There is an exit to this hell...but we have to do something.
A good way in to playwright James Ijames' play Kill Move Paradise is to think about other plays where the characters can’t find their way out.
It’s tempting to think of the play as similar to Sartre’s No Exit or maybe Beckett’s Endgame. In all three, the characters are trapped in a purgatory. There is a certain existential dread at discovering one’s condition, a questioning of agency and humanity, a desperate cry from the other side of the void that lives at the heart of all three plays. While Mr. Ijames is clearly drawing on the tradition of those plays (just as his play Fat Ham, which had a stellar run at the Geffen last year, drew on Shakespeare’s Hamlet), it’s painfully clear he’s giving voice to a very different existential crisis.
We can argue about what No Exit or Endgame are ultimately about, but we'd likely agree that the characters have either themselves to blame or — if you’re so inclined — God. The human condition seems to be their essential sin and what’s cast them into no man’s land. Their agency is our agency. Their condition is, perhaps, universal and inescapable. There is no outsider to blame or hold to account.
That’s not the world, or condition, that James Ijames is conjuring on stage.
Before I dive in, not so much a spoiler alert as an apology: to write about the heart of Kill Move Paradise, I have to give away some of the discovery that happens as you sit in the theater and the world unfolds. It’s not as drastic as revealing a whodunnit, but it might take something away from the experience. If that’s you, know this: the play is about the injustice of being a Black man in America. It’s not an easy journey. But it’s a remarkable production of a complicated play, brilliantly acted and directed. If you have the presence to bear witness to that, it will reward you and you shouldn’t miss it.
Okay, you read the sign and you kept reading, here we go...
What’s different about the purgatory of Kill Move Paradise is that these three men and one young boy can point to something outside of themselves that’s to blame: racism. All four characters are innocent Black men killed for nothing more than being Black in America.
As you enter the theater, set designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s painfully steep ramp reaches up beyond the ceiling of the theater. It’s more of a chute that throws these men down onto the stage. It’s so white and so steep that it’s almost pathetic to watch each of them struggle to climb it, to escape. Perversely it’s almost like a skateboard ramp where they aspire to grab the rim, only to have it slam them back to the floor. In the downstage right corner is an ancient dot matrix printer occasionally clicking as it spews tractor feed paper (remember the little tear-off holes?) cataloging the names, so many names. Then dividing the line between audience and stage is a mirrored platform that stretches the full width of the stage separating the two worlds. Above, four dome lights dangle from the ceiling flickering. And maybe most importantly, there’s you in the audience.
It’s telling that the theater, or said more clearly, the audience is part of this play. The characters on stage see us, perhaps more clearly than we’d like. They see us watching and even make appeals to us, wonder about us, call out to us. It’s not an audience participation play — at least not during its 80 minutes on stage, but we are there.
That’s perhaps the starkest difference from Sartre or Beckett. Mr. Ijames' play needs an audience not simply to be seen, but to play a part. We are, perhaps, the most significant character in this tragedy.
Some of the most poignant lines in the play are the characters' appeals to us in the audience: “What are you waiting for?”, “Don’t just sit there.”, “Don’t look away now.” And we sit silent.
All four actors give remarkable, soulful performances. It should come as no shock that they were directed by Gregg T. Daniel. This is another chapter in his outstanding series of plays created across LA’s theaters on big and small stages that chronicle and give powerful voice to the Black experience. For a single director to have created two or three of the productions he has helmed would be worthy of awards and accolades. Taken as a whole, his body of work has such a propulsive urgency that it is the most significant contribution to Los Angeles theater by any single director in the past decade or more. If you haven’t seen his work, this is a great place to start.
Kill Move Paradise isn’t without its flaws. But they are flaws you not only forgive but try to wish away because the soul is so essential. This isn’t an easy show to sit through but it’s an essential one.
Kill Move Paradise plays at the Odyssey Theatre in West LA through November 3rd.
