Displaying items by tag: Taigé Lauren

Perhaps surprisingly, Anatomy of a Suicide is not an overwhelmingly emotionally gripping play, nor is it horrifying. Instead, it vividly portrays the slow drip of suffering for Carol, a woman in the grip of depression, living always with suicidal tendencies. It also presents the impact of an intergenerational transference of Carol’s condition on her daughter and granddaughter. Written by British playwright Alice Birch and ably directed by Alex Mallory, it features Tatiana Pavela in the role of Carol, Taigé Lauren as her young adult daughter Anna, and Isabel Lee Roden as her granddaughter Bonnie.

Anatomy of a Suicide is hard to watch because of the design Birch has chosen for it. The central stories of these three women are performed simultaneously for two hours with one fifteen minute intermission. These focal storylines are in three different time frames, years apart. And some characters carry their roles between the timeframes. In other words, it is difficult to follow. A number of actors play multiple roles as numerous ancillary characters, adding to the challenge.

The program is helpful, but audience members are given just a barcode then told to silence their phones, so there is nothing to guide us as we watch. As a consequence, it is only by reading the program afterward, then studying the Wikipedia page for the play, that I could understand more of the details of what I witnessed.

Still, the broad lines of Anatomy of a Suicide on stage are clear enough to appreciate the heart of the story. All three actors are stunning in their roles. Pavela as Carol, whose life revealed, we are told spans the time frame of 1967-1985, registers the emotions that accompany what we now recognize as post-partum depression. We see every nuance of her internal strife as she struggles to meet societal expectations as homemaker and mother in that window of time when expectations of a woman’s place were unquestioned.

For those of us around then, it is an accurate portrayal of the menial roles women were expected to play in family life. And it puts in the spotlight how that period militated against women having an inner life, especially one that ran counter to the foreordained narrative line. Those who were depressed by childrearing or housekeeping bore the brunt of social opprobrium. And if their condition persisted, they might be subjected to brutal mental illness treatments, including shock therapy.

Isabel Lee Roden (left) as Bonnie and Taigé Lauren as Anna in Anatomy of a Suicide.

When we first see Anna, Carol’s daughter, portrayed in the window of 1994-1999 and in her twenties, she is being retrieved by her father, John (Josh Razavi) from a hospital where she was placed following a drug binge. The juxtaposition of these two characters, though in separate unconnected scenes, suggests a link between her mother Carol’s condition and Anna’s drug dependency. Anna emerges from her situation, finds her true love Jamie (Raúl Alonso) marries, and eventually bears a daughter, Bonnie.

We gather the pregnancy and birth are triggering emotionally for Anna. But most of her timeline on stage seems happy. She is a vibrant person. Her wedding day is full of joy; her father embraces her. Taigé Lauren's performance is full, rich and vibrant and it is a pleasure to see her on stage. Another actor, Laila Malak, plays a youthful version of Anna, and it seems that later, during Malak's tenure on stage, she and her father are nearby during a picnic at the moment of Carol’s suicide. This happens later in the play’s sequence, and explains retroactively why Carol was not at Anna’s wedding.

We meet Carol’s granddaughter, Bonnie, who seems to be on the spectrum of some neurodivergent condition. Isabel Lee Roden reflects an inertness in Bonnie, her lack of affect in engaging others. But in climactic moments, Roden leaps from reticence to full-throated dramatic presentation, a great performance that bides its time in deference to the character, but is always there.

To my mind, this is an actor’s play, one for theater professionals, but not something the average ticket buyer would want to see. The play is also burdened with a difficult to market title - Anatomy of a Murder or Anatomy of a Fall have worked, but Anatomy of a Suicide is an unlikely draw. With just 32 seats in the theater, I’m guessing co-producers JunkHeart and The Metal Shop Performance Lab do not have high expectations for revenue. Anatomy of a Suicide runs through August 30, 2026 at Redtwist Theatre in Chicago.

Shattered Globe’s world premiere of the delightful comedy “Eelpout!” delivers its punches with deceivingly understated skillfulness. Written by Paul W. Kruse, who calls it a fantasia, it is beautifully conceived and directed for the stage at Theater Wit by Jeremy Ohringer, whose “A Devil Comes To Town” at Trap Door has made me a big fan of his stage work.

