Chris Sinagra
Playing to Our Prejudices

Reviewed: Paradise at the Central Square Theater, April 6 - May 7, 2017. A Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production; recognized by StageSource’s “Standing O” for promoting gender parity in theater. Written by Laura Maria Censabella. Directed by Shana Gozansky.


Caitlin Nasema Cassidy as Jasmine Al-Habadi and Barlow Adamson as Dr. Guy Royston. Photos by A.R. Sinclair.

Dr. Guy Royston, played by Barlow Adamson, is evidently in hell when he opens Laura Maria Censabella's Paradise with a sardonic remark ripping on a student who has written something absurd about fruit flies on an examination. Teacher Dr. Royston seems to be worked up not so much by the wrong answer as a past that has begrudged him. One imagines a number of half-conscious complaints in the subtext as he barks at the student's paper: "Goddamn wife!", "I should be at Columbia!", "I'm too good for this!"

We are made conscious of the reasons for this discontent later in the play when Dr. Royston reveals that both his wife and a lucrative idea were stolen in one swoop by his colleague, Wilder, presumably the adventurous type. Naturally, Dr. Royston threatened to kill Wilder in public (meaning the announcement was made in public); like his wife, Dr. Royston duly got the sack and found himself teaching in an under-resourced inner-city public high school. Paradise lost, Dr. Royston toils in purgatory.

The stolen idea, which Dr. Royston had developed with his wife, was a dating program that used latter-day advances in neuroscience to match partners based on the compatibility of their brains. Ripe for love and redemption, the departure of Dr. Royston's wife with the dating program is a nice felicity in that it gives him an occasion to use it.

Precisely at the moment in the play when I was thinking I have seen something like this before in an AMC series, Dr. Royston manages to combine God and methamphetamine in a powerful allusion, "breaking bread." One of the high moments in the play is the delightful moment upon discovering that Laura Maria Censabella is a punster and likes the same show that I do.

Instead of meth, Dr. Royston is cooking up love, personally perhaps, but also in the research he is conducting with bright, ambitious seventeen-year old Muslim student, Jasmine Al-Habadi. She is passionate about biology and wants to become a biologist herself. I should like to attack her before giving my reasons for believing this to be a very good play.

It may well be my bad personality that keeps me from appreciating Jasmine, who was able to get everyone in the theatre moaning. I found her neuroticism fantastically annoying, even more so knowing that I was meant to find it adorable.

In her entry scene, Jasmine is hounding Dr. Royston to tell her the grade she got on Friday's biology test. The wonderful actress Caitlin Nasema Cassidy gives the impression of a dog ecstatic to find its master has returned from a long trip, and she somehow is able to maintain this kind of energy for the whole play. The result was that there seemed to be no gradation between the different stages of her movements, which were like the different squares of a comic strip. It was like seeing in rapid succession the face flashcards used to teach babies about emotion. But there was a good reason for this, I think. Jasmine is under a great deal of pressure. Her family has arranged her marriage to a man called Sameer, whom Jasmine describes in good terms and looks forward to marrying. She is not averse to the arrangement for she loves her culture and her obedience to it is a matter of her dignity and honor as a woman.

This is provocative. With exceptions, even the most liberally-minded among us will concede that Islam is in at least some ways behind the west in its treatment of women. (I defer to the feminists at Clarion's neighbor publication at BU, Hoochie, for more nuanced thought on the matter.) For my part, I expected Jasmine to be encouraged when Dr. Royston's tells her to reject the customs of her family's religious culture, so that she could instead pursue her education in science with single-minded purpose. If a mind like hers comes once in a thousand years, as Dr. Royston thinks, then certainly it should not be moored to the constricting life choices of obsolete religious teachings. But Jasmine demurs. She treats Dr. Royston's weighty advice with seriousness, yet resists his utter (idiotic) lack of sympathy for the weight she gives in her decision-making to her own family's wishes.

The propaganda in the play is irritating. It obtrudes on what could have been a subtler but still easily understood message: that love allows people of different cultures and values to feel mutuality with each other. One can sense that in order to get this across the playwright feels that a happy ending alone would not do, but that she must also make a point to bludgeon what she believes are the main threats to this principle. So, Dr. Royston, the intolerant atheist, makes himself look silly when he is defeated by scientific arguments for the existence of God; he feels religious people are always playing some kind of angle, but this is depicted in a way that makes the attitude seem obtuse; he is regularly blasting some kind of bigotry that makes the audience plug their ears and Jasmine act like her world has been torn asunder. (One reason for the rollicking applause received by the play was Ms. Censabella's's inviting the audience members to become actors by playing on emotions they were sufficiently experienced in affecting. If one imagines them rising at the end of the play to loudly pat themselves on the back, that would exaggerate only slightly the comedy of an otherwise genuine ovation). I understand that she would be right to feel, but like her excitement her anger and despair are like flashcards and admit of very little degree. Jasmine herself surprised me ("I am a very surprising woman!," in her words) when at seemingly regular intervals she would mount a defense of the Koran using Dr. Royston as the gull.

Jasmine is perfect in her naiveté; combined with her exuberance she is an adorable threat. It is these qualities that give her character such a powerful sway over the audience. I felt very uncomfortable, in the way hugs can be uncomfortable when delivered at the wrong time or by the wrong person, whenever one of her cute barbs made me feel like I was obliged to chuckle. But I should also say that if I were a Muslim I would hate to be condescended to in this way. Adults will laugh at almost everything children say, which is what makes being around them such a hazard; and, probably the child enjoys this liberty for some time. But as an adolescent or adult I figure that most people would feel sufficiently grown up to find this kind of patronizing endearing. At least, I certainly would not want myself or any group that I respect to be depicted in a way that seems to be inviting it.

One of the greatest virtues of Paradise is its showing that even in cultures thought to be patriarchal there are certain aspects that a woman could value in her relations with men. Jasmine discovers near the end that she would like a man with whom she could converse intelligently her passion for science, which she had a hard time doing with Sameer. But we also know Sameer would have honored her, and that his chivalry would not have been lost on Jasmine. It is a paradox that the less patriarchy there is the less chivalry we find, because chivalry belongs to a patriarchal tradition that elevates women to a height much greater than that to which patriarchy allows its men to reach. But it was not for this cloud nine that the play received a thunderstorm of applause; partly, it was because the play unfolds in perfect accordance with the guideposts of our morality; partly, it was because Zeus had struck the embodiment of much that points in the opposite direction, the silly atheist, confirming a set of prejudices that yet remain in our moral blind spot.

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Chris Sinagra is a graduate of the political science program at Boston University. He loves anagrams and Anna Karenina, and loathes elevators and Christmas music.

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