There may be a certain advantage to incorporating film into a staged play. It can make it more cinematic, perhaps broaden the story a bit, and may offer a bit more perspective. However, in the case of Dangerous Ground’s experimental multimedia play "Paris Belongs To Us", the use of film only bogs it down and limits it more. Most of the action takes place behind a wall on which feeds from three cameras are projected side by side, focusing on different sections of the “backstage” play area. The wall distances the audience from the actors so much, you yearn for the moments when they finally do emerge from behind it. However, those moments never last long and make the actors’ inevitable disappearance off stage all the more tedious and claustrophobic. It’s too much strain on the eyes to keep up with the three cameras.
The plot is a surreal, repetitive, and overlong crime story, about a young student named Anne (Susannah Hoffman) whose brother Pierre (David Skeist) gets mixed up with some sordid characters and leads Anne to the mystery of the death of Juan, a close friend of Pierre and his circle. Along the way, Anne falls for Gérard (Mickey Solis), a director in the midst of staging Shakespeare’s "Pericles" with a rotating cast of unreliable actors, and becomes part of the play herself. The various plot twists are so half-hearted, they barely warrant mention.
There are certainly humorous and entertaining moments, though most of them are comprised of bizarre characters, random stripping, and karaoke singing. The intrigue of the story is gone about halfway through the two and a half hour show. The acting fluctuates between realism and melodrama. Hoffman plays Anne with a perpetual nervousness and fear in her face, as though she cannot turn her back without something terrible happening to her. Her determination to find out the truth about Juan and to save her new friends from a potential killer appears to come simply out of boredom with her studies.
While the actors use the space to its fullest – floating on and off stage, into the audience, climbing outside windows, standing by the front door to the theatre – it’s almost torturous to only be able to view the better part of the play on a flat screen. The point of going to live theatre is to see three-dimensional live acting. There is absolutely nothing wrong with multimedia theatre, but there is a big difference between stage acting and film acting. Not only is "Paris Belongs To Us" not live, it’s barely breathing.
Performances of "Paris Belongs To Us" continue through December 21st. Check out our full event listing here: https://stagebuddy.com/listingdetail.php?lid=16434
