>>REVIEW
SITTING ON PARADISE
Runs until May 5
Alberta Theatre Projects
Martha Cohen Theatre (Epcor Centre)
Six-figure suckers, capitalist cronies, the high-fives of the invisible hand. Sure, it’s easy to make up silly names for the affluent, for the materialists wallowing chest-deep in Scrooge McDuck-style vaults. But if you prick them with anything other than a Botox syringe, will they not bleed?
In its final production of the season, Alberta Theatre Projects ends the madness. Taking aim at the excesses of both materialists and spiritualists, Eugene Stickland’s Sitting on Paradise is, as reviewers noted when it first premiered in 1996, a savvy departure from the stock anti-materialism stance of, well, art. Eleven years after its premiere, its current production may play a little soft, but the words themselves hold up far better than the myriad fads of a boom and bust town like Calgary.
It isn’t and wasn’t in vogue to suggest that the kind of people who buy opulent couches and garish salmon-coloured suburban homes might be human too, or that the desire to shed material possessions can be as selfish as a Prada purchase. When Stickland turned his experience of buying a couch into a play whose "move back to the land" premise initially sounds like a take on Green Acres, he indicted the indulgence of materialists and New Age hypocrites alike.
The play begins as capitalist-turned-machismo-worshipper Roy (Stephen Hair) communes with his long-haired mentor, Wolf (Christopher Hunt), on the plot of land Roy allows Wolf to live on rent-free, where Wolf reveals a "vision" for the land’s future use. Soon, Roy is trying to convince his wife, Dotty (Maureen Thomas), to abandon her many deeply treasured possessions and move into Wolf’s utopian community. But first things first: the Brown Room couch has to go, and it won’t be sold to low-income Bargain Finder readers Warren (Joel Smith) and Kelly (Adrienne Smook) without a fight.
In its program, Sitting on Paradise credits the couch as a separate character in its own right, and it is certainly one of the most arresting set pieces on any Calgary stage this season. Its climactic unveiling reveals a behemoth covered in deep reds and golds so loud that it nearly overpowers the production’s weak sound design, where a Bach string piece signals a lazy shortcut to "wealthy."
Where the play’s couch, the subject of its conflict, is an eye-catching piece, Scott Reid’s main set is only dully functional. A bland white-walled affair with a set of French doors framed by roses, the confusingly exterior appearance of the play’s explicitly indoor location is painfully ironic considering Dotty’s obsession with material beauty. Why, it must be asked, would a dyed-in-the-wool materialist settle for something that looks like an uninspired prefab version of an opulent house’s wall?
Thankfully, a few cast members offer the appeal that a bare wall doesn’t. Smith, co-founder of local company Theatreboom, is perfectly cast as the young complement to Thomas’s materialist Dotty. With the occasional indulgent flourish and an unerringly deadpan devotion to material gain, his Warren is an electric presence in a play whose comedy, while quick and still timely, is often understated. On the other hand, Hunt delivers a performance that is a refreshing change from his usual mainstage casting as a screaming (often fey) caricature. As Ron’s fading hippie mentor, Hunt’s performance is strong without slipping into hyperbole, only reaching fever pitch when his designs for a utopian community are imminently crashing down around him.
Only Warren’s somewhat underwritten girlfriend Kelly, a singular nag whose youthful passion does not make her single-minded environmentalist zeal any more endearing, falls flat. Given thin material, Smook is uncharacteristically weak, acting more like a sounding board for other characters than as a rounded character of her own.
Under director Bob White, who helmed the original production in 1996, ATP’s latest production of Sitting on Paradise is a competent rendering of Stickland’s materialist and spiritual ambivalence. A light comedy with moments of riotous absurdity, the company’s final production of the year has politics, ideology and familiar human failings. Though mocking the materialists among us may be easy, Sitting on Paradise is a still a potent satire, pulling only the easy punches. |
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