Friday, February 14, 2025

News and Ideas Worth Sharing

HomeArts & EntertainmentTHEATER REVIEW: Chester...

THEATER REVIEW: Chester Theatre Company plays ‘Birds of North America’ at Chester Town Hall through July 17

"This is a very unusual play that’s been realized by a talented team on and back stage. It’s the sort of play we don’t see very often. Maybe we should. It tells us a lot about ourselves."

Birds of North America
Chester Theatre Company in Chester, Massachusetts
Written by Anna Ouyang Moench, directed by Alex Keegan

“Speak low. Speak love.”

Prelude to a review: I spent Saturday with a playwright I have never met, Anna Ouyang Moench, but spent three hours with her creative mind seeing two very different plays at two very different theaters in two towns in two counties. I will deal with them separately for they have very little in common except for their literary stylings.

In this play by Anna Ouyang Moench the major dilemma has nothing to do with the play’s title. Instead we are faced with a friendly, if failing, father-daughter friendship that is centered on the experience of bird-watching, or birding. Part of the joy in this is recording what you have seen and when and what—if anything—the birds were doing. This couple of birders have, obviously, been doing this together for a long time. John is dogmatic about it all; Caitlyn is a true match but with concerns for both people that supercede her fascination with the flyers they see. John cannot handle his wife’s troubles and he takes refuge with Caitlyn who often takes charge of the difficulties at home. She is so attentive to family issues that over the dozen or so years seen in the play she becomes a surrogate parent to her parents and her sibling and even her sibling’s child. It is her gradually growing disgust with her father’s infidelity to his responsibilities that haunts the center of this interesting drama.

Mullen and Wu. Photo by Andrew Greto.

The play is set in the backyard of John’s house. The two meet daily to move their hobby to the forefront of their lives. As they move through time it becomes radically clear that John is simply withdrawing from responsibility and Caitlyn is taking on more than she ever thought she would. They meet in all seasons. So much is the same from year to year that they hardly notice time fleeing from them. John, especially, ignores his wife’s cancer and impending death. Caitlyn fouls up several relationships and gives in to the need for a companion to take up with a biker who is not of her class and to take in a child who is virtually abandoned by parents. It’s all for the birds. Literally.

Playwrigiht Anna Ouyang Moench uses words judiciously in this play. Each phrase seems to have been carefully chosen to make a point about the lives of her protagonists. Using repetition, or seeming repetition, she emphasizes how two compulsive souls can merge to create a single entity that will, in time, split in two, leaving neither one whole, or at least wholly capable.

John, as played by Christopher Patrick Mullen, is a man with strong convictions but without the strength of will to make them work. He is endowed with knowledge but witihout self-knowledge. He creates excuses to keep himself safe from family disasters. His bible, his life guide, is the one essential item cherished by all birders, everywhere: “Birds of North America,” a beautifully illustrated guidebook to the art of bird-watching. He is thrilled when a rare bird shows up. It is what he wants to discuss with his daughter and not the health of his wife, her mother. A bird rarely seen is an achievement of greatness and though it is not something he can easily share with her, Caitlyn is almost as excited about this discovery as her father really is.

Trying to create and live a life, Caitlyn, played with vigorous intent by Micheline Wu, ultimately realizes that her father’s obsession is also her own and that it is crippling. The author, true to her style in this and another play being seen locally in Williamstown, has a very specific way ot having her characters speak. They each say things that mean a lot to them, but less to each other. Their sense of connection is limited by self-interest and serious documentation of their obsessive viewing. Work cannot be sustained and love-lives are limited by the binoculars, or opera-glasses, that they never take off lest they miss a rare bird or another common one new to the flock. It takes an unseemly act of aggression to move Caitlyn to a new sphere, one her father cannot join and move in successfully. Her action is so horrendous he removes himself from her presence.

Even the talents of director Alex Keegan can’t help enrich the father-daughter partnership. She does all that she can do to keep the healthy side of this obsession prominent, but when the human side of John slowly disappears, only to come back to haunt his daughter, the play begins to lose a bit of its impact. But obsessive behavior does that to a person. I think that, incidentally, Moench has started down a rabbit hole of political invective here. John’s bird interest overtakes his human feelings and, Trump-like, begins to point inward where his own, converted ideology becomes all that matters to him. Caitlyn’s life, which he loved to tease and praise, has become just one more thing that distracts him from his obsession with birdwatching. He can easily avoid reality in his hobby-life. Real life means less and less as he begins to avoid Caitlyn’s revelations by simply walking into the house and closing the door. She understands that there are issues to repair and actions to take to salvage what’s left of the shared interests.

Ed Check’s backyard set is simple but complete. Anna Sorrentino’s costumes do the job. Lara Dubin’s lighting design both defines the time and the season but also amplifies the mood of each scene. Tom Shread’s sound design is perfection. This is a very unusual play that’s been realized by a talented team on and back stage. It’s the sort of play we don’t see very often. Maybe we should. It tells us a lot about ourselves.

“Birds of North America” plays at the Chester Town Hall, Theater, 15 Mountain View Road, Chester, MA through July 17. For information and tickets call 413-354-7771 or go their website.

spot_img

The Edge Is Free To Read.

But Not To Produce.

Continue reading

AT THE TRIPLEX: Comedies of romance

The genre of romantic comedies covers far more than the basic “romcom.” For those who crave something a little more honest, there is its sharper, acerbic sibling: the comedy of romance.

Tickets go on sale Feb. 18, for Emmylou Harris and Graham Nash at Tanglewood on July 29

All seem to agree that Harris' singing hovers between Earth and heaven and that her ability to select the perfect song—whether penned by herself or others—is uncanny.

‘Borderland | The Line Within’ is a must-see

The filmmakers will lead a bilingual Q&A following the screening at The Triplex tomorrow night.

The Edge Is Free To Read.

But Not To Produce.