Photographs by Carol Rosegg
The above photograph from Paradise Park might lead you to believe the two hour production is a kinetic, exhilarating carnival ride. But just as the anticipation leading up to a day at Six Flags, New Jersey quickly dissipates into an irritable, misanthropic funk, an evening at Charles Mee’s Paradise Park leaves you strapped into a roller coaster that lurches forward only at rare intervals.
This, of course, is what Paradise Park is suggesting about the American condition; that our society is one enervating amusement park populated by a weary, dissatisfied mob, drifting from one diversion to the next in an endlessly fruitless search for satisfaction. It’s an apt metaphor, and one that would seem ripe for Mee’s idiosyncratic style. But Paradise Park so resolutely eschews any substantive narrative, and compensates with little else, that the audience is left as lost and frustrated as the theme park’s jaded prisoners.
The actors do their best, but when they’re not isolated by longish monologues, they seem to be speaking past each other, and one scene after another lies inert on the stage. The play has some genial romantic threads, but these elements are ultimately too abstract to hold interest. Mercifully, there are moments of real humor: A fruitcake slingshot contest, a dummy on an existential rant about his ventriloquist, a man self-inflicting water torture in a punch bowl are just some of the play’s rewards. But even when an avalanche of Superman dolls fall from the sky and a massive bouncy castle absurdly inflates on stage, Paradise Park remains deflated at its core.
All the same, Mee is one of America’s most radical playwrights – his Iphigenia 2.0 was the most powerful expression of the Iraq catastrophe staged yet in New York – and any real artistic adventurer runs the risk of producing difficult, alienating work. It’s worth it. This is the third and final production in Signature Theatre Company’s Charles Mee season and continues at The Peter Norton Space [555 West 42nd Street] through April 6th. Tickets cost $20.
