Translated from English to Lithuanian by Rita KOSMAUSKIENĖ
The performance "Anatomy of a Suicide" intertwines the stories of three generations of women in one family: it analyzes the lives and fates of grandmothers, daughters, and granddaughters, capturing key, canonical, and distinctive events in women's lives. The themes explored here include the forging of familial and romantic friendships, the mechanics of patterns and relationships that repeat across generations, loss, societal expectations imposed on women, the anatomy of suicide, and the analysis of sin.
"Since I learned that a woman is born with all the ovum cells that are formed while she is still in the womb, I have come to understand the question of generations in a much more physical way. Today it is very relevant to me: the experiences of our grandmothers live genetically in us, the historical traumas that they lived through and their responses to them are still alive. Then I wonder: what scars will my generation bear? What political and historical marks will be encoded in the children who will live a hundred years from now?", Uršulė Bartoševičiūtė, who is presenting her first production at the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre, reflects.
Carol is a woman in a traditional marriage who decides to commit suicide after suffering from clinical depression. Her daughter Anna, trying to escape her parents' relationships and life patterns, moves to a commune, where she reconsiders the principles of community life and sinks into drug addiction. After giving birth to her daughter Bonnie, soon, Anna also chooses suicide. Bonnie, for her part, tries to end the transgenerational trauma of suicide, to break the chain of such choices. She becomes a doctor and, unlike her mother, she chooses the rational way to structure and understand the burden of her family history: she seeks medical and scientific answers. Bonnie decides to sell the family house and get sterilized. Although she is a lesbian and cannot have biological children with her partner, Bonnie needs to prevent any chance that she will carry on the lineage and pass on to her offspring that which she has received from her mother and grandmother.
In the performance, Carol, Anna, and Bonnie are all young women in their thirties, and their stories are told simultaneously. The different timelines allow us to view the life of one family not as a random combination of actions and repercussions, but as a transgenerational chain of events.
The play's author, British playwright, and screenwriter Alice Birch takes an anatomical view of suicide, as the title suggests: i.e., she does not judge, evaluate, or assess women's actions to achieve a certain narrative objectivity. The author, who claims to have written the work as a score rather than a theatre play, allows the creative team and the audience to view the plot through the eyes of a detective – to notice and record the non-obvious symbols, signs, and traces that accompany this family, and thus to discover what each of us unthinkingly repeats and/or inherits from our parents and carries from one generation to the next.
Alice Birch's oeuvre is often compared to the plays of the scandalous British playwright Sarah Kane – they share a similar relationship with contemporary existentialism, the portrayal of people who are often left on the margins, the analysis of marginal and extreme personal experiences: self-destruction, institutional inefficiency (especially the relationship with medical staff), the portrait of an overworked woman, who gives up, and the picture of sexual and psychological abuse. The image of a woman who leaves her last words as a testament.
