Suicide Has Multiple Victims in ‘Margaret’

An adolescent girl dies by her own hand. She leaves no note, no clue to the secret ofher hopelessness. Dropped with concussive force into the suburban calm of her middle-class neighborhood, her death creates sickening ripples in the lives of those who knew her.

For the girl’s family, those ripples swell into an emotional tidal wave of devastating force. However, if you’re looking for Movie of the Week explanations for the teen’s rash act, don’t expect playwright Timothy McNeil to provide them. Cogently directed by Mark Ruffalo, McNeil’s “Margaret” at the Hudson Backstage offers no pat answers, only lingering pain and simple endurance. In obedience to their biological imperative, the shipwrecked survivors of McNeil’s drama swim and strive as long as they have breath.

For Margaret (Kacy Peacock), the teen who commits suicide, that imperative went unheeded. The play is set in 1968, an effective move that heightens the proceedings into a parable of innocence lost. War, social unrest and feminist discontent have not yet shaken the foundations of this idyllic Midwestern enclave. It takes Margaret’s death to do that.

Initially, McNeil keeps us at an emotional as well as chronological distance, wisely so. The cataclysm occurs early on, when Margaret’s sister, Lisa (Meredith Uccello), discovers Margaret in the kitchen, dead of a self-inflicted shotgun blast.

But that discovery occurs offstage. McNeil takes his time escorting us behind the closed doors of these homes. Co-designers Blake Steury and Bo Crowell’s simple set strings those doors in a deceptively innocuous line, a backdrop for the manicured lawns where much of the action takes place.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Margaret’s mother, Ellen (Julie James), retreats into full-blown fearfulness and dread, while her husband, Jerry (McNeil), struggles to carry on some semblance of a normal family life. Neighbor Bob Marston (Rick Peters) finds distraction in an affair with the discontented Laura (Hillary Hunter), his wife’s (Susan Vinciotti) best friend. And somehow, amid the anguish and disruption, young love--between the bereaved Lisa and Tommy, the Marstons’ youngest son--sweetly surfaces.

So the ripples continue. McNeil weaves a complicated skein of interconnected relationships with only a few false notes, as in the case of boozy floozy Billye Brown, a neighbor who, although played with feisty clarity by Bonnie McNeil, seems overblown in this context.

Director Ruffalo, who has received acclaim for his performance in the film “You Can Count on Me,” meets the challenges of McNeil’s psychologically elaborate tale handily. Some performances, particularly those of the yearning adolescents, may flirt with caricature, but this is a parable after all. What counts is that, by play’s end, we have come to know each character intimately, in all their extraordinary complexity and pain.

“Margaret,” Hudson Backstage Theatre, 6537 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 25. $15. (323) 856-4200. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.