Review: Paradise Park

“Paradise Park” Ran until April 6 at the Signature Theater’s Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 244-7529, signaturetheatre.org.

I’m back from a long stint of analysis and memo writing in the less exciting world of municipal and state politics, phew. What a bore. At any rate, I did not write this as I had planned – punctually, that is – but I saw a play called Paradise Park. Let’s see if I can recall it:

It was an interesting harmony of mediocre dramatic performance and acting. The play, largely an a-synchronous reflection on postmodern themes is disorganized without a cause. The theme park of this play, our mixed up simulacrum-filled world, is staffed by an up and coming homosexual Indian immigrant who’s just trying to get paid. He spends the play in a goofy mouse costume, more or less his “park” uniform, and falls in love with a white closeted elderly man who mediates his sexuality through a talking dummy. Most unfortunate, our meek minotaur is glad to have the dummy with which to spoon. Puke, this is not worth the ticket unless you are some kind of masochist. Of course if you go to see a play these days you are either a masochist, an elderly person or a fop. So of course I went and I was not at all disappointed – though neither was I moved. “Paradise Park” is a not-disorienting, disordered peregrination through an outdated and hyperbolic conception of post modernity and the changing postmodern. Early in the first act, Nancy (Veanne Cox) proposes excavation:

The thing is:
I think we should go back to where we were
because, if you think about it,
the thing is, right now, we are in the present,
and before we were in the present,
we were in the past
so if we want to get oriented
we should go back to the past!

Moments like Nancy’s above make one think now here’s a real thinking play and you brace yourself for a great dramatic feat like “The Dining Room” by A. R. Gurney performed recently by The Keen Company at Theater Row. Yet, after an hour of “Paradise Park” it begins to seem like the playwright, Charles Mee, was simply trying to squeeze in as many dramatized postmodern thought experiments as possible. The New York Times reviewer, I see, called this a “frustrating” lack of “cogent structure.” I would call it a frustrating lack of talent or professional courtesy. The scenes are cross stitched together by the mere identity of its spastic-actants and the pallid side plots that float among them. The playwright succeeds and his audience is moved to experience a postmodern confusion, or perhaps just confusion. There is a tasteful thought experiment/scene, wherein Darling (Vanessa Aspillaga) addresses her terrified father through the rear view mirror of the family car. Her heartfelt confession about reality is a bit over blown – like the play as a whole, but I don’t think this symmetry is intentional – though the idea that her father must keep one eye on the road having only one eye left to divide between his wife and daughter is cleverly performed. The scene, however, like every other side show in Mee’s performance, comes out of nowhere and lacks even the grace and style of actual side shows. Mee frequently makes an unqualified use of technology.

As he has tried to tackle the tough questions he seems only to have fondled the least relevant of them. “Paradise Park” is a joyride through the various politics of identity: moral, sexual and racial. I think he unfortunately drops the ball with the latter and simply ruins the former two.  Mee has built a silly merry go round of a play and has called it cultural commentary. Off hand, I’d say it’s not so safe to ride. Hopefully, you’ll see it anyway. In a nutshell, the thoughts are good, the dramatic performance smelly. This play would fill the funnies section of any paper, though nothing here would qualify a laugh. Mee needs to work harder on the whole picture. I would really like to see this shake n’ bake assembly of themes and provocative situations integrated into a meaningful whole. The depth is decent, but unity and finesse make a lasting work.  If ever you are presented with the opportunity, proceed at your own risk.

See the New York Times “Paradise Park” review

Sincerely,

Sam

Review: Untimely Ripped, Some Prattle About Goold’s Macbeth

It was a suffering kind of thing, as often is Macbeth. It’s not my favorite play and I think the theme is too often recycled elsewhere. Patrick Stewart, however, was phenomenal. It was hard to maintain my blase in the face of such a commanding actor. At any rate I did.

The play, as often is “Macbeth,” was re-contextualized with an potent collection of stage props. A steel desk and an 80’s modern television set were constant fixtures and during the first couple of scenes the director leans heavily on them. In those first moments of the play the steel desk becomes an ad hoc operating table which conveys all the mortal urgency of the modern war film. Also, the TV glows with pre-recorded black and white surveillance images of the actors on stage which is technologically common enough with stage props these days.

For instance, Tartuffe at the Macarthur in Princeton a couple of months ago split the attentions of audiences between monitors in a mostly bare room, and a partitioned stage left. The left stage, a bedroom which occupied no more than 1/3 of the whole stage, could be accessed only through a live video feed from a digital camera held by fourth-wall-straddling camera operator. It was a difficult kind of thing since most of the action is in the bedroom to which the audience has little access. The seated “security guard” in the corner of the bare room with the monitors (stage right) and the “crew member” who filmed the actors with the digital camera produced a pretty interesting effect–a pretty interesting stage despite all the walls.

Anyway, Macbeth was not so interesting or confusing. During the build to each dramatic crescendo, the TV would flicker as would the walls thanks to a Hi-Def projector over the audience. The effect was a sort of hyper-modern horror motif lifted directly from an Asian horror film. Unfortunately there was very little innovation apart from the pairing of the poor execution of Asian horror and a particularly exhausted Shakespearean play.

