desire. The playwright captures the exquisite longing that expresses itself in finding excuses to ditch the boyfriends, hang out 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 tells her boyfriend, George, on the phone. "I'm meeting my friend Sara for dinner."

The internalized homophobia that keeps people in the closet is excellent territory for a play. But there's something disappointingly sitcom-y about Stop Kiss. Son is clearly adept at plot 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 homes how to Riverdance." We don't really get what attracts these women to each other except 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 moment, whereas early on we learn the aftermath of that kiss: a brutal beating that leaves Sara speechless in a wheel-chair. This sends a couple of strangely mixed messages--if you come out, you're going to be punished; it's OK to approve of gay people as long as they're victims (if not of AIDS, then of gay bashing)--that seem to have more to do with pandering to a mainstream straight audience than with reflecting some truth about gay life.