Review: The Suicide by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs

The paperchairs crew is smart, savvy, musical and literate, a combination that has consistently produced challenging and exciting theatre.  With Erdman's The Suicide they reach 85 years back in theatre history to a Russian farce of breath-taking arrogance that earned its author a prison term in Siberia and wasn't staged again in his homeland until after the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Directors Elizabeth Doss and Lisa Laratta cast this piece with a Loony Tunes satiric sensibility and play it with the exaggerated manic energy of the Saturday Night Live troupe at its wildest.

Farce thrives on incongruities, and they certainly spill forth from this stage.  Laratta's stage design is striking both in its simplicity and in its artful design.  That looming black space in the Off Center is held back by a shallow box set of frames across which the designer has stretched close parallel arrays of cord, defining ghostly half-solid surfaces that filter light and image.  The design evokes the claustrophobic openness of shabby Soviet public housing, with families piled together so closely that a snoring next-door neighbor kept one awake at night.  The pair of doors at center stage are painted to look battered, worn and yet oddly festive, and the audience quickly discovers that they're joined on a central pivot so they're a single revolving unit, a staging device that's a classic of French farce.

But within that superficially authentic evocation of the 1928 setting the apartment is furnished with IKEA-style cheap furniture and characters are dressed by Ashley Zeh in colorful cartoonish contemporary dress. Take, for example, the initial outfit of our protagonist the unhappily unemployed Semyon Semyonovich Podsekalnikov, a shiny track suit in electric blue that features prominently in Act 1.  Semyon disappears from view in the middle of the night, causing anguish to his wife Maria; her mother Serafima reassures her, brandishing those bright bottoms and declaring that no man would go wandering around the streets without his trousers.

Emphatically discontent to be living from his wife's meager wages, Semyon's near the breaking point, a condition dramatically illustrated in a confrontation of crashing crockery.  He's ready to kill himself -- and when word of that promptly filters through the interstices of those corded walls, Semyon is courted by a full parade of comic iconic characters eager to exploit his potential suicide.  They offer to finance his funeral costs and even a fitting for Maria's unexpected set of widow's weeds, and Semyon crazily embraces the opportunity.  "I have a job!" he declares gleefully to Maria at the end of the first act.  Act 2 presents the grotesquely comic morning/pre-mourning banquet of the next day, where an increasingly boozed-up Semyon faces the unknown outcome of his new job, scheduled for high noon.  Wild contrasts dominate the staging, fully faithful to the dictum that effective comedy is firmly grounded on the blackest tragedy.

Actors have cartoonish appearances, with the exception of Michael Joplin as Semyon Semyonovich, who's lean, bearded and apparently the Russian Everyman.  The cast includes lots of my Austin theatre favorites: Kelli Bland as the baffled Maria, her beautiful eyes as wide and deep as those of a heroine of Japanese manga; Lana Dietrich as perplexed, dead-pan and matter-of-fact mother-in-law Serafima; Nathan Brockett as the corrupt and callow neighbor Alexander Petrovich, loose-limbed, high voiced and Marxist (Groucho, not Karl); Tony Salinas as the insistently Stalinist postman, as vaudevillian as he is dogmatic; and the glorious Frank Benge, initiator of the seduction of Semyon Semyonovich.  As the querelous, self-loving embodiment of the intelligentsia, Benge's a big, rollicking, articulate Elmer Fudd.  And there are more, each of them as carefully crafted in absurdity as one of Jim Henson's Muppets.

The first act is played relatively more straight, although the directors can't resist some cornball tip-toeing antics.  I'll admit that I loved the sound effects, especially the sproooung! when the rubber plant was overturned in the night.  After the intermission the audience finds the stage set for the banquet, and Laura Freeman greets them with an acidly humorous and beautifully performed ballad in praise of vodka as a remedy to life's ills.  The celebration goes on full blast behind Semyon, who at center stage is trying to articulate the immensity of the consequences of his decision.  Joplin delivers this lengthy and often interrupted soliloquy with awesome force and finely calculated emotional swings -- this speech was so audaciously satirical that it's astonishing that Stalin's NKVD didn't simply have the playwright shot.  Semyon Semyonovich telephones the Kremlin on a red telephone, dismisses socialist cant and loudly proclaims himself to be an "In-Div-I-Du-Al!!"  After Semyon staggers offstage at the noon hour, the piece becomes a chase after the corpse and the casket.

The Suicide is exciting, comic and unpredictable. It's not perfect.  Joplin's a wonderously agile and emphatic performer throughout, but I'd have preferred to have seen that momentary pause of thought before Semyon embraces the offer of his new 'job.'  A couple of contemporary musical references are cheap jokes not worthy of the production: Dietrich's humming of 'If I Were A Rich Man' from Fiddler on the Roof and the pallbearers' use of the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai.  There seemed to be no evident point in cross-gender casting of Rachel Dendy as the proletarian butcher (wearing a phony beard that looked like a shoeshine rag).  And a key plot point involving a different despairing intellectual remained obscure, undercutting the finale -- either because it was a reference familiar to the potential contemporary audience or because Steven Fay as the representative of self-indulgent makers of poetry wasn't sufficiently articulate to establish that story for us.

Bravo to paperchairs for the concept, for the imaginative staging and for extending the intellectual reach of Austin theatre.  Achievements such as this production of The Suicide sustain and invigorate the dramatic art of this town, setting standards of artistry and intelligence not often matched.

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The Suicide
by Nikolai Erdman
Paper Chairs

Thursday, Friday, & Saturday:  May 15th - May 31st 
All Shows start at 8pm. Doors open at 7:40pm. 
There will be NO late seating.
The production runs approximately 2 hours & 15 minutes. 
There will be a 15 minute intermission.

Tickets: 
Our online ticket sales go offline at 5pm, but we will have some walk-up tickets available.
General Admission: sliding scale $15-$25  
"Semyon Special" - $30 for premium seating and special treats during the show!
For tickets and more info, please visit: www.paperchairs.com 
Or call 512-686-6621

Looking for a a friendly discount?
We're offering $10 tickets on Thursdays with the online code "Tuba"