“Eelpout!” examines the less frequently visited territory of the emotional relationship between two men in this tale of a stag party set in an ice fishing hut in Minnesota. We meet Ole Olsen (Carl Hallberg is terrific)—soon to marry Lena (Lydia Moss’s brief appearance is a knockout)—as he and his best buddy Sven Svensen (Jeff Rodriguez in a nuanced performance) trek across the frozen water in the pre-dawn darkness aiming to fish and drink.

Gradually we gather that Ole is more vested in the manly pursuits like ice fishing, while Sven is a more sensitive reflective soul. Their overlap, the safe area in which male intimacy is expressed, is in spectator sports, and chugging booze. Ritualistic beer and shots action is called upon whenever the conversation veers toward honest male intimacy. Likewise for a terse memetic conversation, almost totemic in its value and repeated throughout the play by multiple characters, runs like this:

You catch that game yesterday?
Nail biter.
Sure was.
Down to the buzzer.

These devices substitute for emotional connection, or defer it, for the men.

As the play opens on icy Lake Mille Lac (a real place), Sven pauses to take in the magnificent starry night and beckons Ole to join him and drink in the beauty. The language they have to express their feelings is terse, constrained by male convention, and even more so by their monosyllabic vernacular, which the playwright wields with amazing versatility. (There is a plethora of unusual nouns that I had to Google, only to find that they are real words, at least in Minnesota.)

SVEN: Ole. Just look!
OLE: Oh
SVEN: Worth it.
OLE: How about that.
SVEN: Prettiest right before the sun comes up.
Ole: Yessir

Sven tells Ole, “You ever think about how looking at the milky way is looking sideways through a pancake of stars?” Perhaps touched by the moment, Ole is moved to share a confidence with Sven: that he and Lena will name their first born after him. Now Ole is disappointed that Sven is less than enthusiastic. "You're supposed to be happy,” complains Ole. Sven deflects. “I wanna fish,” But their true feelings spill out in the course of the play, when Sven predicts to Ole that after he is married to Lena, their friendship will suffer and their offspring will take centerstage.

This conversation comes soon after Sven has an accidental dunk into a frigid spear fishing hole during the starlit walk. There he meets the magical Eelpout (Jesús Barajas is absolutely enchanting), a sentient fish in glistening red sequined body stocking. Eelpout engages Sven, nibbling at him in magical fish-like exploration. Barajas is so good in his role, both fishlike, and an alien personality almost from another dimension. It’s a remarkable performance, so good that even one of his stylish exits earned applause!

I suspect the playwright has given us an altogether new personality type - vaguely, a bit Sheldon Cooper-ish from Big Bang theory, maybe Jake Gyllenhaal in "Buzz Saw," with that dash of a very restrained yet overtly gay sensibility. Eelpout as a type seems a rare but familiar character in real life, but I don’t think I’ve seen it on a stage or film.

A third-wheel character arrives in the shape of Lars (Dina Berkeley) with gender bending affect - just one of the guys, but there’s just something you can’t put your finger on. Lars is a well-intentioned dolt and a schmuck, and also affords the playwright an opportunity to caricature the ungainly social behavior of the male suffering deep-seated insecurity and feelings of inadequacy.

In addition to the fantasia style of this play, conjuring visions of great bodies of swirling, writhing, spawning aggregations of fish, the playwright also incorporates classically funny physical comedy and comedy of errors skits: Ole and Sven in skivvies under a blanket, warding off hypothermia and trying unsuccessfully not to get hard; a mistaken identity in which not one, but two stag party strippers (Taigé Lauren as Heidi and Rebecca Jordan as Holly) appear in the ice hut to shock and humorous surprise. It’s a lot of fun.

Particularly notable are the production values, which use very little to great effect. Kudos to Delena Bradley (costume designer), Sierra Walker (lighting designer), Saskia Bakker (props designer), and particularly Eleanor Kahn (set) for the ice house and platform.

All’s well that ends well in a play like this. “Eelpout!” is a precise evocation of the many styles and languages of the varieties of love that dare not speak their name, or perhaps, may not even have a name. Highly recommended, Shattered Globe’s “Eelpout!” runs through May 30, 2026 at Theater Wit in Chicago.

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