Stupid Fucking Bird: inconsistent but sometimes glorious

Nathan Kay and Kerry Sandomirsky. Check the label on the wooden box. (Photo by Emily Cooper)

The Search Party’s production of Stupid Fucking Bird isn’t perfect, but it includes so many wildly successful elements that it’s worth seeing.

Aaaron Posner’s script is a riff on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The timeframe is updated to the present and some of the characters are rejigged, but the basic structure — including its major plot points and emphasis on triangles of unrequited love — remains the same.

We’re on Sorn’s country estate. His sister Emma, a star actress, is visiting with her lover Trig, a famous writer. In the play’s first action, Emma’s son Con presents his experimental play, We Are Here, on a stage down by the lake. Emma interrupts the performance so dismissively that Con aborts it. So the foundational unrequited love comes in the shape of Con’s search for approval from his narcissistic mom.

But Con is also yearning for Nina, his sweetheart since childhood, and the ingenue he has cast in We Are Here. But Nina has fallen for Trig, who is captivated by her beauty. (Trig is old enough to be Nina’s father and has vastly more power, so it would be just as easy to say that he’s a predator.)

Meanwhile Mash, Sorn’s parttime cook, is in love with Con and Con’s best friend Dev is helplessly smitten with Mash.

As Sorn says, “So much feeling!”

In Stupid Fucking Bird, Posner leans into this humour very successfully. He spices his script with theatrical in jokes: Mash calls We Are Here site-specific performance art, which, she explains, means that “It’s like a play but not so stupid.” And, in one of the best bits, Con is asking Dev how to make Nina love him again when they decide to ask the audience for advice. On opening night, Nathan Kay (Con) and Anton Lipovetsky (Dev) handled this section with such wit that they had me in stitches. Kay’s hangdog, slightly resentful response to the suggestion “Stop treating her like an object” was priceless.

Which brings me to the performances. Kay, Lipovetsky, and Kevin McNulty (Sorn) are all pitch perfect. Dialogue flows from them with ease — and complexity.

Within seconds of Lipovetsky’s arrival in the action, I was thanking my stars that I was about to spend another theatrical evening with him. On the one hand, his character Dev is a low-status nerd, and Lipovetsky expertly plays the tension between Dev’s romantic optimism and repeated rejection. But Dev is also the most clear-eyed figure: “You think love is logical?” he pointedly asks Con. In a characterization that looks simple but isn’t, Lipovetsky nails this perceptiveness, too.

Blessedly, Kay is just as relaxed with the play’s comedy. Wonderfully — and ironically — responsive with the other actors and the audience, Kay also accesses such depth of feeling in the later going that his performance becomes deeply moving.

Playing Sorn, McNulty is also a master of combining understatement with richness: “When you see an old guy you never know …” what they might have been, what they might have done.

Emma Slipp offers real gifts as Mash — notably her comic timing in the punky torch songs she sings. But my sense is that Slipp’s performance would be stronger if she and director Mindy Parfitt had allowed us to see more of the pain beneath Mash’s stereotypically adolescent depression.

Although it’s not bad, I had more significant difficulty with Baraka Rahmani’s work as Nina. Unlike the best performances in this mounting, Rahmani is pushing a bit, showing us Nina’s character as opposed to more casually inhabiting it.

And I struggled with Kerry Sandomirsky’s Emma. Although the character is self-obsessed as written, playwright Posner also tries to humanize her, giving her a backstory as an exploited young woman. But Sandomirsky’s performance is so brittle that it never lets us inside any of this, nor does it give us any sense of the charisma — and possibly the vulnerability — that have made Emma a star.

For me, Jesse Lipscombe’s work as Trig is the biggest hole in this production. He says his lines, delivering them at face value, but that’s about it.

Because the performers playing Nina, Emma, and especially Trig aren’t firing at the same level as some of the other actors, the first half of this production, which sets up its metatheatricality, works better than the second, which relies on the audience’s emotional investment in the romantic triangles. Because I was less engaged in Act 2, I also had time to notice that, although Posner’s script is diverting, I didn’t find it thematically challenging.

That said, the physical production, is consistently successful. Amir Ofek’s set uses dust covers to make furniture sculptural and I appreciated the wit of what looks like a bullet hole in one of the chairs.

And the glories of both the script and Parfitt’s production remain: formally ambitious, philosophically clever writing and some truly wonderful performances.

Off the top, the staging of Con’s We Are Here is a lovely surprise. Using looping sound in Owen Belton’s sound design, it’s a persuasive invitation to genuine alertness. And, ultimately, that’s what both The Seagull and Stupid Fucking Bird are about.

STUPID FUCKING BIRD by Aaron Posner. Sort of adapted from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.  Directed by Mindy Parfitt. A Search Party production presented by The Cultch. On Friday, April 14. Running in The Cultch’s Historic Theatre until April 23. Tickets

NEVER MISS A REVIEW: Sign up for FRESH SHEET, my weekly e-letter about the arts.

And, if you want to help to keep independent arts criticism alive in Vancouver, check out my Patreon page.