Stupid F*cking Bird

The Cultch Historic Theatre to April 23, 2023
Tickets from $25 at www.thecultch.com or 604-251-1363

Posted April 16, 2023

It’s not often a script this smart, funny and insightful comes around so I’d suggest you rush out and get yourself a ticket.

Adapted by Aaron Posner from The Seagull, the great Russian classic by Anton Chekhov, Stupid F*cking Bird is as relevant and entertaining as the original was to its late 19^th century audience. Opening night in St. Petersburg was a disaster, almost hissed off the stage, but the remainder of the run and its subsequent Moscow Art Theatre production established Chekhov as a master dramatist. Completing Chekhov’s Big Four, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard followed The Seagull over the next few years.

You don’t have to be familiar with Chekhov’s Seagull to enjoy this Search Party production directed by the company’s founder and artistic director Mindy Parfitt. In fact, it’s easy to spend too much time trying to fit the pieces of this adaptation into the original. Posner has obviously taken huge liberties, starting with the title, but he has remained faithful to the substance of the play: unrequited love and human folly all wrapped up in the characters’ philosophizing over the usefulness/uselessness of theatre. But it’s now metatheatrical: the characters know they are in a play, they all remain on stage throughout, sitting on shabby, period chairs and love seats; they know we are out there and at one point, a character asks directly for advice – “How can I get her to love me?” – and gets responses from the audience.

How can it be so much fun with most of the characters moaning about theatre and thwarted love? Dev (Anton Lipovetsky) loves Mash (Emma Slipp) but Mash loves Con (Nathan Kay). Con loves Nina (Baraka Rahmani) but Nina falls in love with Trig (Jesse Lipscombe) who is the lover of Con’s mother Emma (Kerry Sandomirsky). So much pining, drooping and angst becomes hilarious.

The play takes place in the present on the lakeside estate of aging Sorn (Kevin McNulty) whose sister Emma, a famous actress, and her lover, second-rate writer Trig are visiting from Moscow. On this evening, a little symbolist play written by Emma’s son and aspiring writer Con, is about to be presented with young Nina, a neighbour and would-be actress, in the solo role wearing, as it turns out, a dress of Con’s mother who is well past the ingenue stage in her career. When Emma mocks the play because it’s not a “real play with a plot”, Con, desperate for his mother’s approval, takes offence, stops the play, brings down the curtain, storms off and subsequently tries to kill himself. Or maybe he doesn’t actually mean to kill himself. He doesn’t really know and neither do we.

If this doesn’t sound like fun, believe me, Posner’s smart dialogue and witticisms – including a jab at Cirque de Soleil – make it so. And there’s music under the direction of Lipovetsky on ukulele and sung by the incomparable Emma Slipp (“What Can Be Harder Than Love. Oh Yeah”). Oh, yeah.

Chekhov was all about ensemble playing with no clear protagonist. Posner follows suit and gives each of the characters a chance at centre stage with a monologue. McNulty is slyly charming when he tells us, “When you see an old guy, you never know where he’s been, what he’s done.” Because Sandomirsky has such an illuminating smile, we almost forgive her character’s complete self-absorption. Rahmani brings such bright-eyed innocence to Nina, we fear for her character’s future. Each character in turn reveals him/herself and we understand them even if we don’t like them much. It’s not that we dislike them, we just wish they’d shape up and get on with it.

Of all the characters perhaps we sympathize most with Dev (Lipovetsky) because he sees so clearly what the rest of them do not. “Try”, he tells Con, “loving someone more than yourself.” Good advice for all of them. As an actor, Lipovetsky is so open, so available, it’s impossible not to feel for his character’s hopeless pursuit of Mash who claims, with a heavy sigh, that she is “in mourning for my life.”

And, of course, we are emotionally engaged by Kay’s portrayal of Con: desperate for love, frantic for Nina’s affection and eager to write something new and ground-breaking without the wherewithal to do it.

More than ever before, I felt a self-mocking Chekhov in each of the characters.

Superior direction by Parfitt and stellar performances by everyone, Stupid F*cking Bird is packed with tremendous sympathy for the human condition and the timely questioning of the function of theatre: then as now. While it pays homage to Chekhov, it’s contemporary and f*cking entertaining. Get yourself a ticket.