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Charles Mee Escapes to Paradise
Signature Theatre Company closes the Charles Mee Series with the world premiere of Paradise Park, presented in association with True Love Productions. In Paradise Park, when a young man buys a ticket to a Coney Island-inspired amusement park, he embarks on a dark and wild thrill ride through America where the attractions include the Grand Canyon, Civilization World, and Hamptonland. Daniel Fish, who directed the American premiere of Mee's True Love at New York's Zipper Theatre in 2001, directs. In the cast, Satya Bhabha and William Jackson Harper return to the Mee Series after appearing in Queens Boulevard (the musical). Their fellow amusement park denizens are Vanessa Aspillaga, Veanne Cox, Gian Murray Gianino, Christopher McCann, Paul Mullins, Alan Semok, and Laurie Williams. Signature welcomes the return of choreographer Peter Pucci (Queens Boulevard (the musical) and Sam Shepard's The Late Henry Moss) as well as newcomers Bill Schimmel (music direction and arrangements), David Zinn (set), Kaye Voyce (costumes), Mark Barton (lighting), Elizabeth Rhodes (sound), and Joshua Thorson (video).
Mee chatted with Signature Edition before rehearsals began for Paradise Park about the dramaturgy of collage, America, amusement parks, and what the future holds for him after his Signature season.
Signature Edition: What is Paradise Park?
Charles Mee: That's a good question. You know, I look at the play and I wonder, what was the playwright thinking? A guy buys a ticket to go into an amusement park like Coney Island or Disneyland, and it turns out that the amusement park has no walls. It just opens out into all of America. So, what's the playwright saying? That America is Disneyland or Coney Island? That we're all trapped in an amusement park in this great escapist landscape that's nothing but airhead fun, lost in this place that is cut off from any sense of reality of the world? And then it turns out not to be so fun, there are also some dark sides to it all. But then finally, with all of its fantasies and entertainments and escapes and complications to that notion, it also is a kind of paradise.
SE: Where did the idea come from?
CM: I think it comes from going to Coney Island and thinking, yeah, this is just like America. It comes from an impulse of going to a place and thinking, this feels like some experience of the country we live in.
SE: How is living in America like living in an amusement park?
CM: Although the first amusement park appeared in England around 1133, there's something about them that feels distinctively American. When you wander through America and meet people they always say something like, "Oh, have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? Oh, have you ever been to New York?" And if you're from New York the one question you get over and over again is, "Oh, have you ever been to Coney Island?" I think if people are always asking, "How was it when you went to Coney Island, what was that like?," maybe that means something. So I went there to see if that meant something.
SE: What did it mean to you?
CM: This is a crazy remark to make since I don't think that we're creatures shaped by amusement parks, but there's just this feeling of history at Coney Island that's very resonant. It feels like you're stepping into a culture rather than stepping into an evening's entertainment. I think that's what's appealing about it. What's there is some sense of excitement, some sense of adventure, some sense of thrill, some sense of escape, some sense of constant continuous pleasure. You know, there really wasn't anything like Coney Island or Disneyland in Italy, France, England, or Germany, until after Disneyland was built in France. So this really is an American experience, going to a place that's full of excitement and energy and strangeness. The other thing about American amusement parks is that they really are democratic entertainment. It's not the court of Louis XIV with only fourth generation dukes and duchesses in attendance. It really is the America of all walks of life and geographic locations brought to one place. To get plainly pretentious about it, it's an American gathering place where we get together with our fellow citizens. And there are not many places like that.
SE: There is also darkness in the play - is that another aspect of America that you wanted to explore?
CM: I just figured that the reality of life is that reality is inescapable. Our lives don't exist in some delightful utopian place that remains forever untouched by reality. And that then, okay, if even paradise remains a place where reality intrudes it is nonetheless paradise. It's both sides of the coin.
SE: The characters in Paradise Park all seem to be misfits in search of something even as they're seeking escape.
CM: I think that's true, and this is a great generalization about all Americans, but I think that Americans in general share this deep cultural sense that who we are is not something that's been given to us. It's not our destiny. We're all searching to become who we are, what our lives may be, and what goals we might have. And so all of these characters, even as they live in this, apparently escapist, world are still looking for meaningful lives, or who they really are, or what they're doing. I think that's just part of the American character. The other thing I think that is true about Americans that is also true about these characters is that we make up our lives as we go along. And I think that's what they're doing too.
SE: Did you base Paradise Park on another text?
CM: No, maybe half my plays are based on classical texts by Molière or Shakespeare or Brecht, and the other half just come out of thin air. And this one comes out of thin air.
SE: Did you construct it differently in that case?
