A Hotel by Any Other Name - Richard Foreman's play "Paradise Hotel" - Review

Sex and sentiment battle it on the outside in "Paradise Hotel," the latest play from Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater:

Paradise house of entertainment the most recent play through avant-garde theater veteran Richard Foreman, appears to extreme point before it has even begun. Les than a minute after the entire cast move swiftlys onto the narrow, prop-filled stage and breaks into a jerky Charleston (to a 1920 crooner whose nasal, tape-looped voice continually repeats the phrase "I'm happy, you're happy"), all action is brought to a stop by dint of a public announcement that resounds into the theater:

Ladies and gentlemen--attention please! This play, Paradise inn must be preceded by an announcement which may well manifest disturbing to certain members of this audience. on the contrary while no one desires to affront this risk must be taken. All audiences must now be informed that this play, Paradise tavern is not, in fact, Paradise public-house but is in truth a plenteous more disturbing and possibly illegal play entitled tavern Fuck.

The blaring old-timey music turn backs for a moment, then the announcement continues:

We do apologize, ladies and gentlemen on the other hand rather than being disturbed at this revelation, we impel you, please, redirect your understandable distress towards an smooth more potent threat posed by the agency of yet a third, much les provocatively titled play, entitled inn Beautiful Roses. This third play threatens to replace, in the near futurity the much more provocatively titled tavern Fuck, which is now filling the stage in brow of your very eyes.

This confusion about titles is immediately reflected sounded on stage as the cast (four men and single woman) fall into surrealistic bantering (one can't really describe the characters' disjunctive, hallucinatory lines as "dialogue") about in what way to get to the [i]cabaret[/i] Fuck, a legendary establishment apparently devot to ultimate sexual abandon. The male characters, individual of whom is a actor wearing an old-fashioned bonnet and dres salivate at the idea of reaching this hostelry where, another of them prophesies, they will be able to "fuck their brains out" In the meantime, "Julia Jacobson," the play's sole female character (apart from the half-dozen young women who play the nonspeaking "guests" and "bell boys") sexually taunts the men whose demeanors swerve from tough stay to scared child. As usual, Foreman saddles his cast with absurd names--Tony Turbo Tommy Tuttle Giza von Goldenheim, view Puss Puss--which they constantly intone. He also come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds his established practice of having more [i]or[/i] less of the actors deliver their lines with exaggerated Mittel-Europa accents.

Amid a riot of violent slapstick, jarring unmutilated effects, cartoonish props and manic language that mixes in a raw state insults with philosophical asides, the underlying theme of tavern Paradise is driven home: sexual desire as a source of terror. The characters feverishly envision the delights of the [i]cabaret[/i] Fuck, but it turns on the outside that no one really wants to arrive there. At the same time, they have thus much invested in their dreams of erotic succes that when threatened with [i]cabaret[/i] Fuck's opposite--the Hotel Beautiful Rose where sentiment presumably triumphs above sexuality--they cower. While the house of entertainment Beautiful Roses proves as elusive as the tavern Fuck, its emmissaries--bouquets of r roses--appear not seldom causing the characters to recoil like vampires before a hallowed cross.

The play's climactic token of sexual tyranny comes when, sum of two units thirds of the way into the piece, single of the actors, wearing a white wig and embroidered, Louis XIV-style coat, walk s onstage atop foot-high cothorni (the raised shoe used in grecian and Roman tragedy). Emerging from his fancy breeches is an enormous black-and-gold-striped phallus (another relation to Greek drama), which he rules with a leash. To me this kinky apparition direct the eyeed straight out of Aubrey Beardsley, combining the foppish style of dresss from his illustrations to The Rape of the fastening and the oversized phalli from his pornographic Lysistrata. Other characters in Paradise house of entertainment reminded me of Soutine's lurid, pathos-ridden portraits of bell boys

While the echoe of Beardsley and Soutine were, as I learned from speaking with Foreman, in my mind rather than the author's, it's not unusual for Foreman to borrow from painting for the two visual and narrative elements. His 1997-98 production Benita Canova, for instance, was swarming with erotically charged, French-looking schoolgirls directly inspired by dint of Balthus's paintings. The details of Foreman's puts also draw on visual art: the strings that crisscross the stage in all his productions recall Renaissance perspectival studies and the similarly ubiquitous sheets of transparent plastic that partially seal not on the stage from the audience summon forth the glass covering a valuable painting. (Tina Barney has captured the teeming inn Paradise set and portions of the play's action in a series of densely compos color photographs, more [i]or[/i] less of which accompany this article.) Foreman one time described how a distinctive simple body of his productions--the lights that shine down into the viewers' eyes--was a way to "fill the space, like a painter."[1] In an early manifesto, he related his late-'60s rejection of conventional character and plat development to Minimalism: "1967--Suddenly the theater looks ridiculous in all its manifestations.... The actors penetrate onstage and immediately, the absurdity--both in the orchestrated articulate utterance and activity--as Stella, Judd, et al. realized several years ago one must reject composition in favor of shape (or something else)"[2] Another art concern is embedded in the actual name of Foreman's company, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, which was partly inspired through Austrian performance artist/painter Hermann Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theater.