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

Art in America, July, 1999 by Raphael Rubinstein

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

Paradise Hotel, the most recent play by avant-garde theater veteran Richard Foreman, appears to end before it has even begun. Less than a minute after the entire cast runs onto the narrow, prop-filled stage and breaks into a jerky Charleston (to a 1920s crooner whose nasal, tape-looped voice continually repeats the phrase "I'm happy, you're happy"), all action is brought to a stop by a public announcement that booms into the theater:

Ladies and gentlemen--attention please! This play, Paradise Hotel, must be preceded by an announcement which may well prove disturbing to certain members of this audience. But while no one desires to offend, this risk must be taken. 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.

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

We do apologize, ladies and gentlemen, but rather than being disturbed at this revelation, we urge you, please, redirect your understandable distress towards 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, which is now filling the stage in front of your very eyes.

This confusion about titles is immediately echoed on stage as the cast (four men and one woman) fall into surrealistic bantering (one can't really describe the characters' disjunctive, hallucinatory lines as "dialogue") about how to get to the Hotel Fuck, a legendary establishment apparently devoted to ultimate sexual abandon. The male characters, one of whom is a chubby actor wearing an old-fashioned bonnet and dress, 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 only 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 guy to scared child. As usual, Foreman saddles his cast with absurd names--Tony Turbo, Tommy Tuttle, Giza von Goldenheim, Ken Puss Puss--which they constantly intone. He also follows his established practice of having some of the actors deliver their lines with exaggerated Mittel-Europa accents.

Amid a riot of violent slapstick, jarring sound effects, cartoonish props and manic language that mixes crude insults with philosophical asides, the underlying theme of Hotel Paradise is driven home: sexual desire as a source of terror. The characters feverishly envision the delights of the Hotel Fuck, but it turns out that no one really wants to arrive there. At the same time, they have so much invested in their dreams of erotic success that when threatened with Hotel Fuck's opposite--the Hotel Beautiful Roses, where sentiment presumably triumphs over sexuality--they cower. While the Hotel Beautiful Roses proves as elusive as the Hotel Fuck, its emmissaries--bouquets of red roses--appear frequently, causing the characters to recoil like vampires before a holy cross.

The play's climactic symbol of sexual tyranny comes when, two thirds of the way into the piece, one of the actors, wearing a white wig and embroidered, Louis XIV-style coat, struts onstage atop foot-high cothorni (the raised shoes used in Greek and Roman tragedy). Emerging from his fancy breeches is an enormous black-and-gold-striped phallus (another reference to Greek drama), which he controls with a leash. To me, this kinky apparition looked straight out of Aubrey Beardsley, combining the foppish costumes from his illustrations to The Rape of the Lock and the oversized phalli from his pornographic Lysistrata. Other characters in Paradise Hotel reminded me of Soutine's lurid, pathos-ridden portraits of bell boys.

While the echoes 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 both visual and narrative elements. His 1997-98 production Benita Canova, for instance, was swarming with erotically charged, French-looking schoolgirls directly inspired by Balthus's paintings. The details of Foreman's sets 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 off the stage from the audience evoke the glass covering a valuable painting. (Tina Barney has captured the teeming Hotel Paradise set and portions of the play's action in a series of densely composed color photographs, some of which accompany this article.) Foreman once described how a distinctive element 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 plot development to Minimalism: "1967--Suddenly the theater seems ridiculous in all its manifestations.... The actors enter onstage and immediately, the absurdity--both in the orchestrated speech 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 reference is embedded in the very name of Foreman's company, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, which was partly inspired by Austrian performance artist/painter Hermann Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theater.