The roles of nature and nurture in a child’s development are always up for debate, but if your mom has wanted to kill herself since before you were born, it likely won’t work in your favor. That’s one takeaway from Anatomy of a Suicide, an intriguing, excruciating play by Alice Birch—though it leads to other questions, about the genetic component in depression versus personal and social factors, for instance.
In looking at the unique and complicated relationship between mothers and daughters, through interwoven accounts of three generations of troubled women, the playwright takes us down a rabbit hole, one that can prove so deep and vexing that you may find yourself feeling physically uncomfortable as you watch Carol—the suicidal wife and mother just mentioned—and Anna and Bonnie grapple with the most basic things, like giving and receiving love. Receiving it, especially.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★ review here.]
Birch, whose credits also include Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. and the screenplay for the 2016 BBC film Lady Macbeth, has structured Anatomy so that as many as three conversations are taking place at any given time. Though disconcerting at first, and frustrating at times, the strategy connects the women—and the other people in their lives, male and female—through words and rhythm, with director Lileana Blain-Cruz essentially conducting the actors to accommodate and work in counterpoint with one another. It also requires intense concentration on the part of the audience; I was so focused on keeping up with the dialogue that I frankly couldn’t tell you much about Mariana Sanchez’s set, except that it’s spare and functional.
The players all rise to the occasion—particularly the priceless Carla Gugino, in the harrowing, sometimes thankless role of Carol. We’ve met the character before, in various incarnations: a beautiful, adored, (seemingly) financially secure woman whose self-destructive impulses and general inclination toward misery might stump—or infuriate—anyone who doesn’t share her privilege. Anatomy opens shortly after she has slit her wrists; her devoted husband, John (Richard Topol, offering a nuanced balance of heartbreak and fortitude), is devastated by the attempt, but she only seems irritated, by his compassion as much as her failure to end her life.
It’s a pattern that will continue, Carol shutting John out with a lack of malice that somehow makes the rejection more piercing. Her relationship with their daughter (whose identity would prove a spoiler) is even harder to watch; hopeful in her pregnancy, Carol soon recognizes her caretaker role as an obstacle to her goal of achieving oblivion, and she regards her child with genuine concern but joylessly, with no sense of a bond. Gugino, thin and frail as a sparrow, painfully poised and palpably haunted, makes us see Carol’s despair for what it is: a disease, eating away at her as surely as a cancer would.
Anna is portrayed as a child and a woman by, respectively, a precocious Ava Briglia—who plays several parts, as do a number of cast members—and Celeste Arias, who projects a sensitivity and warmth that let us regard her character’s own self-defeating behavior more sympathetically, especially as Anna’s back story is revealed. Gabby Beans has the toughest task as Bonnie, whose experiences dating back to infancy have produced an almost impenetrable hardness. Superficially, she is, as someone says of Carol at one point, “a shell of a person”—though in fact Bonnie, like Carol, is actually burning inside the shell.
Other connections are established between the central characters—there are recurring, pointed references to fish, of all things—as they struggle to connect with others. Jo Mei is endearing in a trio of roles, particularly as a feisty, big-hearted woman that Bonnie, who is gay, hooks up with, then immediately tries to shake off. Miriam Silverman juggles six parts with finesse, from Carol’s obnoxious sister-in-law and, later, her grown daughter—both sources of welcome comic relief—to a pragmatic real estate agent.
There are moments when all the agony that Carol, Anna and Bonnie put themselves and others through feels oppressive, even a little gratuitous. In her hospital room after giving birth, Carol chants “a baby” to herself, over and over and over again—dozens of times—as other characters go on and on about something that’s ostensibly related. Still, Birch has given us an affecting meditation on the demons we harbor and perhaps pass on, and on a particular and profound kind of love that is too seldom explored, even in our proudly gyno-centric era.
Anatomy of a Suicide opened February 18, 2020, at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through March 15. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
