THIS BIRD AIN’T SO STUPID
There is a strange little niche tucked away in the theatre world which, for lack of a better term, could be called “Travesty Theatrics.” It’s when a classic drama is taken and reworked as a caricature, parody, or mockery of itself. (More on that later.)
A new, actor driven company, Blue Pen Theatre, has chosen a “Travesty Theatrics” for its debut production, Stupid Fucking Bird, Aaron Posner’s 2013 deconstructed meta-homage to Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, the first of that Russian dramatist’s major works. written in 1895. Posner has made certain, precise changes. He replaced those intimidating jumbles of Russian given names, surnames, and patronymics with much more accessible Americanized monikers. So, for Chekhov’s protagonist, Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev, Poser gives us the straightforward diminutive of “Con.”
Additionally, Poser squeezes Chekhov’s four acts into a tidy three, and drops the play’s text into a postmodern blender. Nevertheless, Poser follows Chekhov’s storyline quite faithfully:
A large extended family gathers at the beach house of kindly Doctor Sorn (Marjo Riikka Makila). There’s Emma (Nalini Sharman) a famous actress accustomed to being the centerpiece at any social function; her lover and a famous author, Trigorin (Alessandro Marino); her son Con (Nick Samson), who’s not a famous playwright and is not happy about that; Nina (Amanda Perez) who longs to be a famous actress but has to settle for being beloved by Con; and Dev (Solomon Astley), Con’s best friend who only has eyes for the musical, morose Mash (Nika Burnett), who could care less about Dev’s eyes or any other part of him, because she longs for Con.
As in The Seagull, both works have a cast of characters who are exquisitely dissatisfied with their lives and appear to derive only displeasure from their desires, and both plays begin with Con presenting his avant-garde play, seemingly to annoy all those present in the house, especially his mother, with Nina wearing one of her old costumes playing the only role.
The tensions within SFB, applied in the large brush strokes of character rather than plotting, mirror those of Chekhov’s Seagull as well. There is the same antagonism between son and mother, the same envy between son and mother’s lover. There is the matching tension arising from the full house of star-crossed lovers, from Nina, who’s looking for romantic love, to Trigorin, who’s looking for convenient love, and Emma, who’s brimming with love but mainly for herself.
Unlike the characters in The Seagull, those in SFB know they are the play’s dramatis personae from the very beginning. When Con informs the audience “the play will begin when someone says, ‘start the fucking play,’” the results are Chekhov’s opening play within the play which then becomes Poser’s opening play within the play within the play. Suddenly, those mirrored tensions take on the attributes of “fun house mirrors.” The effect of this conceit, paradoxically, is not to diminish the characters’ humanity but rather to burnish it.
This is particularly apparent in Astley and Burnett’s performances. Dev doesn’t crave fame or artistic heights; only Mash’s love. Mash is gruff. When her character is asked why she always wears black, she answers, “I’m in mourning for my life.” But this attitude strikes one as more defensive than natural in her, for Mash possesses music within her soul, and Burnett has a lovely voice to present it. They are the only couple who achieve a modicum of happiness at the end of the play and are deserving of it. Makila as Sorn, who suffers her anguish silently, accepting her fate rather than blaming others for it, also displays an inner pool of humanity. She has one of the more poignant moments in a play that has no lack of them: blowing out the candle on her birthday cake, aware that her wish will go unfulfilled. But it is Perez, as the most innocent on stage, who seduces us with the earnestness of her dreams and shatters us when those dreams wither into nightmares with the onset of reality.
SFB is very witty and sharp-tongued, but it is not humor that divides it from Chekhov’s play. Despite the topics of infidelity, infant mortality, and suicide found on its pages, Chekhov always thought of The Seagull as a comedy. Set within the intensity of Poser’s more defined context of comicality, the intimacy of the characters’ tragedies seems somehow to obtain a sharper cut. It’s as if sharing the secret that it’s all just a performance elevates us from the roles of audience and actors to that of confidants.
By shuffling the audience to different playing areas in the shifting of his scenes and focus, director Connor del Rio serves to strengthen this sense of connection, while at the same time succeeding in distracting the audience from the fact that the glamorous beach house where the play’s action occurs is in actuality a Quonset hut.
A familiarity with Chekhov’s play would add to one’s appreciation for Stupid Fucking Bird, but it is not a necessity. The show is strong enough to stand on its own.
The production is double-cast, and this review is for the first troupe, performing on May 9–10 and 16–17. The second time out is a walk on a slightly wilder side with the addition of gender-swapping among the roles. They can be seen on May 30–31 and June 6–7.
All in all, Blue Pen impressed me with their professionalism, unbridled enthusiasm and a commitment to their craft that could not conceal the joyfulness beneath it. I wish them well, and hope for many more shows to come.
Examples of Travesty Theatrics past:
You had Joseph Papps’ 1968 Naked Hamlet. There was no nudity in the Papps’ reworking of the Bard’s melancholy Dane, but the play opened with Claudius and Gertrude frolicking about in bed, and Hamlet (Martin Sheen), appearing from under their bed handcuffed in a coffin.
James McClure took the Restoration comedy Wild Oats; or, The Strolling Gentlemen by Irish playwright John O’Keeffe, and swapped the drawing rooms of 18th-century England for the saloons and tumbleweeds of the Wild West for his gag-fest homage Wild Oats: A Romance of the Old West, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in 1984.
Christopher Durang gave an absurdist tweak to two Tennessee Williams classics. In 1994, his For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls, a gender-bending one-act version of The Glass Menagerie has the devoted mother Amanda all fraught and frenzied over the impending arrival of “the feminine caller” to meet Lawrence, her hyper-sensitive son who collects glass cocktail stirrers. Then in 1994, Durang came out with his parody of A Streetcar Named Desire aptly entitled Desire, Desire, Desire, in which the Stanley character just keeps shouting “Stella” over and over.
Stupid Fucking Bird
Blue Pen Theatre
presented as part of Everfound Art’s NEW FORMS
MiViDa in Frogtown, 2415 Eads St, Los Angeles
2 hours 20 minutes with intermission
Fri and Sat: Gallery viewing and drinks @ 7 – Show @ 8
original cast ends on May 17;
gender-bending cast runs May 30-June 7
for tickets (46.90 includes gallery and show), visit Blue Pen
