Photo of a photo by Jim Baldassare
A Less-Than-Serious Suicide
To be or not to be, that is the punch line.
In “Goodbye Cruel World,” a comedy about death that will appeal to fans of “Weekend at Bernie’s” as well as those of Joe Orton’s “Loot,” Semyon (Paco Tolson) announces that he will shoot himself at the count of ... 1,000. After the flaws in this plan are exposed, Semyon communicates a series of distinct excuses not to kill himself through a multitude of precise facial expressions and body language while counting to the more manageable number of 15. It’s a small triumph of comic invention.
Robert Ross Parker, the co-artistic director of the cult theater troupe Vampire Cowboys, has staged this colloquial adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s 1928 corrosive comedy, “The Suicide.” This rarely produced gem is a door-slamming farce wrapped inside a humanist attack on the Soviet regime. The original play, in which Semyon calls the Kremlin to tell the person answering the phone that he doesn’t like Marx (no one seems to care), was so biting that it was banned even after Stanislavski himself made a personal appeal on its behalf to Stalin.
The passing of time has made the play less provocative — although it was probably too dark for commercial audiences when it ran for less than two months on Broadway in 1980. Mr. Parker does not strain for relevance here and while he may gloss over some of the work’s darker absurdities, his target is pure, silly farce. And he hits it, dead-on.
Like Jimmy Stewart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Semyon, an unemployed bumbler, comes to the realization that he’s worth more dead than alive. But instead of finding a guardian angel, his death wish invites a parade of exploiters looking to schedule a media-savvy suicide at noon. The most entertaining charlatan has to be Aristarch (William Jackson Harper, as a delightfully weepy hypocrite), who argues that Semyon must die for the noble cause of helping Aristarch’s career.
“I would shoot myself,” he concedes, “but unfortunately, I can’t, on principle.”
The production’s conclusion, which builds upon the send-up of the righteousness of acting on principle, is more sweet than bitter. As comedies about mortality go, this one is rather joyful. The saddest thing might be the realization of what the theater world lost when this play was banned. Erdman lived a long life, but after getting the message from Stalin, he understandably stopped writing for the stage. In a way, “The Suicide” was his.
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