REVIEW: Anatomy of a Suicide, with The Metal Shop Performance Lab & JunkHeart.
There's a very specific strain of British Playwriting that runs from Harold Pinter to Caryl Churchill to Sarah Kane to Mike Bartlett all the way to Alice Birch and beyond. You know it when you hear it; fragmented conversations, overlapping dialogue, an emphasis on repetition, specific circumstances hiding within ambiguous speech, and a deep understanding of the power of both rambling passages and intentional silence. Birch, in particular, has an innate understanding of how the specificity of words holds power in the medium of dramatic writing, her characters fixating on the phrases we utter in the day-to-day in ways both comical and maniacal. She sees patterns in the way we talk, and the way we each move through the world. Our words, and our actions, reverberate. For better or worse.
Director Alex Mallory, rather astoundingly, transliterates this sense of human reverberation off of the page and right into her production of Birch's Anatomy of a Suicide, here in a searing and melancholic staging with The Metal Shop Performance Lab and JunkHeart housed at Redtwist Theatre. Even in a show whose inherent structural gambit is a daunting feat of narrative interplay (three alternate timelines exist in overlapping scenes that are staged concurrently), Mallory leaps in head-first with her team. There are moments that they stumble, but they never falter. Their mission is steadfast, and they take it on together, nobly.
Birch's play tracks three generations of a family, with Carol (Tatiana Pavela), Anna (Taigé Lauren), and Bonnie (Isabel Lee Roden) each being revealed to be from the same fractured family tree. We see each of them in moments of joy and distress, with drug abuse, relationship trauma, familial drama, and postpartum depression filling the gaps of their lives at various moments. The chronology of the play expands and contracts, and the "muchness" of it all can be a lot to take in, perhaps from an emotional standpoint, yes, but primarily from an intellectual one. I was less enamored with some specific moments of staging where certain important moments were often quite difficult to see from my particular seat, the expansive intent of Mallory's work not always the best fit for Redtwist's intimate space. Thankfully, this intimacy does provide benefits elsewhere though, especially during scene transitions where performers would pass props and gestures to one another, further building upon the growing sense of interconnectedness throughout.
Mallory's production overall feels faithful to the intent of Birch's text, the action kept swift and clear, the actors and design elements moving with a dedicated momentum. I've often bemoaned how Chicago actors can fall into the trap of luxuriating in their words, taking their sweet time with a text in a way that completely sucks the air out of whatever scene they're in. Here, there's no time for that, and thank goodness. Mallory has assembled a stellar ensemble, with a deep roster of some of our city's hardest working performers (Wisterman, Allyce C. Torres, and Josh Razavi among them), but the show undeniably belongs to Pavela, Lauren, and Roden, three titans of performance who may never share a "scene" together in the traditional sense, but whose energies feeds into one another so sensationally that whenever the trio share space together, it feels like the kind of glorious ensemble work that can only exist within the realm of live performance.
Film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul once cheekily remarked that audiences could "sleep through [his] films," not out of boredom, but out of the innate sensorial qualities that come with cinema and how they may find ways of connecting with our own subconscious. I wouldn't dare ask anyone to sleep during Anatomy of a Suicide (and how could you, really?), but I'd rightfully encourage audiences to give themselves into this production's particular rhythms and patterns and see where it may take you. You may not be able to catch every image or every line of dialogue, but you will undoubtedly be enveloped by a troupe committed to stillness, and connection. To plum trees and open spaces. To all those who have come before us, and to those who valiantly carry on after us.
Anatomy of a Suicide runs an estimated 2 hours, including a 10-minute intermission, and performs at Redtwist Theatre (1044 W. Bryn Mawr) through August 30th 2026. Tickets are available HERE.
