FRINGE REVIEW: SUICIDE/JOKE

You've heard of shaggy dog jokes– long tales that goon forever with no point, ending with a weak punchline that makes you sorry you listened for so long. Such is Suicide/Joke, a sort of shaggy play, which enjoyed a reading at the International Midtown Theatre Festival last month, and is now premiering at the Fringe Festival.

The plot, such as it is, follows Amanda, fifteen and full of teenage angst, frustrated with her divorcing parents and with the world at large. As he drives her to various places (almost all of the play takes place within cars, a nice metaphor for the transitory nature of the teen years), Amanda's father tells her the original, virtually endless shaggy dog joke, dragging it out for most of the entire play. He clearly wants to talk about other things with her– his divorce, her budding sexuality– but it's easier to tell an endless joke and avoid the serious issues that need discussion. This is the play's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Subtlety is great, but showing people talking about anything other than the elephant in the room usually does not make for very compelling theatre. While Amanda's awkwardness and emotional issues are certainly believable, too little actual plot takes place for us to see real character growth.

Jonathan Karpinos' script, for all its structural weakness, sounds incredibly real, and he captures dialogue as though it were a transcript. Characters stammer, drag out sentences while trying to think of the next word, and go off on tangents, just as any real person would while having a conversation. Unfortunately, what makes for wonderfully realistic dialogue does not necessarily make for very interesting drama. Some editing and tightening would help bring out the tensions that lie beneath the surfaces of these characters.

As Amanda, Megan Ketch brilliantly displays the many emotions that surge under the intentionally cool façade of a female teenager. Sean Williams nicely captures the desperation of father struggling to connect to an increasingly distant daughter, but his delivery is sometimes so slow that one wonders if he is acting or struggling for his lines.

David Chapman has the unenviable task of directing a play that has its actors sitting and facing straight ahead for most of the time. This can be a blessing and a curse: we get to see every expression on their faces, but they cannot make much eye contact, thus making it harder to establish and build chemistry. And while Mr. Chapman does some fine work with letting submerged emotions appear in facial expressions and pained voices, he lets the pace of the play become so slow that he risks losing the audience's interest in Amanda's development.

With some revisions, Suicide/Joke could become a wonderful, intelligent character study. Jonathan Karpinos clearly respects his audiences' intelligence enough to create a subtle story about complex people, and if he can tighten the script to sound less like conversations and more like a play, he'll have a very admirable piece of work.