Kill Move Paradise
- Jul 14, 2020
- 3 min read
★★★★☆
My brother is the marketing director of the Unicorn Theatre. For the past several seasons, their creative has been handled by a local agency who, in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis, said they were barely hanging on and would have to pass on the upcoming season. My brother asked me if I was interested, and I said I was—this is a dream assignment that’s been on my wishlist for years. Of course, as part of the process, I have to read the plays, and so I have been. I love going to the theatre but I’ve never read a lot of plays (not unusual, I’m sure), so this has been a relatively novel experience for me. In any case, at the conclusion of reading each play, I’ve dashed off initial impressions via text to my brother. For these plays, unlike my more measured, more thoughtful book reviews, I’ll be using those slapdash messages.
Kill Move Paradise—as intense as Lungs and definitely the most confrontational of the bunch. The reading of the ever-growing list of slain Blacks reminded me of the end of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X with person after person declaring, “I am Malcolm X.” At the same time, the play feels a bit slight—narrow in focus and so perhaps limited in impact. A cleaver where a scalpel might be better. Still, these are dark times and the unchecked killing of Blacks has perhaps long passed the civil, the measured, the conciliatory. Blunt force meets blunt force. Justice at any price. Uprising, revolt, sacrifice, death for a cause—any price is better to pay, to bear, to suffer than this institutional culling. Not what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who believed that Blacks’ capacity for suffering would ultimately lead his people to victory, would have wanted. But his were days of hope and optimism, promise and potential. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers saw a different reality, a different truth … “By any means necessary.” Violence is not the answer, though I can certainly understand its appeal. This revolution can’t come at the barrel of a gun; it must come from dialogue and understanding, community activism, and the ballot box. We need to see each other, move past sympathy to empathy, recognize our own biases and prejudices and confront them, and explore and understand and know experience beyond our own.
Well. That was last night. I woke up this morning and realized that I needed to challenge my original assessment. Any play that can generate the breadth and the depth of thinking as this one has, though on the surface may appear to be limited in scope, is certainly not limited in impact. Kill Move Paradise effortlessly (which is not to say without effort) and exceedingly accomplishes its goal: to force us to see and confront and come to terms with (or, at a minimum, have a dialogue about) a society in which Black lives matter little and are too often brought to violent and tragic ends indiscriminately and without consequence. Ijames’s play, which had its world premiere in 2017, both predates and presages the current upswell of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death and shatters the myth that “all lives matter.”
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