He has that tortured look on his face. Rick (Joshua Devitt) sits up from his bed in the middle of night, intimately bothered. The rowdy neighbors give him plenty of reason to fix his face to glare at nothing in particular. The bass is pounding from a sound system next door, and he wonders how he got to this place. At least somebody is having a good time, but he doesn’t care.
In desperation, Rick reaches inside a raggedy moving box. Out comes his hand with a prescription bottle, from which he frantically dumps a mega capsule. A NyQuil chaser follows quickly, all he wants is some sleep and he finally gets it, but for how long?
A Dream Inferred
Interrupted by reminiscent premonitions, Rick’s sleep repeatedly has invaders. Here comes Jimmy (Tim Palecek), affable and doting he shows plenty of concern for Rick’s introspection. Despite his intentions, Jimmy is mostly another nuisance to peace and quiet. As soon as you think he has gone, he reappears with an imaginative take on an an absurd scenario perpetuated by the degenerate scene around Rick’s stank hole apartment.
Rick has a girlfriend. Jimmy pins most of Rick’s distress on her. Lynn (Liz Witford), an ambitious psychology student, wants the best for her and her boyfriend Rick. She wants him so bad all to herself. She does everything she can to help him, including syphoning off some perscription tabs to remedy his inability to sleep.
Rick returns repeatedly to his bottles of relief. His self-meds seem to work well to assist him stall on figuring out what to do with his life. Possibly too well? Rick’s periods of REM become less restfull and full of idiations of his father’s untimely death, his friend Jimmy’s inifinite dude-wisdom, or himself, or his free-flower paramour Sarah (Sammich Ditloff), a mysterious dreamgirl (Kelsey Witford), or an ill-fated moment involving his everything, Lynn.
Short-Form Theater
Suicide Sleeps’ Director Charles Sommers and writer/producer Aaron Kopec, tucked this mentally stimulating live drama into a 40-minute pocket that clipped along fluidly, without a beat wasted, leaving much of the apprenhension theatre goers have about long productions with lulliby scenes stranded in the back of your mind. In spite of the short run time, you still feel your admission is well spent.
A cast of faces familiar to Alchemist productions has a heavy hand in accomplishing this. Each player fills their role with relatable and interesting personal quirks and nuiances. Palecek is overly believable as the bar fly that everyone has known at one point in their life. Devitt, as Rick, is the middle-american kid torn between his family’s values and expectations and his want to chase waterfalls. Witford perfectly fills the body of the highly composed, put together and contriving all-american girl etched into Lynn’s character. Ditloff, playing Sarah, courts and wins believability’s hand in all her scenes as an uber hip girl from the depths of cool-dom.
Where many of Milwaukee’s theatre troops continue to encroach on the realm between stage and auidience, Suicide Sleep stays refreshingly distant from the audience, nearly replacing the ‘third wall’ with an 160 inch LCD screen. The show actually plays like an episode of a television series, a concept that has room to run.
Suicide Sleep is on the Alchemist channel as a double feature with shows starting at 7:20 and 9:00p on October 23, 24, 25, and 30th at the Alchemist Theatre in Bay View.
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