Review: Paradise Hotel

By Amanda Mull

Ladies and gentlemen, the emperor has no clothes. Both literally and figuratively. Not only was Forest Theater of Pure Form’s production of Paradise Hotel the kind of avant-garde theater whose surface-level complexity belies its actual vapidity, but also because there was totally a naked dude in it.

Written by acclaimed New York playwright Richard Foreman, Paradise Hotel is the kind of play that everyone says that they like because no one understands what in the world has happened. They know it’s supposed to be good, and no one wants to be the idiot that doesn’t get it. The standing ovation that the production received certainly indicated that no one in the audience wanted to be that guy.

The play begins with about a half dozen actors dancing the charleston to an annoying loop of charleston-appropriate music, which is then interrupted by a voiceover making an announcement that is identified as “disturbing and possibly illegal”: they are not actually performing Paradise Hotel, but a play called Hotel Fuck. Wait wait wait, another announcement: actually, there are two plays that are competing, and neither is Paradise Hotel. One is Hotel Fuck, the other is Hotel Beautiful Roses. The ad in the Flagpole is kind of misleading in this regard, because they definitely promised me a play called Paradise Hotel. Also, all audience members were instructed to wear feathers, but my sparkly red boa is obviously the best in the room. I feel kind of swindled, but soldier on.

Based on the names, it’s not hard to assume that one play is going to end up symbolizing physical, unemotional lust and the other, romantic and emotional love. That assumption would be completely correct. The characters spend most of the non-story attempting to get to Hotel Fuck and avoid the apparently evil Hotel Beautiful Roses (which, in addition to being dueling plays-within-plays, are also treated as if they are physical places), but are overtaken by the allure of romantic love in the end. Sort of. That’s where things get fuzzy. Or even more fuzzy, as it were, because Foreman goes to great lengths to make sure no one knows what in the hell is going on the entire time. He seems to be from the entirely pretentious school of thought that art is not good unless it is exceedingly difficult and inaccessible to the average person.

If that is the framework that Foreman is using to evaluate his success as an artist, then I’m sure he has given himself many a pat on the back over Paradise Hotel. The play involves, at different times, a man in a giant plastic deer head, a sex god in a faux fur cape on stilts, the use of the word fuck so many times that I become completely desensitized to it, and a fully naked man doing the charleston, which creates an uncomfortable and embarrassing amount of jiggling. Also, most of the characters kill themselves at least once in the play, which doesn’t stop them from hopping back up and getting on to the next disjointed, non-narrative scene.

To be fair, the production itself was not bad. Forest Theater of Pure Form is a small theater troupe that exists mostly on donations and ticket sales to perform in its tiny theater in the back of Rubber Soul Yoga Studio (their curtain was even hand-sewn by director Cal Clements). They produce a new play every month, which is a task most theater groups would never take on, and they handled their roles for March with grace and aplomb, particularly since Paradise Hotel is asininely complex. I am still awed by the fact that they all remembered what they were supposed to do next, since there was no narrative or chronology. A particularly bright stop was Kate Morrissey’s portrayal of Julia Jacobson, the play’s sexually driven, ambiguously Polish female lead.

Ultimately, it’s hard to decide whether or not Paradise Hotel was a failure because I have no idea what it set out to accomplish. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem get there, and I wonder who will have the courage to tell the emperor (or that dude doing the unfortunate dancing) that he’s naked.