Stupid Fucking Bird

One hundred and fifteen years ago, the Moscow Art Theatre produced a play by an obscure playwright – really, a physician who wrote plays – which changed the history of theater. The play was called The Seagull, the playwright was Anton Chekhov, and the Constantin Stanislavski-directed production successfully challenged virtually every convention in the contemporary theater. In The Seagull, characters spoke elliptically, rather than directly; most dramatic events occurred offstage; and the setting, instead of being a few suggestive gestures on a bare stage, was so detailed and realistic that one critic reported that he could smell the lake in the background.

The Seagull, thus, talked the talk, in the character of the young playwright Constantine Treplieff, who skewered contemporary theater, and walked the walk, in the person of Chekhov, who showed an alternative.

On Sunday night, Woolly Mammoth Theatre produced a play written by Aaron Posner, a man better known as a director. Stupid Fucking Bird won’t change the history of theater – it’s too honest to do that – but in scope of ambition, wit, insight, power of observation, beauty of language and quality of execution, is as good as anything you’ve seen in Washington this season ….

….if you love theater.

I add this caveat because the value of Stupid Fucking Bird, like that of the story upon which it is based, is primarily in its critique of the form. Aside from that, both plays are essentially melodramas, in which A loves B, who loves C, who loves D, and so on through the rest of the alphabet.

In this instance, A is Dev (Darius Pierce, bearing a remarkable resemblance to a young Wallace Shawn), a self-admittedly “chubby, bald” and compulsively likeable young man hopelessly in love with the poetically disagreeable Mash (Kimberly Gilbert, hitting the sweet spot with this performance), who loves the splenetic young playwright Con (Brad Koed), who is consumed with desire for the beautiful wannabe actor Nina (Katie duBuys), who worships the preening literary novelist Doyle (Cody Nickell), who is sleeping with the fading actress Emma (Kate Eastwood Norris), who is in love with herself.

It is a potent stew, and Posner, like Chekhov before him, salts it with enough subterranean danger to fill one of Dr. Freud’s casebooks. Emma is actually Con’s mother, and she represents precisely the sort of theater he intends to overthrow. Doyle is not only the lover of Con’s mother, but a man who holds the position to which Con aspires – a literary king, popular, financially successful, and well-regarded. If you see overtones of Hamlet here you wouldn’t be the first – the same observation is frequently made about The Seagull – but this is a little like Hamlet on steroids. Imagine how melancholy the Dane would have been if Ophelia fell for Claudius just as Hamlet was telling her to get to a nunnery.

But let’s get to the heart of the matter: Stupid Fucking Bird, like The Seagull before it, demands a realer theater. “Good Christ, we need new forms, new passions, new work, new ideas,” Con rants to kindly old

Sorn (Rick Foucheaux; the character is a mashup of The Seagull’s elderly landlord Soren and the wise Doctor Dorn). “New forms of theater that can actually make you feel like living better or fuller or…more!” Sorn tentatively praises the work of Cirque Du Soleil, which Con immediately scorns: “Nothing changed” after a performance, he growls. “Nothing in me, nothing in the world…Nothing real.”

So what is the falsest thing about the theater? That it refuses to recognize that it is theater, and pretends to be real life. Con is having none of that: when he comes on stage at the outset, he announces “the play will begin when someone says, ‘start the fucking play’” and the stage is thereafter silent and motionless until someone in the audience realizes hey, that’s my cue and says the magic words.

What follows is a symphony of self-consciousness, and I mean that in the best way possible. Chekhov’s famous maxim is that you can’t show a gun on the wall in the first Act without firing it in the third. Here the great set designer Misha Kachman festoons the back wall of the stage with seven stencils of Chekhov’s face, and thereafter the play fires Chekhov at us for two and a half hours.

Later, Con rails against “tiny, tepid, clever-y clever-y clever-y little plays that are being produced by terrified theatres just trying to keep ancient Jews and gay men and retired academics and a few random others who did plays in high school trickling in their doors.” Suddenly he turns on the audience. “Do you know that six people is now a big play? Seven or eight, like this one….yes, I know I’m in a play. I’m right here and you’re right there, and since you can see and hear me let’s just assume I can see and hear you….”

Later still, and more disastrously, Con turns to the audience for advice on how to win Nina’s love. “Follow her around,” shouts one audience member who is obviously unfamiliar with the concept of the restraining order. “Date other people,” offers another, forgetting perhaps that in the world of this play Con’s options are Mash and his mother.

One of playwriting’s prime directives is never to break the fictive dream, lest audience members switch their attention from your story to where they will go for drinks after. Stupid Fucking Bird bitch-slaps the audience awake on a regular basis, and yet the audience keeps dreaming still, so beautifully written and delivered is the story.

And let’s talk about that delivery, shall we? Posner is bold enough to invite comparisons with Chekhov, but this cast also permits itself to be compared to the great Moscow Arts cast of 1898, which featured Stanislavski as the director and also as a performer; as well as Vsevolad Meyerhold (who Stanislavski called “my sole heir”) and Olga Knipper, who later married Chekhov. I missed the Moscow Arts production, but it is hard to imagine that it was much better than this one.  Stanislavski noted that actors should “wipe away dribble, blow their noses, smack their lips, wipe their sweat” and director Howard Shalwitz honors those observations: without being conspicuous, the characters are busy being human throughout the production. deBuys’ Nina, the epitome of pristine beauty, is particularly good at this.

