Audience Uncomfortably Plays a 'Watching America' in ‘Kill Move Paradise’
America has watched as black and brown lives have been created and disseminated. The narrative has produced sequel after sequel, no gender bias, no age discrimination. Just lives lost.
Magically this trend in American history has been scrupled and hurled at unprepared audiences thanks to writer James Ijames and his ever-so-timely production of “Kill Move Paradise.”
Four black males are thrust into an all white room; confused as to how they arrived and what purpose the place serves. Not even the instructions help them arrive at their purpose any quicker. Three black men and a black boy together in an unfamiliar place, with different tones, exchanging varying moods and a host of reactions and responses to their fate.
Confusion remains the one consistent theme in each of their respective exchanges.
If this sounds like real life, that’s because it is.
Black people arrived in this country by force and are notoriously baffled by a constricting existence. Make them see you is the message we want to teach our children, but “don’t be too assertive and ensure that you serve up no intimidation” is what society retorts.
“Kill Move Paradise,” the transfixing new play by James Ijames that Berkeley’s Shotgun Players is presenting at the Ashby stage in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre has a run time of about one hour and ten minutes. That’s all Ijames needed to stir a pot of emotions and humiliate any preconceived notions that the black experience is an exaggeration.
The four actors: Daz (Tre'Vonne Bell), Isa (Edward Ewell), Grif (Lenard Jackson) and Tiny (Dwayne Clay) compliment one another in a fashion that would make any theater and any stage blush. The audience serves as both a mirror for the cast and as a watching America. At times the crowd is compelled to shout out in defense of inhumane treatment and unanswerable questions, but then almost immediately reduced to just being spectators.
The play is explicitly a response to the growing number of black men and women killed in this country while simply living their lives. Each line, each sarcastic laugh and each jaunt of audacity is a constant reminder that there is very little room for error in this here America.
Grif and Isa are both articulate black men, with their own ideals about life, culture and religion. Daz is a bit more exact in his vulgarities and sentiments toward the country. The three have to put aside their differences in order to try to understand why they’ve arrived in this strange place together. When Tiny arrives, toting a plastic gun and armed with nothing but the purest form of boyhood innocence – the three men are humbled.
They all realize that they are dead and have convened in some sort of afterlife. But are they victims or martyrs they contend? Details of their demise slowly creep upon them. All four were living life, moving through life, minding their business and then it all ended without warning.
At one point in the play, the characters joke that they must give the audience what it wants. They then break into a ‘Good Times’ like sitcom, in which they play a struggling black family doing everything possible to solicit laughter from the audience.
Surprisingly, with such an in-your-face affront to systemic racism – Ijames is able to invoke moments of comedy as the men joke and even play games.
“Kill Move Paradise” is a must-see. Check your pulse if your emotions are not a bit ruffled.
