Paradise Park

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.

Every so often, Mee’s pedestrian tour of escapism and anomie—rendered as a series of vignettes for nine characters, an accordionist and a ventriloquist’s dummy—takes a detour into ironical spectacle. There are musical numbers and an inflatable castle; there is an avalanche of stuffed Superman dolls; cotton candy is spun, and fruitcakes are destroyed; a man dunks his head in a bowl of fruit punch.

Most of the play is not quite so subtle as that punch in the face. Director Daniel Fish floods the stage with projected images of retro Americana; the soundtrack includes “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” “Home on the Range” and the theme from Fellini’s Amarcord; and the dialogue is often deliberately flat. To his credit, Mee aspires beyond easy satire: He means to get into a messy examination of the nature of love, and nearly all of the actors—notably Veanne Cox as a nervous mother, Vanessa Aspillaga as her tremulous daughter and Laurie Williams as an evasive woman on roller skates—find moments to transcend the banality. But most of the time, they are stuck standing in for America, and united in stating the obvious.

—Adam Feldman