Login / RegisterHard to get oriented in Paradise Garden
By Lucia Frangione. Directed by Morris Ertman. An Arts Club production. At the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Thursday, March 18. Continues until April 11
Playwright Lucia Frangione stars in this production of her new script Paradise Garden, and she has written herself one heck of an annoying role.
Watch the trailer for Paradise Garden.
Thirty-three-year-old Layla’s parents have bought half of a waterfront house on an unnamed Gulf Island. Layla and her family are Turkish Muslims. Their landlords, the folks who live in the other half of the grandly crumbling structure, are Jean and her scruffily dishy 27-year-old son, Day. Inevitably, Layla and Day succumb to romance; they are the iconic Adam and Eve in this island paradise.
But Frangione’s Eve is a figure of indulgent romantic fantasy. For starters, she’s absurdly accomplished. We find out early on that she has turned her back on her PhD in regenerative medicine to accept a scholarship to study art history at Cambridge. Soon, this budding curator is telling us that she has just sold $6 million worth of art in Basel. As played by Frangione, Layla sports a somewhat wonky British accent that’s probably supposed to add to her glamour, but instead makes her sounds as prissy as Hermione in the Harry Potter movies. And Frangione’s Layla is so buffeted by emotions that she staggers around the set having feelings all over the place. What Day sees in her is anybody’s guess.
In fact, the relationships between all of the characters are underdeveloped. Rather than talking to one another, they issue policy statements. When Day first meets Layla’s mother, Ergul, for instance, they immediately offer their positions on the differences between new cultures, such as Canada’s, and ancient ones like Turkey’s.
Maybe the characters don’t have time for more nuanced or affecting dialogue because the play is trying to cover so many subjects. Layla and her father, Mustafa, blow hard about art, in conversations that are too abstract to matter. Ergul is dying of cancer, although she vacillates between sentimental frailty—cue the tinkling piano music—and genuinely comic chirpiness. Day’s father, Keith, is a drug dealer and Mustafa works for a UN antidrug agency, but that potential conflict goes nowhere.
Getting oriented on the set is even harder than getting oriented in the script. The two families wander into one another’s garden spaces; sometimes they can see one another and sometimes, mysteriously, they can’t. (A hedge is mentioned, but never successfully established.) Because I’ve read the script, I know that Day leaps into the ocean, but you’d be hard-pressed to figure that out from director Morris Ertman’s staging, in which Day passes through a sparkling curtain and returns soaking wet.
Kevin MacDonald is charmingly straightforward as Day, and Meghan Gardiner brings a similarly effective frankness to Kaylee, Day’s sometime girlfriend. Richard Newman makes an authoritative Mustafa and Marie Stillin a dignified and witty Ergul. The urbane Michael Kopsa is miscast as the aging hippie Keith, and he is forced to wear an absurd ponytailed wig in the first act. The charming Gina Chiarelli overplays her hand and takes Jean right over the top in a superfluous scene that has Jean flirting with Mustafa.
Although it doesn’t solve the impossible challenges set by Frangione’s script, which calls for a crystal sculpture, among other things, Ted Roberts’s set is a pleasing sculpture in its own right—a gnarled, twisting tree that is, perhaps tellingly, dead.
I have noted that sometimes with the highly educated, they use intellectual banter as a cover to express their real feelings underneath. For instance, the argument about Picasso between Layla and Mustafa in the play (actually about the desire for approval) was taken from a conversation I witnessed between curator daughter and architect father. Perhaps my investigation into this kind of conversation hasn’t worked for you, but it is hardly “indulgent” or “romantic” for a woman to be smart. I chose the accent (not to add “glamour”) but because the stem cell research lab Layla worked at is in Cambridge. She would have honed her English there, unlike her parents. If that particular accent reminds you of a Harry Potter movie, well”¦
I think it is insulting to Michael Kopsa to say he can only be cast as someone “urbane”. Especially considering in real life he is a complex man: intelligent and elegant and also self made rough hewn and bawdy. He actually helped me write the carpenter dialogue because he does it by trade.
