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

Art in America, July, 1999 by Raphael Rubinstein

Back on stage, the grotesquely endowed Giza von Goldenheim bullies the other characters into scenes of degradation. There follow strange doings inside a large sack, loud music, bell boys delivering enigmatic messages on silver trays, rude limericks and the bandying about of phallic table legs. Just when the chaos threatens to become unbearable, the seemingly endless hysteria is brought to a halt by Tommy Tuttle, who has earlier shot himself in the head only to bound up immediately, unhurt. Now he delivers Paradise Hotel's central soliloquy, an account--accompanied by otherworldly music, white screens and a white globe carried onstage by an actor whose white-bearded, old-man mask suggests an ancient deity--of a mystical vision brought on by extreme sexual frustration:

I wanted to fuck somebody so bad. And it kept on not happening and not happening and not happening and not happening! And in total frustration I threw myself onto my empty bed with a feeling--that's it, if I'm not getting fucked then I give up forever. That's it for me! But at that moment of giving up forever--Jesus! As if a switch had been thrown at the bottom of my consciousness--as if giving up all hope of sexual fulfillment--I'd suddenly fallen into an ocean of white light where, painlessly, I was burned empty of all anxiety and suffering.

Alas, Tommy Tuttle goes on to say, he could never regain this "heavenly experience." At this admission, the previous aggression and anarchy return, as one character proclaims, "Back to the real world, I'm afraid!" But after a few more minutes of pantomimed sexual violation and baby dolls flying through the air, the vision of a sex-free nirvana returns. Its announcing angel is the overweight Tony Turbo, who, in the play's penultimate moment, sheds his dress to appear stark naked, except for a giant feather headdress. Sensuously dragging his fingernails across his rolling flesh, he cries out: "Please, no more fucking. Please, please, no more fucking." As if this is what they have been awaiting during the entire play, other members of the cast echo his plea: "Oh God, me too," cries the lascivious Julia Jacobson; "Me too, me too," whimpers Ken Puss Puss. A more conventional author might leave things there, but Foreman can't resist turning the emotional tables one last time. The perennially dissatisfied Tommy Turtle breaks the spell of a post-sexual paradise by screaming out repeatedly for the Hotel Fuck. As the inane "I'm happy, you're happy" tune returns, the cast falls into the St. Vitus-like Charleston with which Hotel Paradise began, and the play is over.

Reveling in characters who act in self-contradictory ways and plays which constantly get knocked off track, Foreman champions "impulse" against social conditioning and what he terms its concomitant "spiritual and emotional stasis."[3] As he describes it, "the same impulse that pushes the character into `acting out' also twists and controls the artistic structure, so that the form and sequencing of the play itself reflects that impulsive, usually suppressed energy of the human mental/emotional apparatus." And yet, as an exacting director, he also seeks "lucidity in the framing and ordering of each `impulsive' moment and disruptive moment of dialogue and action."