The Brooklyn Rail

To hold an anonymous meeting, you must make a circle out of folding chairs. The chairs will be staticky metal, gray, or the shade of beige you have only ever found in standardized testing facilities and church basements. Some of the chairs will be broken and resting on a wall; someone will tell you not to touch. Ideally, the circle you form has a slight opening through which bodies may enter and settle without shame. Everyone should be able to see everyone else’s eyes when they speak.

The choreography of AA—or Narcotics Anonymous, or Co-Dependents Anonymous, or any other possible twelve-step program—opens Paradise Container, an ambitious room-to-room performance that theorizes a movement of addiction: what it might look like to be stuck in a loop. Written and conceived by artist-filmmaker Mara McKevitt and Monica Mirabile, Director of Open Movement at Performance Space New York, Paradise Container makes use of limbs in a techno-feudalist hellscape that has almost convinced us we don’t need them.

In the lobby of Pioneer Works on the first weekend of February, an audience settles into a circle of folding chairs, expecting to be entertained by some spectacle in the empty center. But it’s a sitting woman who startles with a monologue outburst, a circuitous and out-of-context rant. It feels like a distraction, as if the words are not telling the truth of her bouncing knees. A collection bucket goes around—eager immersive-theater participants rifle through their own wallets—and when it reaches the woman, pathetically named Penny, she dumps the change into her purse, whirls around to the black trash-bag curtain behind her, and runs through. The audience silently scrambles to follow, emerging on the other side to find the former ironwork factory’s cavernous main hall transformed into a flophouse cum fulfillment warehouse, cluttered with the detritus of plastic storage containers and lumpy couches illuminated by the blue glow from a box TV.

The dialogue-heavy show reveals that Penny, played by dancer Anna Thérèse Witenberg, is the older sister in a nuclear family unit working as a group of “independent contractors” for a dark-sided and predatory version of the Container Store. It’s not clear what the work technically entails, only that their life depends on it. So they make tea and coffee. So they smoke. The four of them sprint, sashay, and drag their feet about the space while the audience trails like a shadow, light and sound providing placement clues, crisscrossing from one site of menial nothing-task to another.

Penny’s brother (actor Tim Griffin Allan) and silk-robe-wrapped mother (yoga instructor and movement artist Sigrid Lauren) preside over a kitchen table scattered with printer paper, trying to find “the contracts” and hatching a plan to boost the value of their tenuous position by making promotional social media videos for the company. Little sister Jean (fantastically fiery poet and performer Maya Martinez) is game for this ring-light endeavor, donning a fur coat for a rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” addressed to the boss, and a bikini to inflate a pool floatie. She insists on being baby, stomps around, climbs into her mother’s lap, and follows her siblings like a puppy or like a kid who’s bored—which is what they all are.

A courier puts the side door to Pioneer Works’s courtyard to use when he delivers a new shipment of the drug called “shift,” and Jean and her mother inject themselves mommy-daughter style at the vanity table. And then Jean is still the way babies can’t be, collapsed on a bed. When Jean rises, she shuffles over to one of the piles of plastic boxes. She picks up the boxes, throws them back down, kicks them across the floor with the toe of her UGG boot. She flings herself onto the concrete and writhes for a while. She performs a sensual and free-associating solo with a twelve-foot step ladder to a strobe-light version of “Silence” by Delerium and Sarah McLachlan, then straps herself into a harness and climbs to fix a bulb while wearing a pink plastic box on her head. What you do with your body when you’re on drugs always makes sense to you, but not to anyone sober. As Jean is snapped out of her trance by her family—an acrobatic fall from the ladder only comes later—she explains how she meant to dim the light. “It got so bright all of a sudden,” she murmurs.

This swerve between the frantic and the static forms the emotional core of Paradise Container, and the quintessential experience of the addict. There is so much and so much and so much and then there is nothing, until it’s too much nothing, and it needs to feel like there’s so much something again, so as to not trick yourself into thinking the nothing lasts forever.

McKevitt and Mirabile constructed a dystopia that leans hard into narrative. It would be enough to present simple structures and images anchored by the haunting premise of a life spent either working or blitzed—not to mention working for the company secretly manufacturing the blitzing. There is a muddled plot point about Penny becoming pregnant by the boss. Hilariously, an older actor in boxers spends the show’s seventy-minute run splayed in a sofa chair, presumably playing the silent father for whom the rest provide. The set is almost oppressively stylish, with a haze even more convincing than the filter over A24’s drug drama Euphoria.

Addiction is shaped like a circle. It cycles and the body refuses to permit its end. In the final portion of Paradise Container, the family stages a sudden disaster—a work-related incident, let’s say—meant to secure their freedom. They dance with a plain purpose through the preparations, finally in sync. The siblings pull their mother, sitting inside a plastic box and hugging her knees, through a red fog, and I think: let go and let god.