FringeNYC 2013: Suicide Math

Review by Sergei Burbank · August 13, 2013

Over the course of the twentieth century the life expectancy of Americans nearly doubled. As generations overlapped and cohabitated to an increasing degree, the social compact between them became more complex, even as it was codified in laws like the Social Security Act. The struggle for resources and supremacy continues to this day, as questions like the funding of that same Social Security, and crowding out expensive older workers in favor of cheaper younger ones, vex policymakers. But these issues are small beer compared to the Vietnam Era, when elder generations seemed hell-bent on the wholesale slaughter, for no apparent reason, of their descendants.

It is within this context that Suicide Math finds Frank (David Gelles) and Michael (Jonathan Randell Silver) as roommates at Princeton in 1972. Frank, a preternaturally brilliant mathematician/proto-computer programmer, is struggling in the immediate aftermath of his best friend’s suicide, while Michael is overwrought about his brother’s deployment in Vietnam. Frank obsesses over the teeming pile of boxes full of punch cards that his friend left behind: while they seem to be a computer program, he is unable to rest until he finds that program’s hidden purpose. Their already upended world is knocked for another loop with the arrival of a drunken and largely undressed Lydia (Sarah Shankman), a Vassar student fleeing a weekend jaunt gone wrong, and trailing her own cargo hold’s worth of emotional baggage.

Gelles’ Frank is a near-autistic doyen of numbers and patterns -- absorbed in his work, yet aware of his social shortcomings. His friend’s self-destruction is baffling in its lack of rationality, and this absence of reason drives Frank closer and closer toward madness himself as he tries to assign a meaning to his partner’s legacy. At the same time, Frank’s, er, frankness allows him to speak bluntly about the patterns he sees -- including the budding romance between Michael and Lydia, and the true nature of the near-constant phone calls Michael shares with his brother overseas. Silver’s Michael is a tightly wound ball of sublimated grief and rage; in contrast to Frank’s lack of emotions, Michael cannot find a means to channel the unbearable burden of his own; the ensuing meltdown is as painful to watch as it is inevitable.

Shankman’s text is a tsunami of process code, German philosophy, and the ample evidence of trauma in the near-maniacal denial of it. The two roommates evince a casual brilliance in their shorthand back-and-forth, and the curse of that brilliance is evident in their inability to reconcile the madness of their world with the knowledge that it could be better -- without any practical means of bringing about such an improvement.

Gelles digs into his mountains of words with a carnivorous vigor that alone is worth the price of admission, and while Silver rises to the challenge when engaged with the right partner, it is Shankman who at times finds herself in over her head by the demands of the script; her game attempts to tackle them, however, are so earnest that the audience is as protective of this broken bird as her new roommates are.

Despite its setting, this play is not for a moment about Vietnam -- or about politics of any kind. It is a raw chronicle of bright but broken people who burn far too brightly to sustain themselves, and far too brilliantly for us to turn away. What makes Suicide Math such an engaging work is that the characters are organically gifted with the ability to describe their cages, even as they are fundamentally unable to escape them. If they swing a bit too quickly from receiving to giving confessions in the play’s denouement, it is eminently excusable thanks to individual feats of linguistic legerdemain and a tight, bright script that does not let up, even for a moment.