View to a kill PBRC’s masterful Suicide in B-Flat BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Suicide in B-Flat By Sam Shepard. Directed by Donald W. King. With F. William Oakes, Bob Jaffe, Raidge, Sherry Spears, Michael Rogers, and Elizabeth Keiser. At Providence Black Repertory Company through November 14.

Sam Shepard’s plays don’t get produced often enough around here. Local theaters should take turns staging his dark, provocatively ambiguous dramas, especially before elections, as a kind of inoculation against foolish certainties and posturing personas.

Providence Black Repertory Company is doing a bang-up job with Suicide in B-Flat, a play they rescue from its tendency to disintegrate into motivational anarchy like a multiple-personality on amphetamines.

Director Don King keeps the high energy and entertaining unpredictability, but he has the actors hack clear, straightforward paths through the psycho-poetical Shepardian undergrowth.

Things start out ostensibly as a whodunnit, an absurdly comical one. Detective Pablo (F. William Oakes) is trying to fit detective Louis (Bob Jaffe) into the tape outline of a suicide victim who blew his face off in his apartment. Noirish venetian-blind shadows and B-movie mood music from the stage rear piano player (Keith Munslow) fill out the atmosphere of stylized, satirized despair. But this is no mere spoof, we see, as Louis begins the first long, lyrical monologue riff to improv piano background. The investigator does a free-association rap on the growth of awareness and sensibility in the dead man, who was a musician — "one day he hears music the same way he hears noise" — and leaves us slack-jawed at a poem/essay charting the genesis of creative genius.

Suicide takes us on a walking tour of the various shadowy crannies of the young Shepard’s imagination as he explores, with gulps and trembles, self-identity. It’s a favorite theme of his, in the sense that a nagging toothache is a favorite preoccupation, and provides wandering direction for most of his plays. But the playwright’s search is for the identity of the larger self, what it is to be a creative artist, a man, a human being.

Representing the sober, cerebral side of the dead man, Niles (Raidge), Detective Pablo calls Detective Louis "dead weight," disdaining his tendency to empathize and feel more than think. Pablo’s monologue fantasy of what led Niles to suicide imagines him resorting to religion for meaning, which turns his music into "boring melodies." (While he chatters on, Louis unsuccessfully, and increasingly desperately, is trying to stab himself with a knife he’d been idly playing with. The black humor strikes just the right note.)

Niles comes into the picture as a ghost in the room, accompanied by a nagging companion (as conscience, muse, underworld guide?) named Paulette (Sherry Spears). Shepard’s fascination with the myth and inspiration of the cowboy soon comes into play. Under a tiny cowboy hat, Niles expresses conflicted admiration: "Towns sprang up wherever he stopped to wet his whistle. Crime flourished all around him. The law was a joke to him." However metaphorical the ghost’s obsession, it intrudes into "life" as Paulette, the irascible Tonto to his Lone Ranger, shoots an arrow into the back of the hapless Louis.

Within all these overlapping realms of imagination, Shepard is talking about a playwright killing off characters and projections of himself, of course. But what conflicts and comforts make creative artists say yes or no to suicide? Shepard brings in two more characters. Sax player Petrone (Michael Rogers) is condemned by the hyper-rational Pablo for the fact that improvised jazz is "changing the shape of American morality." The casually erotic Laureen (Elizabeth Keiser), in a black slip and playing a stand-up bass, tries to dissuade Louis from committing suicide.

Director King doesn’t so much guide these people through this conceptual maelstrom as keep them, and us, bobbing back upright. The actors know who their characters are, if only by what mode of confusion and pressure they are surviving. Oakes’s detective is as single-minded about left-brain primacy as Jaffe has his poor partner be about the fallibility of reason. Raidge makes musician Niles (the closeness to "Miles" is not incidental) a powerhouse of intent that we believe could take giant creative steps in any direction. Rogers is contrastingly laid-back as the musician Petrone, quietly projecting intelligent understanding. As Niles’s female friend, Keiser provides a similar reminder of solace, both gently and knowingly. As the netherworld Paulette, Spears stays keen-eyed, an attentive guide, and has the emotional range to absorb climactic shock with effective understatement.

From various directions in Suicide in B-Flat, Shepard reminds us, and himself, that the output of creative genius is immortal. Even if brilliant artists crumple up their lives and discard them, we can smooth out what they leave us and be amazed. Thanks, Providence Black Rep, for lending this genius-in-training the stage.