Written by Charles Mee
Directed by Daniel Fish
Synopsis: Welcome to Paradise Park, an amusement park that opens up into all of America and beyond. Meet the inhabitants of this bizarre carnival of life, including a ventriloquist, his dummy, and a teenage girl on the run. From Futureworld to Londonland, the Grand Canyon to Fred's Polynesian Dive Shop, step right up to this wild ride of fruit cake tosses, underwater ballets, square dances, and star gazing, too.
NEW YORK TIMES:
"As the Charles Mee season at the Signature Theater Company winds down, “Paradise Park,” the last, weightiest and darkest of the series’s three works, finally offers a glimpse into why the company thought his plays were worth staging, and why his resistance to any cogent structure remains so frustrating."
Read the whole review HERE.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS:
" Mee places characters at a seedy amusement park to shed light on dysfunctional relationships and the American experience. The play delivers no such enlightenment."
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NEW YORK POST:
"Typically antic, imaginative and filled with outlandish stylistic flourishes, it ultimately adds up to not very much. "
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THEATERMANIA:
"Unfortunately, despite a handful of strikingly effective moments, the production fails to measure up to the playwright's past successes."
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VARIETY:
"But the great reward of this script -- and Daniel Fish's lyrical production -- is that it offers so much more than a statement on national identity. It makes familiar truths about love so strange and surprising that they become freshly affecting."
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VILLAGE VOICE:
"Well, I wanted to escape from Charles L. Mee's Paradise Park, the final play in the Signature Theatre's Mee season. Judging from the handful of audience members who walked out during the intermissionless two-hour performance and the critic seated next to me writing "PURGATORY!" in his notes, I wasn't alone in my sentiments."
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NEW YORK SUN:
"It's not just that Mr. Mee's America is a creepy, disturbing place. It's that the collage-like method he uses in "Paradise Park" makes the play feel like a series of anecdotes strung together — and anecdote fatigue starts to set in. Yet if watching "Paradise Park" can be taxing, there are also many gems scattered among its vignettes. "
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TIME OUT NY:
"When Charles Mee is in top form, as in last year’s soul-shaking Iphigenia 2.0, he is among the most exciting playwrights in the country. But woe is Mee when he is merely diddling with his bag of tricks, as in the enervating Paradise Park, a frankly purgatorial theatrical experience that exhausts an already tired trope: the dilapidated theme park and carnival midway as metaphor for American values."
Read the whole review HERE.
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