The Frog Princess

TITLE: PRELUDE TO A KISS

DIRECTOR: NORMAN RENE

WRITER: CRAIG LUCAS

THE BOTTOM LINE: This adaptation of a Broadway hit is a heartbreaking fable of love and loss — and love triumphant.

Will you still love me, darling, when I’m old and gray?

Of course, my forever.

Really? Then watch this.

(Poof! The beloved is old and gray.)

Fairy tales are for children; adults usually have to settle for metaphors. But Craig Lucas knows that for grownups a fable can have the impact of a first kiss — every bit as beautiful, seductive, haunting.

The works of this wonderful writer (the plays Reckless and Blue Window, the screenplay Longtime Companion) pirouette impishly on themes as deep as the earth. His pieces begin as modern sophisticated comedies with the brisk banter of naturalism; then they spiral into tragedy and, finally, liberation from fears of madness, isolation, death. But not until his 1990 play, Prelude to a Kiss, did Lucas find the perfect blend of style and subject. The combatants here are the human body and the human urge to love. The first is impermanent, the second imperishable. For once an ad line gets the sense of a movie: “If you can’t believe your eyes, trust your heart.”

Peter (Alec Baldwin) and Rita (Meg Ryan) have a love too good to be true. He is sensible and cute; she is vague and cute. “Let’s get married,” he says, almost as soon as he meets her. “O.K.,” she says. On their wedding day, an anonymous old man (Sydney Walker) gives Rita a congratulatory kiss . . . and things start to go sour. On their honeymoon, she doesn’t drink; Rita was a Dewar’s girl. Before, she was forgetful; now she is an amnesiac. Suddenly she is fastidious in her lovemaking. To Peter, Rita seems another person. Isn’t everyone, really, when the musk of courtship has evaporated and people stop playing at being their most attractive selves?

After an uncertain start, director Norman Rene (a valued collaborator on all of Lucas’ projects) finds a sure, subtle rhythm that honors both the script’s delicacy and the boisterous demands of a date-night movie audience. Baldwin, who breathed this role so naturally in the play’s off-Broadway stint that no one else needed apply for the movie version, is a terrific guide through Peter’s decent bafflement. Ryan, new to the part, must work hard to get under Rita’s skin, which she does beautifully at about the time someone else invades it. And Walker, a stage veteran, has the knack of expressing despair and ecstasy with the sag of a jaw, the wink of a smile. He is a priceless gift in a dowdy package.

Which is Lucas’ moral. Inside every frog, he suggests, there is a princess held in bondage. Inside every princess is the clock of decay, which ticks remorselessly until she loses her looks, her grace, everything but her love — you can read that in the eyes. In Peter’s eyes too. They course with anger when he feels he has lost Rita; they moisten in awe when he finds his love in a most unexpected place.

Hurry up; the film opened last Friday. You’re late already, but so lucky the rapture of Prelude to a Kiss awaits you.