Visitors to “The Grand Paradise” interactive theater show can each have a unique experience, depending on where they wander in the revamped Bushwick warehouse. So we sent two reviewers to get individual takes on the piece:
By the Butcher of Flatbush Avenue Extension
The Third Rail theater company, known for transforming unexpected spaces into performance venues, invites visitors on an interactive voyage to a 1970s Hawaiian seventies resort.
While waiting to enter “The Grand Paradise,” I leafed through a “Time” magazine dated 1973; where I learn that consuming white sugar is the healthiest diet for a growing child. This kind of lurid, retro attitude is captured perfectly in the rest of the production.
The second the doors to the “resort” open you step into a fully-fledged world with mysteries awaiting behind every door, and mermaids pirouetting in a clear water tank. The “staff” of the resort is not so much attentive and friendly as predatory: every interaction with audience members is erotically charged and suggestive, though not intrusive.
When the five protagonists “guests” arrive, each carrying personal baggage (the metaphor is clear), “Grand Paradise” cracks open, with resort staff leading the “guests” and visitors into other rooms singly and in groups. Sometimes we observe the narrative as voyeurs, but at other times we are invited to join in the revel. The experience is different for every visitor.
During the course of the evening I received a massage by a male cast member (who pointedly invited me to momentarily hold a cucumber), snuck in a bedroom in the dark with a flashlight and stole a frock from a guest’s suitcase, and made a magical cocktail at the bar.
But following the plot can be a confusing task, since we are rarely left to choose the story we wish to see. And sometimes we got locked up in a room and made to assist to dance sequences that do not establish narrative as much as express inner turmoil.
The moral seems to be “one size fits all” — liberate yourself from the shackles of your expectations and find freedom through sensual pleasure, and the monologues are pretty on-the-nose on that theme. But the general oiliness of the staff-members can come across as malevolent rather than helpful, and I was waiting the whole night for a murder to happen and break the tension. Just like the staff, the show teases continuously, but the climax never quite comes.
By the Butcherette of Flatbush Avenue Extension
“The Grand Paradise” feels like an invitation to peer through the windows of some 1970s cult. At least, there’s something odd shining in the eyes of the residents of the Grand Paradise, the island resort constructed in a Bushwick warehouse that hosts this immersive theater piece. Replete with grottos, coconut-shell bowls, late-1970s attire, and lush tropical foliage, the Grand Paradise may be the home of the Fountain of Youth — and it seems plausible that the audience may be asked to drink the fountain’s waters and join an orgy.
A series of sexual and spiritual awakenings is as close as the show comes to narrative. A tourist family arrives and each member is promptly seduced: the mother trades her polyester pantsuit for lamé, a daughter throws off her glasses, and eventually her shirt, to dance with abandon in various locales, and the father puts down his camera and throws himself into energetic mingling with just about everyone.
Otherwise, the show is built on New Age-y philosophical musing, engagement with the elaborate environment, and long dance sequences. The performers are all impressively physical, clambering around multiple levels, dancing on every surface, and performing trust falls from alarming heights — but the movement itself can get repetitive, built on a fairly limited dance vocabulary.
With multiple pathways through the piece, every viewer has a different experience—there are whole rooms where I never saw action, but in other spaces, I was offered water from the Fountain of Youth in a hushed one-on-one encounter in a gazebo; had my palm read by the bartender; was asked intense questions about death after the ritual planting of a sprout; and was given a personal talisman (a 1970s issue of TV Guide) to carry with me for the remainder of the show. The journey feels pleasantly dreamy, a meandering stroll rather than a directed path. Secrets are perpetually hinted at, but nothing particular is revealed, and the continual tease-and-withhold structure can make the piece feel overlong.
Still, the mood of languorous flirtatiousness casts its spell. The opening and closing segments seemed overstretched, but the hazy, dreamy middle, with its caverns of hourglasses, its old records, and its rituals, has a weird power.
“The Grand Paradise” at the Grand Paradise [383 Troutman St. between Wyckoff and Irving avenues in Bushwick, (718) 374–5196, www.thegr
