'Jump, Jump'

SAM SHEPARD lives in that very rare space between hallucination and vision. It is the place inhabited by all manner of fakes, fakirs, savants, pseudos and seers. It is the testing ground of gullibility and genius, and sometimes these are just the qualities Shepard exhibits. When he tips to one side, he's our best playwright and he has the ability to short circuit the intellect with all the subtlety of a file on the teeth. When he tips in the other direction, his short circuits more resemble the random firing of brain synapses and he is in danger, as Tom McGuane says of "being trapped in a globe of his own hallucinatory despair." It's a precarious balancing act, and one which makes Shepard so much more a playwright than a writer of plays. Reading a Shepard script is an exercise in boredom at worst and frustration at best. A bad production, and you leave feeling that terrible wired disappointment of the long slide out of a bad indulgence. Shepard is difficult, and Suicide in B Flat is one of his best plays--which, from the point of view of a theater company, is a double blessing and a double curse. Thus, though the Harvard Summer Theatre Ensemble sometimes errs in their current production of Suicide they err on the side of the angels.

Suicide in B-Flat is nominally concerned with the death/suicide/hoax of Niles--a Pynchon-like musician whose experimentations with sound and composition have rocketed him so far into the stratosphere that he can barely exist on the mere surface of the planet anymore. Two detectives, Louis (Christopher Randolph) and Pablo (Christian Clemenson) come in out of the mainstream and attempt to reconstruct the crime. What follows is a collage of random psychic violence and free association, philosophy and claptrap, all so intricately conceived that to follow it in any sort of literary sense is ridiculous. They talk about Shepard writing in dream language, and the bearded wunderkinds at NYU write introductions to his plays that speak of ritual Indian drug use and the tradition of the shaman--and all of them are full of shit. You can't follow Shepard from word to word, because his transitional sentences are emotional. His characters are suffering from psychotic jet-lag and even though the fact that their minds have been careening from one end of the cortex to the other cannot really count for travel anymore, but they move all the same. It's the language of the awful silence.

This production, under the direction of R. J. Cutler, respects those silences, and that's one of the major reasons it works so well. Cutler, too, has a balancing act to perform--that thin line between silence and stasis--and for the most part he pulls it off. In the tiny space of the Loeb Ex, with nothing but a white backdrop, an antique lamp, an overstuffed chair and elegant lighting by David Van Taylor, the action begins simply as the detectives confront the eerie outline of a body on the floor. This outline eventually becomes almost a character in itself--a totem, sinkhole and vortex of the show--but in its opening scenes the play draws the audience in with a witty sortie into slapstick and high comedy. The two detectives are something of the classically mismatched partners. Pablo is a prissy fussbudget, a wheezy bureaucrat. Clemenson flounces through the role in grand style, with his nervous gestures and his half-exhausted grandiosity (he tires before he can really come through). His gestures become more frantic, his reasoning more strident as he is the antithesis of Louis, who prides himself on his logic and dispassionate aloofness, and his slightly cynical humor. The two wander around the outline on the apartment floor, the play delves into the absurd and it is full of discordant, funny bits. All of this changes, however, when Randolph gives his theory of the cases--an increasingly bizarre trip through the reaches of what pilots call the envelope--a theory of music, of being, a crypto-musical little speech which marks the real opening of Shepard's floodgates. When Petrone, a neighboring saxophonist (played by Nick Wyse looking for all the world like DeNiro in New York, New York) and Laureen, a neighboring bass player (Grace Shohet), arrive, an inner circle rears its head, signalling the end of the commonplace relationship which have gone thus far. And even then Niles himself (Brian McCue) arrives with his compatriot Paulette (Bonnie Zimering) and the play becomes a meditation on the mind.

And this is where the play is at its most beautiful. Memory and random images are Shepard's vocabulary and they are used to striking effect as vignette after vignette comes across--from Laureen a meditation on time and appearance, and one of the most haunting speeches Shepard has ever written (which is unfortunately undermined by the music.) Niles and Paulette wander through the music and madness, acting out a ritual exorcism of his personalities, Pable and Louis find themselves sucked further and further in. You can drive a truck twixt the shadow and the reality, Shepard seems to be saying, and it's not a question of going over the deep end since there really isn't any difference between the two. The line between sanity and reality is just a membrane--and we are all the hapless victims of osmosis.

But it is behind even this layer that this play succeeds so well. Shepard's dialogue is almost inadvertent--it bubbles up from the turmoil below. He deals in images and almost primitive responses--screams, bodies, music, costumes and deceit. The music in this show, composed by Stephen Drury, is wonderful--unnerving and soothing, sometimes capricious and sometimes just a bit too out of control for comfort. In these silences Shepard does his best exploration--and into these silences this production does not attempt to read too much. These characters for the most part are shadows--inventive shadows (Pablo's and Louis's shift from the childish to the grandiose are beautifully done)--but for the most part they allow themselves the restraint needed to remain unwitting victims. Occasionally the pace of the show is a bit off and the silences are lost, but for the most part the subtlety is to be commended. Suicide in B-Flat remains one of Shepard's best works, and this production, a rarity, does it justice.