Suicide in B-Flat
Bill Helbig would have understood the spirit behind Sam Shepard’s 1976 “mysterious overture” Suicide in B-Flat, would have gotten what Shepard was driving at in this beautiful, dreamlike, nonlinear play about a jazz composer who hates his life so much that he kills himself–or perhaps fakes his own suicide–and about the people he leaves behind who try to piece together what he did and why. This is such a strange, sad, fascinating work that, like the best of Shepard’s other plays, it defies easy explication.
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What does it mean, for example, that Niles, the suicide, walks through the apartment unseen by the detectives and friends who’ve gathered there, poking through his past and looking for answers? Is Niles a ghost? Is Paullette, the woman who accompanies him, a spirit-guide of some sort? Has he really, as Paullette hints, managed to escape his life and transcend his world? Shepard offers plenty of such questions, plus a few others. The body found does have Niles’s fingerprints, yet Niles speaks of having killed someone. Does this denial indicate just how alienated he’s become from himself? Is Paullette really, as she implies, capable of powerful magic? Even the ending, which parodies the clear-cut conclusions of detective novels, is not what it seems. Likewise Niles’s confession–“Someone was killed here for sure. I saw him face to face. I saw his whole life go past me”–begs the play’s central question: whose body is it in Niles’s apartment?
Niles hates his life so much he doesn’t even recognize it as his own. Yet he’s trapped. His friends and fans cling to him, needing him to stay because they know that without him they cease to exist, either as people or as characters in a play (about a famous man who might have committed suicide). The detectives investigating the suicide need him, dead or alive, to justify their existence. Even we in the audience need him; the moment he leaves the stage, the play ends.
