Anyone eager to quickly pinpoint the essential differences between radical theatre in the 1960s and what remains need only compare two utterly contrasting views of paradise: the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now and Richard Foreman’s most recent production, Paradise Hotel. Premiered in the annus mirabilis of 1968, the Living Theater’s vision of paradise is arguably the most representative (certainly the most notorious) production of that body-conscious decade. In its opening sequence, the actors gradually transformed a chanted litany of prohibitions (“I’m not allowed to travel without a passport,” “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana”) into a primal scream, culminating with “I’m not allowed to take my clothes off.” At which point, the actors proceeded to do just that: strip down to whatever approximation of the altogether was allowed by law. The opportunity to let it all hang out was by no means confined to the performers—the audience too was invited to disrobe and join the company in an extended group grope, titled, with a utopianism wholly characteristic of the era, The Rite of Universal Intercourse.
Three decades later, the finale to Foreman’s Paradise Hotel can be interpreted as a direct rebuke to the Living Theatre’s “liberated” and redemptive view of the human body. A character with the eponymous name of Tony Turbo—a sad, pudgy, sex-starved loser played by the sweetly rotund Tony Torn—tears off all his clothes and directly confronts the audience, screaming, with an ever-mounting sense of urgency, “Everybody, take off your clothes now. Everybody, take off your clothes, NOW.” Suffice it to say, this time around not even the smallest group is eager or willing to grope.
In the alternative theatre world of the 1960s, “the naked truth” was no mere metaphor. This was, after all, the decade in which the dress rehearsal gave way to the undress rehearsal. Clothing had come to symbolize not only concealment and repression, but also cultural conditioning. Discarding layer upon layer of one’s outer garments was deemed tanta-audience keeps its clothes on mount to peeling away layer upon layer of social indoctrination. Or so it seemed. The unclothed body thus came to represent our natural state, our last lingering connection to that paradise of earthly delights: the Garden. Of course, from the jaded vantage point of the 1990s, this utopian view of the body has come to seem more than a little naive (HIV and AIDS constituting only one of many reasons for a sea change in attitude). Alas, you don’t have to be a semiotician to realize that a body minus clothing is still very much a product of cultural conditioning. Even naked, we continue to move in ways that are dictated by the habitual imprint of the garments we’ve just discarded. Clearly, there’s no shortcut back to the Garden. Or, if there is one, it’s unlikely to involve the unclothed body.
No one understands these sobering truths more fully than Foreman, whose Paradise Hotel is arguably his most complicated and pessimistic take yet on that 1960s credo which argued that the soul resides in the body. In Foreman’s production, a motley assortment of misfits and exotics all become fixated on the idea that if only they can find their way to the mythical Paradise Hotel, they will enter a state of perpetual orgasm more fulfilling than anything dreamt of by the Marquis de Sade.
But, as things turn out, no one seems to know the way. The characters are never certain about when—or even if—they’ve arrived at their carnal destination. To borrow a line from Gertrude Stein (one of Foreman’s favorite writers): “When you get there, there’s no there there.” And—irony of ironies—by concentrating on characters who can’t get no satisfaction, Foreman has created his most fully satisfying work in many years.
Like other addicts of his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, I’ve come to crave my annual Foreman fix. But having attended to this habit for nearly three decades, I’ve begun to suspect that Foreman may be a bit too prolific for his own good. His stylistic obsessions—the stretched string, the Plexiglas, the body mikes, the crescendos of over-amplified music, the quick bursts of bright, white light—have become so indispensable to him as a means of organizing his own perceptual experience that they sometimes seem like a crutch or a security blanket. They recur again and again, regardless of whether or not they appear to be thematically justified.