CM: Well, partly what I was hoping from this season as a whole was to do the several different kinds of pieces that I really love. So there was [Iphigenia 2.0] the Greek tragedy. Then Queens Boulevard was a romantic comedy that also conjured the multicultural society we live in. The third piece is meant to be pure collage. When you do pure collage, to make it coherent you're using not the strategies of traditional playwriting so much as the strategies of choreography and painting. In choreography you get repeated themes, in painting clusters of recurring images. For any visual work of art you see the whole piece and any part of it at the same time. So you know where the pieces belong. With a work of art that occurs "in time" you don't see the whole until you get to the end. And because not seeing the whole is disorienting to human beings we tend to panic if we don't get a sense of orientation. And then the only thing that's happening is panic, which is the least interesting emotion. So the way people who have made things in time usually deal with that (in terms of plays or a novel), is to give it a plotline. Boy gets girl, oh right, we're on that ride. Guy wants to be king, right, we get it. And then that narrative unfolds. With this piece, which is almost pure collage without a big story line, there are little stitchings to bring it together. Like a quilt in a way. So in the beginning boy meets girl, right, got it, that little storyline is mobilized. And then we have the scene with the family, wondering how they're going to handle their growing up daughter, there's another little storyline. So the piece is constructed as a collage with these little storylines knitting it together.
An awful lot of what a work conveys is not just in its content but in its structure. For instance, in the Greek plays, like in Iphigenia, the principals advance the plot and then the chorus riffs, and then the principals advance the plot and then the chorus riffs. The chorus is really the response of the community, which is very present. And then in Queens Boulevard, based on a kathakali play, there are these long, meandering digressions, which is what happens in the Mahabharata. It's not just the content, it's that structure and that is a deep belief about what life is. With Paradise Park, there's my belief anyway, that certainly when you talk about stepping into a public space there are many narratives, many stories happening in that landscape and it may be that no one of those stories is privileged above the others. So that's what's happening in the structure of the piece. We like to think our own story is always privileged above the stories of anybody else, but this is not really how it is to live in the world.
SE: How did you develop Paradise Park?
CM: I don't think that the process of writing is taking something that isn't so good when you begin and then making it better and better until you find a way that's perfect. I think you start with some impulse: a picture in your head or a person saying something. Then you make notes about that and you come back a couple of days later and make some more notes. Then you add to your notes, then you fix your notes, and then you re-arrange your notes. Pretty soon you're thinking, "Oh, if that's happened then he would say this, and if he said this, then she would say this, and then if she says that, well then he's really going to score by saying this..." And pretty soon you're writing dialogue without having thought about it. Then as you work on it over some months you come back to it in different moods. You come back to it when you're feeling euphoric, you come back to it when you're feeling bitter and depressed, you come back to it when you're feeling frivolous, you come back to it when you're feeling purposeful and rational, and you just keep running the piece through your mind over months. Eventually it contains all of who you are in all of your various moods and then it's called finished. Then you take it into a room as I did with [Paradise Park director] Daniel [Fish]. We've done a couple of readings of it and then, again, it passes through the moods, impulses, and thoughts of Daniel and the actors. Then those feed back through the piece too until the whole collective shares the same thoughts and feelings and is ready to do the piece.
SE: This is the last play of your Signature Series. What are your thoughts on this past season?
CM: I completely loved it. I think that the sheer culture of the people who run the theatre is extraordinary; they're incredibly open, warm, gracious, smart and adventurous - the whole staff has just been lovely to live with. That culture then draws an audience who is also quite open, adventurous, ready to consider something that they hadn't considered before, and look at a kind of work that they never would have imagined they might like. So to put a play on in that theatre is fabulous. It feels great to see a few plays in wonderful productions realized as well as they can be. I wanted to do all new plays and it's been exciting to take that risk and see what these plays are. Inevitably you look at them and think, okay these are the sort of plays that I've written. I've done the Greek classics, I've done the romantic comedies, I've done the collages. Here's my life's work. Okay, pretend my life's work is over. Now I can write my posthumous plays. And the really lucky thing is I'll still be alive to enjoy them. And that's terrifically freeing. To reconsider the work that I've done up to this moment and to think, okay now that's finished, now I'm going to do something else. My hero in life is [Pablo] Picasso, who had his Rose Period, then his Blue Period, and who thought, oh I'm done with that now, and did his Cubist Period and his African-Inspired Period, and kept thinking that he would re-invent who he was, or keep exploring and adventuring to see what else might be thrilling for him to do. That's my life model. So this is a great chance to think, okay, this is the work up to now, now I'll start fresh and see what happens.
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