You never know what anyone else is going through. It’s often the person you least expect. When people tell you they’re fine, they might actually be desperate for help. These are the well-worn truisms explored in Jump, Charly Evon Simpson’s one-act drama about the impact of suicide on a family. But Shattered Globe’s Midwest premiere production, directed with kinetic flair by AmBer Montgomery, explores these themes in authentic, moving and often-surprising ways.
A trope Simpson does not embrace is the one about suicide being a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Though she unflinchingly shows the wreckage left in the wake of a loved one killing themselves, the play breaks taboo by treating the decision with respect and giving the person a full hearing as they explain why jumping off a bridge felt like the right choice for a very long time.
That choice is leavened by other characters struggling, and ultimately succeeding, to battle their own depression and suicidal ideations and embrace life in all its messy, painful glory.
The play centers on Judy, a woman who’s always on time and lives a well-organized life governed by her planner, and her baby sister Fay, who’s moody and somewhat disaffected as she seems to be waiting for something to happen in her life.
The two, empathetically portrayed by Jennifer Glasse and Jazzma Pryor, meet at their childhood home overlooking a bridge. They’re there to help their father (a wounded, emotionally distant Alfred H. Wildon) finish packing the place up a year after their mother’s death from cancer. They live very different lives, but a trip to the bedroom they shared growing up rekindles their sisterly bond. To a point.
Fay has taken to walking the bridge most evenings for a quiet vape on the water. There, she encounters Hopkins, a brooding young grad student (Jeff Kurysz, playing deep emotional chords with an appealingly light touch).
Hopkins resents the intrusion, perhaps contemplating a jump to a watery death in peace. When Hopkins starts dancing and singing along noisily to the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” playing on his phone to drive Fay off, she shocks him by joining in and then calling him out on his rude behavior. Hopkins has found a friend, and a reason to keep living, at least for a while.
That dance on the bridge is of a piece with Judy’s repeated flopping back onto her childhood bed and dissolving into giggles like she’s diving backwards into the water, and Fay throwing one vape off the bridge only to produce another–and then another, and then still more of them–in her triumphantly raised right fist as the most recently tossed vape pen splashes down.
These manic actions underscore that to live is to move and impetuously embrace the whims of the moment, even if that may mean giving in to the temptation to feel what it’s like to fall into a deep river from a great height.
Shattered Globe Theatre’s production of Jump runs through June 1 at Theater Wit.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Liz Lauren