The space of the stage, white-tiled walls, was also fixed and for me this produced the overall ad hoc institutional quality of the play. As it does for Konami’s Silent Hill, so too is the rusty haunted institution motif something of a blank canvas for BAM’s Macbeth – a recontextualizable space where anything from dining to murder, and a combination of the two, is possible . In fact, in the spirit of new Asian macabre, the director has even figured the witches as three otherworldly military nurses which, interestingly, occupy the same spaces. Their transition from nurse to witch is marked by a change in lighting – which provides the opportunity for nurse and witch to bleed together. With a quick flip of the switch the stage dims, some creepy static crawls onto the monitor, and the institution-white wall tiles become a hellish wall paper, and suddenly it’s bubble bubble toil and all that jazz. The space, like the nurses, toggles between the sterile institutional and the other worldly. Inner spaces (or other kinds depending on your reading and cosmological preference) blend with outer spaces, I guess.

At one point, I believe it was act 4 when Mac Duff’s family is murdered, the director shoots for the popular filmic effect that I like to call in my layman’s tongue, the “shaky head” effect. It is so named for its appearance in the remake of House on Haunted Hill where in the apparition of the mad doctor of the asylum strolls up to a surveillance camera and his head gets all shaky. I love it. I could watch it for hours. I get really depressed when I think it’s gonna happen in a film and it just doesn’t. Anyhow, in act 4 the effect is attempted as the lights go on and off. Yet, I suppose it’s impossible outside of film so what happens instead is the lights go off and on to reveal different gory poses that are meant to shock but it all goes wrong because it turns interpretive dance-ish. The posing each time the lights returned suddenly embarrassed me–I don’t think that was the intended effect. It was hoaky.

At one point, what appeared to be actual footage from the American remake of the Japanese film, The Ring, in the form of a big luminescent ring, was projected on the wall amidst a trite bunch of white noise. There was a magnetic HUMMMM and some crackling and, officially, I was scared and felt suddenly compelled to leave the theater.

I’ve often considered the audience at BAM to be a pretty artsy and up-to-snuff crowd. My favorite part of going to BAM is the after-show eavesdropping, stealing a little bit of cultural capital from the artsy-fartsy super-smarties who often appear to be more in-the-know than their theater row counter parts. Yet, by the end of the performance, it seemed as though everyone had taken the bait.

A couple of years ago, this showcasing of what many are calling Japanese “soft nationalism” would have been profound, political even. At this point, submerging an over submerged Shakespeare play in some played-out commercial horror techniques, American-Japanese aesthetic currency, seems rather vacuous, thus gimmicky, thus obnoxious. Mr. Goold might have benefited from a study of Tartuffe at the Macarthur or looked to some deeper versions of film horror like Takashi Shimizu’s Marebito (2004). He at least could have abstained from projecting that borrowed footage on the wall. It was like that tired bullet dodging scene from The Matrix all of a sudden.

Am I missing something?

I can’t wait for Antony and Cleopatra in March.

On Hillary, On Education

Stories of Milwaukee’s experimental voucherized school system, both hilarious and horrifying, have disenchanted many former fans of free market education theory. In the spring of 2005, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that: “Parental choice by itself does not assure quality. Some parents pick bad schools – and keep their children in them long after it is clear the schools are failing. This has allowed some of the weakest schools in the program to remain in business. “

That the silent force of the free market has failed to do its job does not sufficiently account for the disappointments of the Milwaukee experiments. In Milwaukee, for some reason, defective products persist past their expiration date and despite the dissatisfaction of consumers. In a system of choice, parents and students must become good consumers; a free market in which there is no standard of value is no market at all. It’s just free. And that’s stupid.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that not every school in the Milwaukee school voucher system is a disappointment, but where there is disappointment the findings are shocking. They report that the range of 115 voucher schools in the Milwaukee school system included successful schools as well as schools like the “Academy of Excellence Preparatory School, where reporters found only one administrators and two students the day they visited. The trio was about to leave for McDonald’s.”

The possibility of wasting taxpayers’ money on illegitimate schools is high in a system in which everyone is free to sell a product and for it there are no standards of valuation. Some time in the mid to late 1800’s New Jersey instituted a requirement that all teachers must provide proof of their credentials and “shall have first have deposited in the hand of the town clerk for the time being, of such township, precinct, or town corporate, a certificate, stating definitely the science, branch or branches of literature which such teacher, or teachers, respectively profess to teach.” This old degree of regulation might not be laissez-faire enough for voucher systems but perhaps Milwaukee’s children could have benefited from an innovation of this kind. It’s customary to level charges of child abuse against bad educators in some states. And surely, outside of New Jersey, child abuse isn’t only something that state workers do. It might be that the voucher institutions described in the Milwaukee article were actually composed of “certified” staff, which makes a case for teacher testing.

In a 2000 debate with Rick Lazio for the New York Senate, Hillary explained: “I’ve been involved with schools now for 17 years, working on behalf of education reform. And I think we know what works. We know that getting classroom size down works. That’s why I’m for adding 100,000 teachers to the classroom. We know that modernizing and better equipping our schools works. And we know that high standards works. But what’s important is to stay committed to the public school system, not siphon off money, as my opponent would, with vouchers.”

When we look to Milwaukee to verify Mrs. Clinton’s words, as many do, she seems to be right on top of things. Without some measure of quality, without standards, parents in Milwaukee were unable to say whether their child was receiving a quality education. This is mainly because, on its face, most education cannot be quantified. At least, if we don’t hold schools to state or national standards, evaluations of every school should be available to parents. However, it is not the case that In her 1996 book, It Takes A Village, Senator Clinton notes “some critics of public schools urge greater competition among schools as a way of returning control from bureaucrats and politicians to parents and teachers. I find their arguments persuasive, and that’s why I strongly favor promoting choice among public schools.”