A great play – and this is one – is made up of a mosaic of brilliant small moments, and I list some of them here. Gilbert, an actor of great range and scope, is particularly good playing supernally angry young women; here, she sings her melancholy, self-pitying, slightly ridiculous songs (“You’re born and then you live and then you die/You never get to know the reason why/You breathe and then you don’t, you’ve just begun/You’re hot you rot, and then you’re done….”) with such a righteous conviction that she, almost against her will, becomes sympathetic. Though her passion for Con is insane and her hostility is grating, Gilbert gets enough of Mash’s vulnerability through to marshal us behind her.

Pierce’s Dev is a closet intellectual with a sense of bewildered decency – an unruly array of characteristics which Pierce somehow manages to meld into a coherent character. Eastwood Norris has for many years been the most accomplished comic actor in Washington but Emma is not a comic character. She is instead a desperate woman, hanging on to her lover and her career with all the strength she can muster. She inverts the traditional mother’s role, in that she claws at her son to protect herself, and she hates herself for it, and she does it again. It is an immensely complicated role, and demands a bravura performance. Eastwood Norris gives it.

Doyle is not the complicated role that its Seagull counterpart, Boris Trigorin, is, but it has plenty of mustard to it. Nickell’s Doyle is brilliant, arrogant, shallow, opportunistic, and capable of stunning indifference, as many great writers are. Nickell has frequently acted with Eastwood Norris before (she is his real-life wife) and his scenes with her have the grace of familiarity and the resonance of deep feeling: when Doyle pleads with Emma to “let me go” he sounds less like a man who wants to dump his lover for a younger woman than a doomed soul trying to get out of hell.

Nina is a classic virgin seductress; translated into the twenty-first century, she is a young woman of good intention with normal sexual urges and a tendency to romantic fantasy. deBuys, who showed her mastery of below-the-surface sexuality nearly three years ago in Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room at Woolly, gets all of it here, too.

Foucheux’s Sorn melds two of Chekhov’s characters – one wise, and the other ill – and gives us a man who is weighted down with wisdom. He is a witty man, whose remarks are shadowed with sorrow, and Foucheux gives us him with great economy of gesture. He is without self-pity, but not without regret. When he asks his assembled guests whether they have lived their lives authentically, or only acted a part they assigned themselves (a question also being asked in Studio’s The Real Thing) the chilled silence spreads out from the stage and into the audience. And when he says “I want to be twenty-seven again. I think I’m ready to do my late twenties really well now” the chill, and the shock of recognition, spreads from the audience out into the heart of our self-absorbed city.

Koed plays Con with an unvarying thermonuclear intensity – the Chernobyl of characters – which must be a director’s, and probably a playwright’s, choice. I get the same sensation from watching him that I do from seeing some Hamlets: I’m uncomfortable, and I’m supposed to be. Con is rageful, self-aware, and self-pitying; his self-awareness makes him rage at his self-pity, which therefore increases it. Con’s flaws are not mere character flaws, which he can overcome or we can forgive, but something fatally deeper: flaws in the argument, which Posner, to his eternal credit, recognizes and forthrightly states.

Consider: at the outset of The Seagull, Treplieff presents a play which – though abstract and unconventional – showed integrity of concept, beauty of form, and technical proficiency. Con’s play at the beginning of Stupid Fucking Bird – the play with which he intended to launch his assault on conventional theatrical form – is simply ridiculous, featuring Nina repeating “Here we are” over and over again, and following it with lines that sound dangerously like commercial jingles. Con’s mother, like Treplieff’s, loudly scoffs during the show, but here we are secretly with her.

Or this: Boris Trigorin, the novelist Treplieff seeks to overthrow, is nothing more than a popular middlebrow – a Muscovite Dan Brown. “[I]f you have read Tolstoi or Zola you somehow don’t enjoy Trigorin,” Treplieff sniffs at one point. But Doyle, for all his insufferable smugness, is really a great artist, and Con comes to admit it.  Doyle’s “stories are sharp. Clean. Smart. Efficient…So good. So simple. He just says things. Just says them, you know? I have to shock and astound….”

Or this: in a parody of the American musical’s “I want” song, in which characters let the audience know what their objectives will be, Posner gathers his characters together for a festival of self-pity. “I just want to shine!” Nina cries. “I want to ignite the world for one, hot, shining moment….” “I’d really just rather not be hated anymore,” Emma rejoins, and Doyle moons, “I want sweet first kisses. Inconceivable softness.” “I want a bottomless bowl of ice cream,” Dev states, getting to the bottom of our childish, selfish dreams. “A bowl the size of a bushel basket.”

Or, finally, this: Con’s realization that we need not new forms but new dedication. “I mean, new forms. Why? Why? Why new forms? How about this for an idea: just make the old forms better!”

Oh, my – what’s this: someone who, instead of blaming form or convention or tradition or history blames the artists who use them for failing to use them as well as they can? Someone who says that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves? It is an act of historical importance to tear theater down in order to have it start anew. But it is an act of grace to challenge theater to become greater without tearing it down.

So for this act of grace, Mr. Posner, you and your collaborators at Woolly Mammoth have presented the best play I have seen this year.

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Stupid Fucking Bird by Aaron Posner . directed by Howard Shalwitz . featuring Brad Koed, Kate Eastwood Norris, Cody Nickell, Katie deBuys, Rick Foucheux, Kimberly Gilbert and Darius Pierce . Set design by Misha Kachman . costume design by Laree Lentz . lighting design by Colin K. Bills .  Sound design by James Sugg. Maribeth Chaprnka was the stage manager. Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company . Reviewed by Tim Treanor