The Catastrophic Theatre is pleased to announce the Houston premiere of Richard Foreman’s Paradise Hotel: a frank, experimental play about the nature of physical and emotional satisfaction and the bipolar nature of American sexuality.
The play is set in a sexual purgatory. Everyone wants to have sex, but no one is actually having sex because they haven’t reached their destination, Hotel Fuck. The dead-eyed, slack-jawed desire for physical pleasure is at odds with an invading threat of dewy sentimentality — a placed called Hotel Beautiful Roses.
“Watching it will be like sitting in on someone’s dream; like an hallucinogenic trip,” co-director Greg Dean says. “Foreman’s plays are largely unknown outside of New York and the theater world. They’re a lot of fun: funny, sad, mind-expanding.” He describes Foreman’s work as “metaphysical vaudeville or philosophical burlesque”: combining low elements with intellectual themes.
If you’ve never witnessed one, expect a wild ride from a Foreman play. Paradise Hotel is not driven by a familiar narrative pattern, but by a series of situations that are constantly being interrupted. Like watching the Three Stooges try to accomplish a series of tasks, the entertainment value is not in watching the characters succeed, it’s in watching them flounder.
Paradise Hotel’s cast features Drake Simpson, George Parker, Kyle Sturdivant, Matt Carter, Jessica Janes, Kayla Brown and Aaron Asher. The play will be co-directed by Greg Dean and Troy Schulze.
This play is for mature audiences.
About the playwright: Richard Foreman founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York City in 1968. The avant-garde playwright has won multiple Obie awards and a MacArthur Fellowship. The New York Times calls him “the reigning philosopher vaudevillian of the New York avant-garde…creating fractured dreamscapes in which life is the banana cream pie that keeps hitting you in the face.”
http://catastrophictheatre.com/shows/paradise-hotel
Performances February 11 – 26
Wednesday – Saturday evenings, 8pm
At DiverseWorks Artspace (1117 East Frwy, 77002)