To be or not to be: Playwrights on the complex issue of suicide

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

Albert Camus’ famous opening sentence from “The Myth of Sisyphus” is obviously directed to people who aren’t standing on the window ledge. Those planning to kill themselves don’t typically consult the existentialists beforehand. It is the bystanders of self-inflicted death who are compelled to philosophize.

Observe the unstanchable flow of anguished speculation and sermonizing elicited by Robin Williams’ suicide last week. New facts (his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, for example) have only intensified the flood of conjecture.

Social media have been so rife with commentary (on addiction, Hollywood careers, the dark side of comic genius, the stigma of illness) that I couldn’t help recalling something August Strindberg wrote in the preface to his dramatic masterpiece “Miss Julie”: “Someone commits suicide. ‘Business worries,’ says the business man. ‘Unrequited love,’ say the ladies. ‘Physical illness,’ says the sick man. ‘Shattered hopes,’ says the failure. But it may well be that the motive lay in all of these things, or in none of them, and that the dead man concealed his real motive by emphasizing quite a different one that shed the best possible light on his memory.”

Suicide is an intensely private act that provokes an immense public reaction. It bequeaths to those left behind fundamental questions about the value of existence, the fragility of our social bonds and the hidden life of even those closest to us.

For all of these reasons, suicide has been a central concern of drama from its beginnings in 5th century B.C. Athens. What can we learn from the way playwrights have dealt with the complex subject of self-slaughter, a topic Hamlet contemplates at length in what is the most famous speech in all of drama, his “To be or not to be” soliloquy?

One obvious lesson is that motivations are various and take on different meanings in different social and historical contexts. What in one epoch is a sign of character strength can in another era indicate character weakness. Today suicide is seen primarily as a mental health issue; in classical drama it tends to be looked at more circumstantially, as the inevitable climax of an unfortunate story line.

In Sophocles’ plays, Antigone, imprisoned for her refusal to heed the state and leave her brother unburied, hangs herself. Ajax, humiliated after Athena leads him to commit carnage on livestock instead of his hated rivals, falls on his sword. Jocasta, realizing the truth of her relationship to Oedipus, tightens a noose around her neck in her private chamber.

One dies for a greater cause, another as a heroic rebuttal to shame, and a third to end the nightmare of her horror and grief. For all of these characters, their plots have left them no other option. To live would be a disgrace. The only reason Oedipus doesn’t kill himself after discovering the truth that he had unwittingly murdered his father and sired children with his mother is that the thought of seeing his parents in the afterworld is too painful a proposition. Better that he gouge out his eyes and wander the Earth in darkness. Values in each of these instances are clarified.

In Shakespeare’s plays, suicide continues to be presented as a rational response to a narrative that has gone tragically awry. It can be a mark of conscience (as with Lady Macbeth, who presumably kills herself out of inexpiable guilt). Or a sign of nobleness of character (as when Othello becomes his own executioner). Or a romantic escape (as when Cleopatra, filled with “immortal longings,” majestically stage manages her mythological finish with help from the poisonous asp).

But it is with Hamlet that we are introduced to a despairing consciousness, someone whose inner world is as painful as his external reality. There is a causal connection between these realms. The murder of Hamlet’s father by his uncle, which has led to the rotten state of Denmark, has turned the prince’s mourning into melancholia.

Yet there is no doubt that Hamlet feels things more acutely than others. The grief he conceals exceeds that which is visible (“But I have that within that passes show,” he snaps at his mother, who questions his heavy brow of woe).

This excess of sensibility is what made Hamlet such an icon for the Romantics, but it’s also the reason he has become a literary emblem for humanists despite his frequent lapses into nihilistic sentiment. Man is, after all, the self-observing animal, and what could be a greater demonstration of this extraordinary capacity than his questioning of the merits of existence itself?

Suicidal preoccupation in Hamlet is paradoxically a source of his humanity. What draws us to him is the eloquence with which he articulates forbidden feelings that most sentient human beings have shared at one point or another in their long and at times overwhelming journey. Most of us, thank heavens, won’t commit suicide, but one reason suicides fascinate and appall us is that they raise fears about the boundary between black thoughts and irrevocable actions.

This may seem simplistic in this pharmaceutical age of ours, when the chemistry of the brain seems to hold all the answers and the concept of the mind has sadly gone out of fashion. Peter D. Kramer, author of “Listening to Prozac,” wrote an article in the New York Times in 1997 (when antidepressants were in the throes of their pop-cultural moment) arguing that Chekhov’s play “Ivanov” no longer has much relevance. In the bestselling author-doctor’s view, the protagonist, who commits suicide, is simply suffering from “garden-variety depression,” for which we now have a more sophisticated understanding and better methods of treatment.

This may be solid medicine, but it’s shoddy literary criticism. Ivanov’s melancholy opens a window not just onto the inner workings of his character but onto the soul of his society, for this flawed yet rich early play is indeed more concerned with the reactions to Ivanov’s behavior and the interpretations of his moral failings than it is the mystery of his malaise.

Chekhov, a doctor himself, was also keenly aware of the overdetermined nature of suicide, the way in which it is rarely reducible to a single cause, even one as capacious as that voguish 19th century literary disorder known as “superfluous man” syndrome. Moreover, “Ivanov” wasn’t written for psychiatrists engaged in the precarious business of keeping mentally ill patients alive. Art, in general, is intended for the survivors, not the casualties, of life, and its vantage is wider than a particular medical condition.

Suicides in modern drama hold a mirror up to society. After Hedda Gabler shoots herself, Judge Brack, in the final line of Ibsen’s play, exclaims, “But good God! People don’t do such things!” This is Ibsen poking fun at bourgeois attitudes and conventions, the real subject of this dark late 19th century drama.

Willy Loman’s suicide in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” exposes more than the character flaws of a working man who conspicuously lacks the necessary courage for self-knowledge. It’s an indictment of the myth of the American dream.

There are, of course, contemporary plays that attempt to shed light on the internal experience of those who kill themselves. A few days after Robin Williams’ death I reread Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “‘night, Mother” about a character who opts to shut down her life “like the radio when there’s nothing on” she wants to listen to. I wasn’t looking for answers, but I felt the need for a more compassionate examination than what I was finding on Twitter.

In this two-character play, Norman presents Jessie’s decision to commit suicide not as the outcome of her illness or divorce or living situation or delinquent son. It encompasses all of these reasons and extends beyond them as an act of existential freedom. Her response to her mother’s agonizing pleas for her to keep living is a gunshot.

Sarah Kane, the brilliantly talented English playwright who took her own life in 1999, left the dramatic equivalent of a suicide note in her posthumously produced play “4.48 Psychosis,” a work that finds artistic form for the weltering interior confusion of mental illness. More an oral poem than a play, it may be the most harrowing literary record of suicidal depression since Sylvia Plath’s poetry collection “Ariel.”

The play that I, someone who has suffered from spells of “garden-variety depression” like so many others, look to for guidance is strangely “Uncle Vanya,” which hardly ends on an up note. But the way Sonya gives dignity and comfort to her despairing uncle reminds us of the obligations we have to one another to bear our portion of sorrow. For those healthy enough to listen, it is the closest thing the theater has to consoling wisdom.

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com