‘The Peacock’s Paradise’ Review: Family Melodramatics Land as Heavily as a Flightless Bird Plummeting from a Balcony

Some creatures waste away when they’re domesticated, pining for the freedom of the outdoors. That seems to be the case not only for the immensely improbable, leadenly symbolic peacock at the center of Laura Bispuri’s “The Peacock’s Paradise,” but also for Bispuri’s flair for characterization and absorbingly grounded melodrama, which comes tamely indoors after the vibrant, windblown elementalism of “Sworn Virgin” and “Daughter of Mine,” and vanishes. In the stultifying environment of a small coastal apartment, “The Peacock’s Paradise” follows a family of unbearably self-involved secret-keepers at a reunion that precipitates an entire telenovela’s worth of soapy revelation in the… Read Full Article