The flirtatious scene you site as being superfluous between Jean and Keith doesn’t exist. They have one short scene and it’s a fight about money and parenting”¦what are you talking about?
Finally, my script does indeed call for a crystal sculpture, a hedge, an ocean, and a garden in full bloom. In past plays I have written in a stream of salmon with eagles flying overhead, a parting of the red seas, a camel trampling through the Cariboo snow drifts”¦a playwright should never insult and limit a director and designer’s abilities to create magic by editing out fantastical images in their story.
Sincerely, Lucia Frangione
Charlie Smith
It's funny you found Michael Kopsa miscast and think his "urbane" roles more fitting. I've only seen a couple of things he's done but I enjoyed him most in this - he seemed so natural, endearingly unguarded - and so funny.
Afterwards on reflection I thought of a couple of reasons why I could have "not liked" the play. Often romances bore the hell out of me (not this one) and I would agree the staging was confusing - but I didn't care, like Harvey I left the theatre absolutely uplifted. I thought this new script was an amazing accomplishment - and something that Arts Club audiences will delight in.
I laughed, I cried, the ideas in the play made me think - and had a wonderful night in the theatre - as did my three nieces who came with me.
While Layla's "house" had an identifiable entrance area (in that people going in and out, came and went through the same place), Day's "house" was a mystery to me. There seemed to be two major entrance/exits there, but where they were supposed to lead - ?
And Day went into the SEA? I thought it was a pond or fountain, thus the shimmery curtain, as it was located between two halves of what we were told was a divided house!?
There was something on the floor - paths of sorts, but they were not clearly visible from where I sat, so they were of no help with the shifting boundaries the actors "observed". My companion also was mystified as to what was where.
I do agree with Ms. Frangione that "”¦a playwright should never insult and limit a director and designer’s abilities to create magic by editing out fantastical images in their story. " These people have to pick up the challenge though. And if fantastical images or geography are involved they need to be (if not fantastically) that at least relatively clear.
I saw/heard this play as a reading, in November 2007, and liked it, but thought it needed work. Unfortunately, rather than clarifying relationships, story arcs, I feel the play has moved backwards. In my opinion it needed simplification then, strengthening of major arcs and elimination of digressions.
It still does.
And a mystifying set, and loose direction/mime isn't helping things.
In reality this play would have benefited from a workshop production, rather than what seems now to be a premature full scale run.
Couple of other notes for Ms. Frangione:
Firstly - I wish you great success with this and other ventures and hope that you revisit "Paradise Garden" someday.
"For a gallery to sell six million dollars at their table at the Art Fair in Basel... is rather modest." - this may be true, the information isn't presented to us this way though. It's presented as a major accomplishment.
" I chose the accent (not to add “glamour”) but because the stem cell research lab Layla worked at is in Cambridge." - fine, but it was confusing (I caught the reference to where she was educated, but others including my companion didn't) to most of the audience, and inconsistent. Also it is children who tend to gain/lose accents permanently, those added as adults usually fade quickly.
And Layla might attempt to keep the accent, as an Art dealer it might add cachet (indeed I think she would try to keep it, but mostly because accomplishments aside, she comes off as superficial), but it needs for us the audience to be real, and sorry but in this case it didn't make it.
"I could name several other women in my life who are equally amazing and they make my character Layla look like a chump." - I'm not buying.
I agree Layla isn't absurdly accomplished, or even absurd, but she is very accomplished (Stem cell researcher becomes successful art dealer while being full time "wife" to her father, that's a lot.)
In an article you said “For me, this is the riskiest play I’ve ever written. I’ve written plays that have felt risky because they have explored and exposed my questions, my anger, and my despair. But this one explores something way riskier for me, which is my hopes, hopes for love. It’s tricky to put that kind of dream out there.”
I agree, because honestly the "love" in the story seemed to get lost underneath everything else you put in there.
Find the "love" (Why DO they fall in love? Why DO they take so long to accept it?), and you'll find your way back into the garden.