But miraculously, in Paradise Hotel Foreman never seems to be on auto-pilot. This time around, everything coheres. Every one of his signature devices seems to serve an end beyond itself, an end related to the subject of sexual desire. The pieces of stretched string—which often point us toward that not-so-obscure object of desire, the genitalia—exemplify the power of sexuality over the human gaze. Those painfully bright flashes of light embody what Foreman himself refers to as a “cosmic thunderclap of sexual energy.” (Frequently, the characters will touch a stick to a giant light bulb looming overhead and then recoil from the resulting burst of light as if from a massive electrical shock.) In Paradise Hotel, the usual tinny, distorted musical score—the hurdy-gurdy from hell—takes the form of a Charleston-on-speed, with the lyrics “I’m happy, you’re happy” repeated over and over again in a way that perfectly captures the manic energy of a culture determined to convince itself, come hell or high water, that sexual fulfillment lies just around the corner. The wall of Plexiglas that separates the audience from the performers also enables the spectators to see reflections of themselves in the process of peering in on the characters. (The audience’s own voyeurism, in other words, is reflected back on itself.) The body mikes promote not only the usual degree of technological mediation, but also a mode of heavy breathing whose creepiness is enhanced by its sense of whispered intimacy.
And what better way to demonstrate the supercharged power of sexual repression than to have the characters futilely fling themselves against the walls of the set, as they routinely do in the more “hysterical” moments of any Foreman production? And what of the text itself? Here as well, the most familiar strategies feel freshly minted by virtue of how well they serve the subject matter. Typically, Foreman’s language will carry the philosophical weight of a passage from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; but here the structure of the text—especially the orchestration of entrances and exits—is pure Feydeau. And Foreman has always utilized a chorus of manic, wind-up-toy “extras,” the sort of bell-boy characters who dash madly about in films like the Marx Brothers’ Cocoanuts or Feydeau’s sex farces.
The title of this new piece is only a slight variation on Hotel Paradiso, the most common English translation of a classic sex farce by Feydeau (Peter Glenville directed a film adaptation of the play in 1966). If Paradise Hotel is indeed a latter-day version of Hotel Paradiso, then not only are we a long way from the sexual utopianism of Paradise Now—we’re no further along on the road to sexual maturity than the most middle-class characters in the history of drama! In a farce like Feydeau’s, the moment a long-dreamt-of sexual fantasy actually threatens to materialize, the characters hightail it back as quickly as possible to the unadventurous security of their bourgeois homes. Typically, Act 2 will take place in a disreputable hotel; but Acts 1 and 3 will be set in the same safe haven: an upper-middle-class drawing room.Thus the play ends as it began—back amidst the same “respectability” that prompted the characters to stray in the first place.
Foreman has come up with his own brilliant variation on this symmetrical theme. No more than a minute or two into the production, the deep, gravelly voice of Foreman himself—our intrusive if not omniscient narrator—announces: “All audiences must now be informed that this play Paradise Hotel is not in fact Paradise Hotel, but is in truth a much more disturbing and possibly illegal play entitled Hotel Fuck. We do apologize, Ladies and Gentlemen—but rather than being disturbed at this revelation, we urge you, please, redirect your understandable distress toward an even more potent threat posed by yet a third, much less provocatively titled play, entitled Hotel Beautiful Roses. This third play threatens to replace, in the near future, the much more provocatively titled Hotel Fuck.”
Here we encounter Foreman’s true theme: the relative ease with which the “Hotel Fuck” can transform into the “Hotel Beautiful Roses,” the symbiotic relationship between the crudest of pornography and the smarmiest of sentimentality—and the more than occasional confusion about which is which. The competition between the two competing hotels is also a potent metaphor for at least one dimension of the current American culture wars, especially the way in which the cultural Left and its militant “gender agenda” both locks horns with and reinforces the religious Right with its gay-bashing, single-mother-bashing, family-values agenda.
Foreman’s “disturbing” announcement also introduces us at the outset to the bon mot of the evening. Henceforth the word “fuck” will manage to insinuate itself into virtually every utterance that passes from his characters’ lips. As in: “Is this the Hotel Fuck or the Hotel Fuck You?” Or: “I bet that fucking bellboy is getting fucked a lot more than the rest of us are fucking.” And so it goes, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Long before the end of the evening, the word “fuck” has been drained of its power to either shock or arouse. Which is precisely Foreman’s point—and his strategy. Sex is (essentially) talk about sex. Or, as Mark Twain was reported to have said about the weather, “Everybody talks about it, but nobody ever does anything about it.”
Roger Copeland teaches at Oberlin College and writes frequently about the theatre.
