‘Gwyneth Goes Skiing’ takes whimsical turn on a London stage
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When asked to describe “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” the play Joseph Martin wrote and performs in with his partner, Linus Karp, Martin says, “The show is the Gwyneth Paltrow ski trial, at times not as you remember it, and at times even more real than you remember it.”
Martin and Karp’s production is a rowdy, joke-a-minute retelling of the trial between Gwyneth Paltrow and Terry Sanderson, the Utah man who sued her for $3 million in damages for injuries he claims she caused when the two collided on the slopes of Deer Valley Resort in 2016.
The livestreamed trial centered around one of America’s most iconic celebrities and became a pop-culture phenomenon made more viral by the antics of many of the people who were part of the trial. These antics inspired Martin and Karp to turn the trial, or at least their version of it, into a stage production.
There’s a moment in the second half of “Gwyneth Goes Skiing” when a puppet version of Sanderson’s attorney, Kristin Vanormon, asks Paltrow (played by a wigged Karp dressed in a sleek off-white top, flowing slacks and Paltrow’s signature trial glasses), “Are you good friends with Taylor Swift?”
Martin explains, “There’s something so visceral about that moment for me. That really did happen. We didn’t dream that.”
Much of Martin and Karp’s script pulls lines of dialogue from the trial nearly verbatim, and when their characters recite the lines, it highlights the absurdity of the trial that turned the eyes of the world to a Park City courtroom earlier this year.
I attended the second showing of “Gwyneth Goes Skiing” in London. On the night of Dec. 14, I took a cab 30 minutes north of the center of London proper to Islington (which is pronounced “Izlington” but which I pronounced as “Eighlington,” much to the amusement of my taxi driver). When he dropped me off on a quiet road across from a construction supply store, I wondered if I had written down the address incorrectly.
But then I spotted the Pleasance Theatre, tucked behind a courtyard, buzzing with patrons there to see the sold-out show, most holding a beer from the theater’s adjoining bar. Attendees filtered into the theater with their drinks and snacks, sat at the tables and chairs lining each tier of the theater, and talked and laughed loudly with each other until the show began.
When Karp appeared on stage, he was dressed as Paltrow and wearing a long, blonde wig that I get the sense was lying around in a prop closet somewhere. He spoke in an accent not quite American, not quite British and not quite Karp’s native Swedish, but instead seemed unplaceable and ethereal, much like Gwyneth Paltrow herself.
With wide eyes and a sing-songy cadence, Karp made jokes about Goop, the lifestyle brand founded and run by Paltrow; her marriage to Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, whom he called “beige personified,” and their later “conscious uncoupling”; her daughter named Apple, represented in the play by a literal apple attached to a stick and jiggled by a stagehand; Paltrow’s British roles and her inexplicable Britishness in the late ’90s; and Paltrow’s insistence that she was not in Marvel movies that she was, in fact, in.
When Martin appeared on stage, he was dressed in a sweater much like the one worn by Neal (and mocked by Bernard the elf in “The Santa Clause”) and nondescript pants. He wore a salt-and-pepper wig and glasses. He spoke in a gruff, low-register American accent and made a number of optometry-centric jokes.
The opening scenes set the tone for 90 minutes of meme-heavy jokes written for and by digital natives who spend far too much time online.
“We get a lot of different demographics who come to our shows, and they all seem to have a good time,” Martin says. “Everyone is welcome, if you’re willing to see theater as a live art form. With our theater, you experience it and you’re in it, and as long as you are up for that ride, anything else is secondary.”
When Martin says “you’re in it,” he means that literally, at least for some. There are five audience roles in the show, and the only warning these audience members are given is a card with the name of their character written on it, which they are handed shortly before the play begins. One participant is given no warning at all and is pulled at random.
Once on stage, these volunteers/hostages read their lines from monitors flanking the stage, with text visible to the audience as well. It’s chaos, but a chaos that’s both controlled and intentional.
“You see our work and it feels like it is constantly on the edge of descending into uncontrollable madness, but it’s very controlled,” Martin explains.
“Everything is in our control,” Karp adds. “We’re happy to improvise around anything that may happen. Those live moments add so much to performance.”
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Other than the five terrified audience members, the play has only two actors on the sparsely decorated stage — Karp, who plays Paltrow, and Martin, who plays Sanderson and is the puppeteer behind some woodland creatures and the miniature Vanorman, replete with the blue pantsuit and blunt bangs.
“I like to think of our shows as kid shows but for adults,” Karp tells me. “It’s over the top and we have big characters. We have puppetry. We have music. We’ve taken over those children show elements, and used them in a very adult way.”
The play also has only two locations, both in Utah — Deer Valley Resort, where Sanderson and Paltrow befriend one another until their ski collision, and the Park City courtroom where Paltrow and Sanderson are accompanied by the puppet attorney and the voice of an ominous offstage judge. Jokes about the movie “Se7en,” Paltrow’s continued insistence that she was not in “Spider-Man,” and a number of lip-synced musical numbers are sprinkled throughout.
As a Utahn, I was particularly amused by the official Utah state seal on the judge’s podium, a detail I’m sure no one else in the audience noticed but one that, somehow, made me proud. Like this was our biggest collective accomplishment as a people.
I was also amused by the actors’ occasional accent slips which made them pronounce “Utah” as “Utar,” and their entire representation of Deer Valley as a place where one might procure a $300,000 deer necklace (which, given everything I know about Deer Valley, is probably true). This becomes a major plot point in the play, though I use the word “plot” very loosely.
“I still know very little about Utah as a place,” Martin tells me. “I would love to visit.”
That’s a chance he and Karp might get if Awkward Productions brings the show to Park City this spring, a process currently underway.
“We’ve followed Deer Valley on Instagram now,” Martin tells me. “We watch their posts quite frequently. It seems like a lovely place.”
At the conclusion of “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” I felt as though I had just witnessed a roast and an ode in one production.
While most of the jokes are made at the expense of the participants in the trial, there’s a real sense of adoration for each of them.
“It’s done with love and affection,” Martin says.
“In a way, it’s a celebration of the people involved,” Karp adds.
The heightened reality created by Martin and Karp both highlights the truth of the trial, often stranger than fiction, and the whimsy surrealism possible when life becomes art, and one finds oneself watching their hometown shown on a stage 5,000 miles from home.
A version of this article first appeared in The Park Record.
