Theater Production of Paradise Street Coming This Winter

There’s a lot of work from the early days of Clive Barker and The Dog Company that I’ve never heard of and the Christmas play he wrote called Paradise Street is most definitely one of them. The Exit Theater, the San Francisco California based theater group, will be putting on a production of the story just in time for Christmas. The opening night of the show will be December 1st and it will run till the 7th.

Here’s the story synopsis for play from their press release:

The American Premiere of a Truly Unusual Christmas Play by best-selling author Clive Barker. A strange magical Christmas play about England’s greatest monarch, the search for meaning in a godless world, and STDs.

Paradise Street is a lot like A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM crossed with A CHRISTMAS CAROL crossed with a Blackadder Episode crossed with LOOK BACK IN ANGER. Barker borrows and steals from all of these things and more, and then throws them in a blender without any reverence and hits the buttons until something freakish looking but amazingly tasty comes out. His characters are these incredibly rich, complex people, and so real but also so stylized, so hyperbolic, and he uses them to talk about a wide array of topics and never really comes to any conclusions, just relishing the conversation. He thumbs his nose at conventional storytelling demands like an ending that ties things up or has a moral or even really an opinion, while creating work that is incredibly structured, full of parallels and symbols and clues, as tight as a sonnet. But to what purpose? Totally up to you, the audience, to decide.

It sounds like classic Barker for sure.

For our listeners who live in the San Francisco area this would be a great opportunity to get too see one of Clive’s earlier works that’s making its American premiere for the first time.

Tickets can be bought through The Exit Theater official site:

http://www.theexit.org/paradise-street/

via Clive Barker: Official Facebook  and The Exit Theater.