Suicide—the act, the motivation, the fallout in its wake—is a profound and mysterious thing. Anatomy of a Suicide, a new drama that considers three generations of troubled women, strives for profundity but gets tied up in its own mystery.
The play, by Alice Birch, debuted in London at the Royal Court in 2017 and won the next year’s Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for outstanding playwriting by a woman. It opened tonight in its American premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company, under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz. (In London, Katie Mitchell did the honors.) It has important things to say about the challenges of womanhood and motherhood and how they’ve both changed and stayed the same over the generations, about the burdens society places on women, and the struggles of maintaining mental well-being while bearing them, and about how a legacy of mental illness and self-harm can echo through a family. But its experimental formal structure renders its action barely decipherable and, accordingly, its audience barely invested in its characters.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★ review here.]
The stage is set when the audience arrives, a sort of quasi-natural dreamscape with blue-tinted walls, pale blue lighting, and wafting mist. (The sets are by Mariana Sanchez; the lights by Jiyoun Chang.) There are several upstage doors, a counter and sink against one wall, a claw-foot tub near center stage, and vegetation sprouting from corners and along walls. Is it a home? A lab? A jungle?
Things don’t become appreciably clearer when the play starts. A man (Richard Topol) and a woman (Carla Gugino) enter, a couple, talking but not really communicating. Her arms are bandaged; she has tried to kill herself. They’re near that counter and sink, so perhaps they’re in a doctor’s office. (The script says it’s a hospital corridor.) They’re tense and angry. They transition into a second scene, the woman alone in the same space, but meanwhile a second hospital scene begins next to them. There, another woman (Celeste Arias) wears only one bandage and argues with a doctor (Vince Nappo). As their scene progresses, a phone rings in the first one—and rings and rings—followed by some conversation. And then a third scene begins, on the opposite side of the stage, as the first two continue. It’s another woman with another bandage (Jo Mei), meeting another medical professional (Gabby Beans). Now all three scenes are happening at once.
This is, essentially, how the rest of the play progresses: scenes overlapping, dialogue overlapping, actors playing different roles in one scene and then another. Eventually, slowly, we figure out that we’re seeing the women in a family over three generations—that the first woman, with her formal clothes and cigarettes, is living sometime in the past, while the third, in a jumpsuit and boots, is probably sometime in the future.
This is the sort of slow unpacking that can make a play interesting. And surely all these overlaps are designed to show that past and future are always with us, that we’re always haunted by what came before. But as the play continues, and as the three stories unfold more or less simultaneously, with dialogue from one story often layered upon the next, the cacophony becomes overwhelming and sometimes impenetrable. We continue in our befuddlement, largely because we’re just overwhelmed.
Perhaps this is a conscious choice by Birch, whose script presents the multiple scenes in adjacent columns. Perhaps it’s her effort to make her audience feel what it’s like to be caught within an addled mind. (I think of Arthur Kopit’s Wings, and Jan Maxwell’s stunning portrayal in the Second Stage revival nearly a decade ago of a woman experiencing her own stroke.) But her characters aren’t manic. They’re sad, perhaps depressive, and sometimes drug-addled. They seem sure of what they want, even as the audience struggles to follow along. They’re in pain, clearly, and in need of help. And that tripartite script, and Blain-Cruz’s direction, keeps them all talking on top of each other.
They’re saying interesting things. If we could engage with their stories, we’d probably even be moved to care about them.
Anatomy of a Suicide opened Feb. 18, 2020, at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through March 15. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
