We've all been there, coffee-talking about something for hours, and whenever you make eye-contact you lose your train of thought. Sound boarding.
I'll try to omit self-editing, just like I'm blabbing to someone who really exists, but I'll spare the universe my introverted and selfish conversations. Cut to the chase. Ditch the middle-man. Hand to mouth.
First off- Suicide in B Flat, Sam Shepard
Suicide in B Flat is about a Jazz Pianist, Niles, whose inspirations have filled his head up with voices, and driven him mad.
So mad, in fact, that he may or may not have shot his face off.
Two detectives show up on the scene, and from a realm left indeterminate by the lack of much established stage directions, the two members of Niles' jazz ensemble show up to rehearse.
Most critics are quick to point out that the play is, in the loosest sense, autobiographical. More articulately, it could be called psychiatric.
Shepard's early work is entrenched in Mythos. His fascinations frequently include the American Tall Tale; origins, both cultural and personal; World War II; and music, i.e. Rock and Roll and Jazz.
A purely autobiographical reading of an artists's work is often reductive. However, Suicide in B Flat could certainly be construed as a dramatization of Shepard's artistic process. If that's how we want to look at it, in pursuit of meaning in such an interpretation, I will exhaust the subject.
"Those midwestern women from the forties suffered an incredible psychological assault, mainly by men who were disappointed in a way that they didn't understand. While growing up I saw that assault over and over again, and not only in my own family. These were men who came back from the war, had to settle down, raise a family and send the kids to school and they just couldn't handle it. There was something outrageous about it”
Shepard's play starts with "Trying to reconstruct the imagination of it." His work
Essentially? What are the implications of an author putting himself into the work as a character? It is it an effort of post-modernity?
Shepard's Niles character was born on an island, far from America. His mother carried a gun around in her purse to shoot the Japanese who could attack at any moment. Shepard himself was born on an army base in Guam, the son of a G.I.
The war is a constant presence for the inhabitants of Suicide. For the detectives, it is a dark reminder that the rules of the game may have changed, indeed, there may not be a game left to play. Louis exclaims, "There was a time when death was looked on as a defeat." Indeed the very landscape of their reality seems to attune itself to a sinister absurdity. When Pablo eventually counters "The only reality is the reality of my dying. Write it down Louis. Write it down before you forget." his words aren't understood.
For Shepard, the war is a mysterious event at the beginnings of his memory. However he remembers it, in the depths of his subconscious, it is the lens through which he perceives his ogre father.
Shepard, in his early work, focused heavily on myth, and tall tales. Pecos Bill on the Night of Murdering his Wife, is about the disappearance of a Tall Tale. Pecos is the first of Niles' inspirations to go. He dresses up in kid's cowboy clothes. As Paulette shoots an arrow into his back, it mysteriously finding its way inside the hapless and unwitting Louis. It is Niles' sacrifice, and Shepard's sacrifice. It is Paulette's experiment, and Shepard's experiment. The focus then switches to the mortally wounded Louis.
Niles and his mother sit in an army jeep watching Songs of the South, a movie about a boy whose father leaves him and his mother at the family plantation, when he must go off to fight in the civil war. Late that night, the boy runs away, and meets Uncle Remus, a wise, beguiling slave their family owns. His stories provide the boy comfort, in the absence of his father. It is armed with these stories, these inspirations, that Niles defends himself against the harsh horizonless world of his existence.
In the end, Niles is incoherently distressed. Has his attempt to reduce his inspiration to carte blanche left him with only terrifying images of the war? Is the cleansing rain a possibility? Or does his self-directed strip-mining leave him only with harrowing images of the war?
Is Niles nothing more than a poor kid, whose one-way ticket back to the womb has sacrificed his only protection from the horrors that surround his early childhood? In the end, he is arrested.
Has an attempt to wipe away the manifestations of the father left left him realizing that it was only those manifestations that could protect him from the harsh absurd reality of the world he was born into? The drive-in movie in the rain no longer exists. His mother is no longer there to protect him.
Niles thinks he is starting over. What he doesn't realize is how painful that will be for him. He suspects, maybe, that it will be like the safe feeling his mother gave him, sitting in the jeep.
Are the detectives hapless Shepard Super-Ego's?
On a separate note: The absurd in Shepard's worldview.
Shepard is a child of World War II, and so his work is a child of absurd work.
Beckett and Elliot, whose work is a reflection of the world after the world wars: bleak, devoid of meaning, in a word, absurd is found also in Shepard. Beckett's characters are clowns in an absurd world. Estragon and Vladimir's efforts to make sense of their world only perpetuate its senselessness. Like Stoppard's question game, absurd work create's a devil's hallway. The detectives Louis and Pablo are in search of truth, and find that there is no true reality. The only reality is the truth of the present moment. Suicide in B Flat
