Theater: The Grand Paradise--What's your sign?
The Grand Paradise is the latest immersive "theater" installment for Third Rail Projects, creator of the hit Then She Fell, the Lewis Carroll fantasy-immersion now playing in its third year. This one, staged in a Bushwick (Brooklyn) warehouse, takes you back to the 1970s decadence of Fantasy Island (well, a more R rated version), complete with short shorts, cheesy meditation mantras, facial hair (for men), and obsessive facilitated seeking for your own inner whatever.
(Warning, spoilers ahead). You enter the environment with an airline "boarding card", with or without a cocktail (nicely available at a bar at the entrance), and are guided through the darkened tropical environment (sort of like a Club Med in the old hedonistic days) for the next two hours by attractive young actors. Themes include voyeurism (you stare at go-go dancers of your choice and peer through blinds at a young man "finding himself" by stripping naked and bathing in the sea), astrology, massages of varying types, and seduction, a nicely done scene in which you, in a private room, slow dance with an actor after picking the dance music (I picked Rita Coolidge), then snuggle on the bed--all done tastefully and gently, I might add. Not all of the 24 or so audience members experience the same events. For example, I was given an aroma-therapy session and told to lie quietly, eyes closed, with an orchid clutched to my chest for a minute or two. While I did so, I heard various mysterious door-closing sounds. My colleague tells me that in his version of the experience, he was asked to indicate who in the audience he might want to date, and was escorted into a room where that individual was apparently laid out in a coffin. Apparently I was actually such a coffin denizen in my "aroma" experience. Clever!
This gives you an idea of what this is about. Like Then She Fell, I think The Grand Paradise qualifies more as an experience than as theater. The plot is very skimpy (a guest resists seduction, then succombs). There were hints of a dark side of the resort (e.g. the coffin, photos of missing resort guests), but these could have used more development. I would have been more entertained by a better developed dark side theme (haunted resort, e.g.) than by the incessant self help, actualization, meditation lingo....but that was the 70s, after all. Overall, a shallow, slightly repetitious, but fun evening in Brooklyn.
(Warning, spoilers ahead). You enter the environment with an airline "boarding card", with or without a cocktail (nicely available at a bar at the entrance), and are guided through the darkened tropical environment (sort of like a Club Med in the old hedonistic days) for the next two hours by attractive young actors. Themes include voyeurism (you stare at go-go dancers of your choice and peer through blinds at a young man "finding himself" by stripping naked and bathing in the sea), astrology, massages of varying types, and seduction, a nicely done scene in which you, in a private room, slow dance with an actor after picking the dance music (I picked Rita Coolidge), then snuggle on the bed--all done tastefully and gently, I might add. Not all of the 24 or so audience members experience the same events. For example, I was given an aroma-therapy session and told to lie quietly, eyes closed, with an orchid clutched to my chest for a minute or two. While I did so, I heard various mysterious door-closing sounds. My colleague tells me that in his version of the experience, he was asked to indicate who in the audience he might want to date, and was escorted into a room where that individual was apparently laid out in a coffin. Apparently I was actually such a coffin denizen in my "aroma" experience. Clever!
This gives you an idea of what this is about. Like Then She Fell, I think The Grand Paradise qualifies more as an experience than as theater. The plot is very skimpy (a guest resists seduction, then succombs). There were hints of a dark side of the resort (e.g. the coffin, photos of missing resort guests), but these could have used more development. I would have been more entertained by a better developed dark side theme (haunted resort, e.g.) than by the incessant self help, actualization, meditation lingo....but that was the 70s, after all. Overall, a shallow, slightly repetitious, but fun evening in Brooklyn.
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