1st Play Response- Zora Kesich
First Play Response– Stupid Fucking Bird
On Saturday, May 28th, in South Portland Maine, I went to see a live production. The play was a modern adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s ‘The Seagull’, and it was titled ‘Stupid Fucking Bird’. I have never read or seen the original play, but I greatly enjoyed this one. I felt that it took the audience through a wide range of emotions and spoke to some important questions that many people grapple with.
A few of the characters were in situations where they person they loved did not love them back but loved someone else instead. This was inevitably a very painful state and many of the play’s monologues centered around the question: “Why doesn’t the person I love love me back?” or “What can I do to earn back their love?” These are age old questions but the way they were portrayed in the play felt new and interesting to me. I think part of it was due to the fact that the language was so honest and felt very authentic.
Interestingly, the play broke the fourth wall quite a bit. At many points throughout the show, actors addressed the audience directly and even acknowledged the fact that they were in a play and that they were actors. I actually really enjoyed this. It kept me engaged and made it easier for me to put the play in the context of my own life since the actors were helping me do so.
Another important question the play addressed was “Do their need to be new forms of art or should we work with the existing forms?” The protagonist’s mother was a very successful traditional actress and the protagonist worked with new experimental forms of performance. Throughout the play, he and others around him, considered the inherit value of creating new art forms. The mother argued that the old forms were perfectly good and that there was really no need for new ones. This was an interesting question because the form this particular show was taking was that of an old play. Thus, in this sense, I was watching an old form made new in some aspects.
Yet another relatable issue the characters faced was questioning why they were not happy. None of the characters were truly happy. They were all deeply flawed, facing significant inner turmoil. This falls in line with what I read in the textbook about Chekhov’s plays– his characters are complex. He has no simple, one-sided characters who are happy all of the time and never face emotional anguish. One of the characters in particular, a doctor, asked ‘Is everyone pretending to be happy just like I am? Or is everyone else genuinely happy?’ I think this is a question that plagues a great number of people, so to see it portrayed on the stage was moving.
One of my favorite characters was Nina, who was the girlfriend to the protagonist at the start of the play. She was his muse and he was deeply in love with her. However she cannot love him back fully and runs away with an older writer. When she returns years later, she tells her former boyfriend that she could not be with him because she did not feel like a human being. Instead, she felt like she was a seagull. Nina’s storyline was complex and she was in a lot of pain throughout the play. I thought that the actor who played Nina was extremely talented, making her character captivating to watch. However, all of the actors were talented. This made the play genuinely enjoyable to watch, making me laugh at times, and feel somber and pensive at others.