THEATRE REVIEW: THE BIRD
14 JAN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3 out of 5

Metaphors often serve as the mules of the theatre world.

Properly harnessed, they can carry a lot of freight, after all — but just let a playwright get on the wrong side of one of ’em, and chances are he or she will be picking himself up from the wrong side of a bunch of bad reviews. Happily, although she’s saddled her latest play with a metaphor that seems pretty lame, playwright Sonja Mills suffers only a glancing blow from the inevitable kickback.

Titled THE BIRD, it’s a semi-smart little party piece that aims a little lower than OMNIUM GATHERUM, but still falls short of its metaphorical goal. It opened at Buddies in Bad Times’ mainspace Wednesday, in a presentation by Union Eight Theatre.
The play is set in an upscale downtown penthouse shared by Kate, a successful marketing executive played by Astrid Van Wieren, and Mia, an insecure artistic sort played by Lesley Dowey. While Kate toils in the business world, Mia has adopted taxidermy as her medium of choice — which explains the stuffed and moth-eaten bird of prey that dominates their home, even though it clearly gives Kate the willies.

What’s giving Mia the willies these days, however, is the mysterious Petty (played by Anna Chatterton), the young woman that Kate has recently hired as her assistant and whom the jealous Mia sees as a potential romantic rival. In order to check out the possible competition, Mia has invited Petty and her underachieving-but-amiable husband, Gord, played by Jim Shlag, for drinks. But Petty and Gord, it seems, have taken Mia at her word when she urged them to bring their family as well, and they arrive with Petty’s suicidal brother, a banking executive named Boo (Bruce Hunter) and his avaricious wife (Veronika Hurnik) in tow. Mills rounds out her guest list by introducing a seventh character, Mia’s very pregnant sister, played by Caitlin Morris-Cornfield, into the fray with little apparent effect, apparently trusting her audience to fill in the details about why she’s there and what role the baby she is carrying is supposed to play in Kate and Mia’s future.

As the evening unfolds — or, more accurately, unravels — and as booze and drugs combine with explosive effect, the assembled gathering has it out on a range of subjects, ranging from same-sex marriage through the effect of high-rise condo towers on the avian population, with almost obligatory stops to dissect the worlds of finance and marketing and read their bloody entrails along the way.

Known most widely for her acclaimed drama, THE DANISH PLAY, Mills has clearly sharpened her pen to take aim at the often dicey and difficult world of farce, made even more dicey for being rendered largely in stark shades of black — and happily she scores more than a few laughs. But such plays are notoriously difficult to bring to life.

And working on a set that designer Patrick Du Wors clearly hopes will pass for upscale luxury, director Ruth Madoc-Jones tries to weed out the awkwardness of bringing a script to life while still preserving the awkwardness of bringing together a group of strangers. She achieves only a mixed success at best. While she establishes the latter with satisfying effect, she never fully overcomes the former, and as a result this party is driven more by political strife than personal acrimony, for all that it is the personal that is supposed to drive it.

All of which means that in the end, Mills’ metaphor — something to the effect that we are all merely disoriented birds making our way through tall towers — never really takes wing and soars. To mix a metaphor.