“Stage Kiss,” now in its Hawaii premiere at the Manoa Valley Theatre, is a romantic comedy jammed with relationship and romantic issues between an actress and her leading man. It’s alternately a backstage farce, with rehearsals segueing into performance scenes, and embraces two plays-within-a-play.

Set in the backstage space of a theater, “Stage Kiss” is an off-Broadway comedy-­drama by Sarah Ruhl, whose offbeat play “In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play” opened MVT’s 2015-16 season. Both provide outlandish humor.

Act 1 is primarily staged before the minimalist black hollow-tile back wall of the Manoa facility; functional sets finally roll out in Act 2.

The central figures are a woman, called She (Amy K. Sullivan, who has a gift for physical comedy and exaggerated accents), and a man, called He (Alan Shepard, who succeeds in creating stage chemistry with his co-star, bringing more to his role than likely defined in stage notes). They are the key performers first in a revival of a middling 1930s play; they also happen to be exes reunited when they unknowingly audition and land roles opposite each other, fodder for awkward and expected laughs. But the production also deals with the mounting of a show, with real and artificial antics of the auditions and the idiosyncracies of a cliche of a director (Allen Cole, in a frothy and forthright depiction of a composite of many directors), calling out for repetition of dialogue and replays of scenes.

The focus, however, is on the exploration of the seesawing genial and explosive temperaments of the leads, with recurring emphasis on the nature and essence of kissing, and what feelings are at play between kisser and kissee. The continuous wonderment, uttered by She early on, is, “When I kissed you … did it feel like an actor kissing an actor or a person kissing a person?”

This is the slim crux of the roller coaster ride, as the actors repeatedly kiss each other, as actors and as persons, some on their own terms, others under the guidance of the director. She is remarried to a businessman, Harry, and He has taken up with a young schoolteacher, Laurie. And She and He smooch with each other, or get smooched by the director and others, including a stage understudy named Kevin (a superb Adam Le­Febre, in a truly physical and manic tour-de-farce performance involving several roles). “Stage Kiss” is a volley of outrageousness, with not all the kissing via the lips, but also by a finger-motioning alternative between She and He.

As Act 2 begins, the second play-within-a-play that She and He are performing — an absurd venture with exaggerated dialects, pitting She as a whore, clad in a Day-Glo outfit, and He as an Irish Republican Army member — has earned rotten reviews. She learns painfully, from a doctor (the indefatigable Kevin guy again) that she has but a month to live, and her husband (LeGrand Lawrence, who effectively and joyously overacts) believes a reunion with her ex might be the spoonful of sugar she needs. Nothing that a kiss can’t cure.

While there’s music in the show, including tongue-in-cheek ensemble delivery of “Some Enchanted Evening” from “South Pacific” in Act 2 (along with numerous recorded oldies during scene changes), this is not a musical.

Thanks to playwright Ruhl’s volleying wave of gags, “Stage Kiss” smacks you when you least expect it.