The show, written in 1998, has been refined and makes its Southwest premiere at Circle Theatre on Wednesday. Depending on response, it could open off-Broadway later this year.

Kiss is one of many projects for DiPietro, who may just be positioning himself as the next Neil Simon. His long-running off-Broadway smash musical revue I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change!, co-written with composer Jimmy Roberts, and his oft-produced comedy Over the River and Through the Woods are just two examples of his talent for representing relationships through accessible comedy and identifiable human characters.Up-and-coming playwright Joe DiPietro brings his play based on a famous French photo to Fort Worth's Circle Theatre.

"I call my work human comedies," DiPietro says. "It's the big subjects of life which are easy to sometimes dismiss, like family and love."

The Kiss at City Hall has the potential to join the growing list of DiPietro successes. What's fascinating about the photo, titled Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville, or The Kiss at the Hotel de Ville, is its backstory.

Doisneau was a noted freelance photo documentarian who worked for several major publications such as Vogue and Life. When Life commissioned a photo that captured spontaneous romance, he responded with a brilliant image of a man and woman sharing a passionate kiss while the street life around them continues to move on.

"The thing I love about the Doisneau photograph, the thing that really speaks to me when you really study it," says Susan Sargeant, who is directing the Circle production, "is that the lovers are sharp and still, that's what you're focusing on, and all these other people are passing by. But the couple takes the moment, and the world stands still for them.

"The photo immediately appealed to hopeless romantics everywhere. And in the '80s and early '90s, it enjoyed a resurgence of popularity, with a poster that sold half a million copies and countless more in bootleg versions.

"It was probably on the wall of every college freshman in the Western world at one time," says Peter Hamilton of England's Oxford University, author of two Doisneau biographies.

"There were duvet covers, picture puzzles, postcards. It was merchandised heavily."

But with popularity came controversy. In 1992, Doisneau was sued by several royalty-seekers claiming they were the subjects captured in his photograph. During these trials it was exposed that the photo had been staged. Doisneau had hired two actors, and though the actors were truly lovers, The Kiss suddenly lost some of its allure.

"The real problem is that it gives you the impression that it was taken on the spur of the moment," Hamilton says, "which is what he was trying to make it look like. There wasn't really any obvious difference between the setup shot and a shot that looked like it was made on the spur of the moment."

DiPietro, who had read about the saga of the photo, began to think of it in terms of a play, focusing on two contemporary American couples in various stages of relationships.

"I thought it would be interesting to have modern-day characters reflect on this meaning," DiPietro says. "People always assumed it was an impromptu snapshot of some couple kissing. But it wasn't."

Staged or not, Sargeant sees the image of such a passionate kiss as the perfect vehicle through which to explore ideals of love and romance.

"The kiss is the most intimate romantic symbol, even more than the sexual act itself," she says. "The reason why is that's where the exchange of souls comes in, the breathing of each other's breath."

Whether or not Kiss has a life in New York after Circle's production, DiPietro's career seems to be on the right track.

Among his many other projects, he's writing a new book for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Allegro. He recently did a similar treatment with Rodgers and Hart's Babes in Arms, which was staged at Goodspeed Musicals last summer. He's also writing a "new" Gershwin musical, Heaven on Earth, based on Oh, Kay! and using Gershwin's well-known songs and trunk material.Then there's the musical Memphis, about 1940s disc jockey Dewey Philips, the first white DJ to play African-American music for Tennessee teen-agers.

There's also The Thing About Men, a new musical collaboration with Jimmy Roberts. It's based on German filmmaker Doris Dorrie's 1986 movie Men and should open off-Broadway in late summer or fall.

But ahead of all that is the Broadway-bound musical Can't Help Falling in Love, an original story that uses Elvis Presley songs (think Mamma Mia! and ABBA). It's being workshopped this spring and could hit the Great White Way as early as this fall, which would make it DiPietro's first Broadway show. The music is by David Bryan, former keyboardist for hard-rock group Bon Jovi.

For DiPietro, 40, all this is a dream that hardly seemed possible less than a decade ago, when he was working as an advertising rep.

