Prop: Suicide note
Appearing in: “Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart, A Comedy With a Body Count,” Rhinoceros Theater Festival
Though Ian Belknap bills himself as a comedian, he is no stranger to tragedy. When he was 9 years old, his father left the family behind in Amherst, Mass., and moved to Arizona for good. “He was a hippie who embraced the counter culture without adopting its social mission,” Belknap recalls.
When Belknap was 20, news came that his father had died in his car from carbon monoxide poisoning. That was it–no more details, no grieving. “The non-coping mechanism of my family was not to speak about it, which was less than productive,” says Belknap. In fact, it was the second tragic death in the family. When Belknap was 19, his father’s father was beaten to death with pruning shears. His murder remains unsolved.
“All the other stories I perform are obliquely referring to or springing from these events,” explains Belknap, “so if I wanted to grow as an artist I knew I had to meet them head on.” So he wrote to newspapers and medical examiners and law enforcement officials to get more information about the deaths.
The sheriff’s department that had investigated his father’s death sent him an envelope. Belknap found a report inside–and to his great surprise, a photocopy of his father’s suicide note, rewritten in the hand of a police official. “My response was very complicated given the amount of time that had elapsed,” Belknap says. “There was no blunt force trauma. It was a bit more removed. I cycled through a lot of anger and self-pity, and a sense of betrayal before I could feel the delayed sadness that was at the core.”
Belknap reads the note during his solo performance “Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart, A Comedy With a Body Count.” The show is a close-up view of his attempt to wrestle some meaning from the deaths. “I’ve stripped away a lot of my performance tropes [that] lead me to be ironic and distant and dismissive, and tried to get at the central kernel of honesty and earnestness,” he explains.
But, he is quick to add, “I cast a pretty cold eye on the confessional, Dr. Phil-ification of our culture. So this is not a wallow festival to manipulate the audience. I want them to have their own response.”
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“Wide Open Beaver Shot of My Heart, A Comedy With a Body Count,” through Oct. 22, Prop Thtr, 3504 N. Elston Ave. $15 suggested donation; 773-267-6660.
