Callie is a swerver. She’ll do anything to avoid trouble. She tapes over the peephole in her door before she dances alone. Twice a week at 6 p.m., a deafening thudding fills her apartment from the neighbor upstairs. She doesn’t ask the neighbor to stop, she just always makes sure she is gone at 6 p.m.

Sara is a third grade teacher, just moved to New York. She is slowly finding her courage. When her 8-year-old student defends her honor in public, she knows it is time to become a bolder woman. Callie knows it too. In Pentacle’s new production Stop Kiss developing their inner strength will bring Callie and Sara great happiness. It will also possibly cost them their lives.

Two women fall in love in this play. Two women, regular women, with sometimes-boyfriends and no particular desire to declare themselves gay. In fact it is possible that Callie and Sara were not born to be lesbians. That their relationship, which grows so timidly, is not mired in a sexual preference. Their love just becomes more intense than can be contained by friendship, and has to find a higher level.

At the center of the story is a kiss, and a brutal beating. The play both builds toward this moment, and falls away from it in a clever chronology. A format of many short interspersed scenes show us the aftermath of the beating at the same time as the slow assembly of events that made it happen.

Director Jo Dodge presents a solid play with a solid cast. Sophie Morris plays Callie as both bright and timid, showing daring stunted by fear. Her strongest scenes are when she is suffering, such as when she recounts the truth of the assault to a detective, or is delicately dressing a sick friend. Cheryl Witters, as Sara, is skilled with her character’s gentle confusion and completely conveys a woman loveable enough to wreck your world for.

Jason Cude’s George is a trick character, seemingly entirely capable of brutality but developing into the play’s representative of kind and tolerant masculinity. Valerie Self has the small but effective dual roles of the crime’s witness and its nurse. Bobby Hooper captures frustration and pain superbly in Peter, Sara’s faultless but outgrown ex-boyfriend. Randy Boyd rounds out the cast with Detective Cole, and does a good job just letting the audience see just the edges of his disgust.

The play is an exploration of love and strength, shame and cowardice. Even though the climax of the plot is revealed after the first twenty minutes, the play continues to slowly build suspense throughout. Scene after scene bring the two women closer toward honesty, but each one ends with all the important words still unsaid. When the connection is finally made, the play stops abruptly, much like the kiss it was centered on. An entirely fitting, maybe even necessary ending, for Stop Kiss.