"I loved writing, and I loved theater and didn't know what to do," he says. "No one gives you permission to write, you have to carve out this own time in your life. So I had this full-time career that was going well, but I had this other thing that I had to do. A lot of nights and snuck-off time from work were spent writing."

His break came in the form of a little musical revue with a long title: I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change! It was originally called Love Lemmings: A Leap Into the Dating Abyss, a series of sketches about relationships. When he met Roberts, it became a musical revue, that opened off-Broadway in 1996 to mixed reviews but enthusiastic audiences.

It's now in its seventh year off-Broadway, making it the longest running musical revue in off-Broadway history, surpassing Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

DiPietro's next success was the comedy Over the River and Through the Woods, which ran off-Broadway for two years. Both Over the River and I Love You have become two of the most-produced shows around the country. Locally, Denton Community Theatre is staging Over the River in May, and Theatre Arlington is doing it in June. Circle has already done both shows. So has Dallas' Theatre Three, which is still running I Love You in its downstairs space after two years. In the summer of 2002, I Love You played concurrently at T3 and Circle to great success in both cities.

"I don't have to have a day job anymore and I don't have to write for Hollywood, unless I want to," DiPietro says with enthusiasm.

Considering the romance and relationship connections between The Kiss at City Hall, I Love You, Over the River and some of his forthcoming work, DiPietro is building his reputation on honest portrayals of human relationships injected with human folly.

"I think in his own way, Joe tries to distill a truth about something, in this case love or relationships," says Roberts, his collaborator on I Love You.

DiPietro admires the old comedies of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the more complex farce of late British playwright Joe Orton, and, of course, Neil Simon.

"Since Neil Simon did what he did in theater, all of a sudden dramatic plays have gotten funny," DiPietro says. "Most dramatic plays before that, things by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, those plays aren't funny at all. But the big plays that win the Pulitzers now, like Angels in America and Proof, even though they're dramas, they're funny."

But he also knows that, like with Simon's work, writing comedy that appeals to the masses comes at a price.

"When you're as popular as Neil Simon, there's going to be a backlash, critically, in any artistic endeavor," he says. "I think critics never respect comedies the way they do dramas. I've seen shows of mine where the entire audience is laughing through the entire show, and then the next day some critic will write 'The play wasn't funny,' and you're like, 'Well, what can I do?'

"But there's something to be said for the ability to reach so many people, he adds."

[Joe's] strengths are humanity, universality. He genuinely can build up a rapport between an audience and the cast so that they don't feel patronized in any way," says Dena Hammerstein, wife of DiPietro's former producer, the late James Hammerstein (son of musical theater legend Oscar). "Joe seems to be writing exactly what the people want as he's writing it. I think he wants to please a mass of people. He doesn't think he's writing for 30 people in a garret."

He's comfortable with the idea of being a playwright for the people. But DiPietro's work has continued to evolve.

"Each piece is written at a certain time in my life," he says. "I look back at I Love You, You're Perfect, and I see that as a result of being a younger man. There's a freewheeling nature to it that doesn't take into account some of the more difficult things in life now."

Even the revisions done for Circle's production of Kiss show a maturity.

"I did try to change it a bit as I've gotten older and, hopefully, a little wiser," DiPietro says. "It's essentially the same play, hopefully deepened a little bit."

Having read both versions, Circle director Sargeant can confirm that. "It had become a finer wine," she says.

"The play has such a wonderful romantic soul," she adds. "When love happens, you just do it. It's not an intellectual experience, it's an emotional and spiritual experience. Seeing these [characters] struggling puts you back in a place of seeing lovers on a street, how they walk, how they sit, how they stand, the language of that. It's there every day in front of the Coffee Haus in Sundance Square. You don't always notice it. Because of this play, I've become like Doisneau, a photographer, a voyeur, looking in on something that's interesting to me."

The Kiss at City HallWednesday through Feb. 22 at Circle Theatre, 230 W. Fourth St., Fort Worth.Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays. Tickets are $15-$25.For more information, call (817) 877-3040.