Escape From Paradise
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Escape From Paradise, written and performed by a woman best known as an actor in the television series I’ll Fly Away, is an ironic, ambitious new play–in general an evening of skillfully performed poetic theater. Though the narrative describes a ritual journey, it’s rarely abstract or literary, driven as it is by Taylor’s athletic energy. Squatting, clutching her belly, crawling, leaping, crouching under a table, Taylor moves around the stage as if memory has made time into a physical space that can be crossed as decisively and absolutely as an ocean. Together the script, choreography, and projected images reproduce the twists of a maze, with its sudden turns, dead ends, and revisited corridors. We meet characters and hear their stories several times, from different perspectives that give new details, challenging our perceptions. Taylor’s repeated gestures layer each story with the emotional charge of earlier situations.
Through both a voice-over and the character of a Venice cabby, we learn that “the mind of a traveler is like the mind of a sleepwalker–you are in different places and times at the same time.” Taylor’s travels are skillfully fleshed out by the design team at the Goodman. Royd Climenhaga’s projections and Michael Bodeen’s soundscape give solidity to the play’s sleepwalking landscapes, establishing Jenine’s grandfather’s farm or her parent’s house with a spray of branches across the stage or the tortured honking of her father’s saxophone. Scott Cooper’s set–a battered wall and arched windows–forms a malleable backdrop for the shifting action.
