Pier Paolo Pasolini, film theorist and philosopher, once wrote that it is “absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives…is untranslatable.” The exploration of what death does for a person’s life, and what, specifically, self-inflicted death means for the people who knew the deceased, is at the heart of The Artistic Home’s Dying for It. The play was written by Moira Buffini and directed by Monica. It ran from March 18 to April 23 at The Den Theatre in Wicker Park.
To call The Den Theatre a black box theater—no offense to black box—would be insulting. Though the whole show takes place in a typical black box room without an elevated stage, almost the whole room is a large set. The risers that the audience sits in make room for the actors down below and the oil lamp-riddled, rotten wood doorway-adorned house in which the play transpires. The set designer, Kevin Hagan, used the depth of the room to his advantage, and the set has foreground and background pieces that create the apartment building that the show takes place in. This layout creates the feeling of being inside a Disney ride, where one can take a trip into another place or time purely as an observer.
Before the show starts, a duo of women in peasant garb sit on the set’s stairwell landing. They play the cello and the violin, alternating between jaunty and melancholic music. The music conjures cold winter nights on the snowy cobblestone streets of Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, when Dying for It takes place. There is something about the play that brings to mind my contemporary conceptions of Russia, but it does not fully work to bring me into a historically accurate Russian SFSR. Instead, right from the beginning, the show toys with its anachronistic quality, worrying more about the story than the devils in its details. It often brings up the work of Marx, and even cites Hegel—who is famous but not Trotsky—so that the audience understands the story’s context without having to work through historical accuracies that would have dragged the plot down.
By the time the first act starts, I had already become submerged in the set and music for almost fifteen minutes, and, expecting a dark and dramatic show, I was immediately surprised by the comedic tone the actors offered. The protagonist, Seymon, played by Daniel Shtivelberg, is at a crossroads in his life, as he decides whether to continue having one. He has married a working woman, but he is unemployed and ashamed of it. He feels his life has no meaning, and that his only true job is dragging his wife down into poverty. His wife, Masha, is played by the delightfully quick and engrossing Kayla Adams, who desperately reacts to the thought of her husband’s death. Between Seymon’s wife and mother-in-law, there was much hyperbolic prayer and screaming in the first act, making what could very well have been very dramatic into a highly comedic show. This playing down of the seriousness was purposeful and set up well for the second act’s callously despairing ending.
I did not find the show to be laugh-out-loud funny, but despite the obviously doomy content, the first act ended on a note of hope. The audience certainly enjoyed Seymon’s tther-in-law, Serafima, played by Kathy Scambiatterra, who had the comedic timing of someone who had been acting in comedy since the Revolution.
As the plot transpires it begins to follow a dependable and cyclical routine: Seymon threatens to kill himself, and his neighbors try to stop him through a variety of attempts, all ambivalent in their seriousness and irony. Seymon does not really know if he wants to end his life any more than his neighbors know. In order to convince Seymon to keep from killing himself, his upstairs neighbor sells footnotes in Seymon’s suicide note to people who want to be made important through Seymon’s death. Seymon’s neighbor gives this money to Seymon, telling him that now he doesn’t have to worry about not contributing financially to his marriage. However, Seymon is convinced by the pleas of the people who asked to be mentioned in his notes, and after the oddest going-away party ever, walks off stage to kill himself.
At this point, an hour and a half in, is where the show becomes a comedy of errors during a moving show of bereavement from Masha. Because he was drunk, Seymon had passed out when he tried to commit suicide and only shot his gun into the air. In tradition with the time period, his neighbors believe that he is dead because he is cold to the touch, and do not check for a pulse before declaring him deceased. Of course, when Seymon awakes, he realizes that though he immortalized many people through his death, and though in his suicide note he disrespected the Kremlin and the Communist Party, that he should not die just because he can do more with his death than his life. He does not think that he impacts the world more through being alive, but rather prefers his small impact on the world while still living.
Throughout the show it is implied that Seymon is such a burden on his wife that he can only be a dead hero, not a living one, in that by killing himself he can dedicate his life to a greater cause—whether it be the church or the revolution or the arts, Seymon can be a martyr, a symbol. However, the comedy ends with a downward peripeteia, as the Communist Party government employee living upstairs is discovered to have hung himself. Throughout the show, this character’s main purpose was to reference his government job and people’s award, always met with mockery. No one likes him and his strong patriotic sentiment, but they tolerate him until Masha tells him to “Fuck off.” The next time we hear from him, we hear about him from another tenant, who announces his suicide.
I enjoyed the play’s treatment of the difference between true despair and self-centered crisis, as it contrasted the empty threats of Seymon’s suicide with the reality of the government worker’s hanging. The actors had spot-on comedic timing, playwright Buffini’s clever wordplay, and a beautiful set designed by Kevin Hagan to work with and they used those tools well. The play’s themes of revolution and the way that people sometimes become symbols through death—often for things they never believe in—unfurled at a perfect pace within Buffini’s screenplay. The death of the government worker, played by the subtle Reid Coker, is never shown; it is mentioned at the very end of the show, and afterwards bows are taken immediately. The silence and solemnity of the man’s death, after the comedy of errors that is Seymon’s attempted suicide, changes the entire focus of the show in hindsight. It was never Seymon’s story, although he was at the forefront.
Dying for It is not so much about a dissatisfied husband, but rather about the quiet lives and deaths of those who do believe in something but nonetheless never become heroes. In that ‘black box’ theater, I found the message to be lovely and melancholy and not at all how Pasolini describes it.
“Dying for It” played at The Den Theatre from March 18, 2023 to April 23, 2023.
