Next Act’s “Kill Move Paradise” is a Stunning Production on a Harrowing Subject
Photo by Ross Zentner.
“They like to watch.”
Early in Next Act Theatre’s searing production of Kill Move Paradise, one of the Black men trapped in limbo onstage looks out at the audience and questions why the spectators are there — mute, motionless, and shamelessly staring. The response, “they like to watch,” could not be further from the truth. White America doesn’t like to be confronted with the epidemic of police brutality that has resulted in hundreds of violent deaths of people of color. Specifically, since the Washington Post started recording police shootings in 2015, 1,630 Black men have been killed – a staggering number and one that is hugely disproportionate to the population. But that is largely the purpose of Ijames’s play – to force the viewers to pay attention.
The playwright does not make it easy. There are many silences contained in the 90-minute production. Performed confidently, they nonetheless unnerve an audience the longer they go on. Non-linear conversations bounce across the stage. There are songs and dances, games of pretend, and literal attempts to escape. There are crying jags, and even trips out into the audience so the actors can inspect their viewers. There is no named setting, although it becomes apparent that the men we meet are in an in-between space after their deaths, before they ascend to the afterlife. Except for the backstory filled in by Tiny, the youngest of the group, we find out relatively little about the circumstances of their lives or their ends. And it’s unclear for most of the play what steps they need to take to leave this blank holding pattern. Like the absurdist classic Waiting for Godot, we are all waiting and watching, wondering what will happen next. It is an uncomfortable 90 minutes. It is supposed to be.
Photo by Ross Zentner.
And that is where the script ends and the production takes over, filling each of the four characters with passion, anger, confusion, compassion, laughter and rage. Director Marti Gobel has previously demonstrated her ability to augment a spare text to make it visceral, kinetic, and compelling, in pieces like Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root (Next Act, 2019) and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size (Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, 2018). Here she uses all those skills to fill in what the pages only suggest, to great effect. In concert with her daughter Freedom Gobel, she imbues the play with stylized movement that make the lines feel like poetry and the performance feel like ritual.
On a set that resembles an enormous, steep skateboard half pipe ramp, flanked with a second-hand store’s worth of random objects of those who’ve passed on (effective production design by David Cecsarini) the ensemble of three adult actors do an extraordinary job of world building. Isa (Marques Causey) is a spiritual guide with vague instructions from his boss, delivered via paper airplane. From the outset, he is disappointed to be back in this loop of helping young Black men remember how they were murdered, and disheartened by the periodic buzzing of a dot matrix printer that adds more and more names to the list. Grif (Ibraheem Farmer) is the polite former valedictorian who seems to have had everything going for him when his life was suddenly cut short. Daz (Dimonte Henning) is loud, brash and in your face, but equally heartbroken and confused about his life’s abrupt end. As these men struggle to assess their situation and find an escape, they argue, joke around, tease each other and explore their environment, often running repeatedly at the steep ramp, struggling to make it over the top and failing each time. Each plays his part with full bodied conviction, but Henning stands out as the largest voice and the largest personality with the largest pain. His performance is raw and staggering.
Photo by Ross Zentner.
The dynamic in this waiting room changes significantly when a young Black boy named Tiny enters the space (Joseph Brown, Jr.), holding a multi-colored plastic toy gun. While the audience doesn’t identify the other figures from news headlines, it’s impossible not to recognize Tamir Rice, the 12-year old Cleveland child who was shot by law enforcement in 2014. An earlier line from the play, “I remember the age I learned I was scary. . .8,” resonates as we watch the youngster organize a game of cowboys versus aliens. In another particularly harrowing passage, Isa begins to “say their names” – reading the computer generated list of the Black men killed by cops. But the sheaf of paper is so large, he gives up after a few minutes simply repeating “and, and, and, and. . . ”
In stark contrast, during another beat the cast embarks on a musical travelogue, told with TV show themesongs. They sing and dance their way through popular culture images of Black families, designed to entertain white audiences without threatening them. In a montage of familiar jingles announcing “The Jeffersons,” “The Cosby Show,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” and “A Different World,” is is easy to be amused by, and even nostalgic for the old television lineups. But it is impossible not to acknowledge the disconnect between these onscreen fictions and modern Black parents’ mantras to their children: put your hands up; do not appear threatening, pensive, mean or angry; be prepared to be the prime suspect, no matter what the crime; to be ignored when you plead, “I can’t breathe.”
Unsurprisingly, there’s no happy ending for Kill Move Paradise. Like the reality it reflects, there’s no end at all – not even a prescriptive message about how to change the reprehensible situation. There is simply the assignment that the audience (who was overwhelmingly white on the day I attended) was tasked with from the play’s start – see these men. Listen to their stories. Understand and acknowledge their pain, the injustices done to them, and most of all their humanity. Until we do, society will be stuck in this eternal loop of purgatory – unable to move on.
Kill Move Paradise continues through October 16.