I’ve been thinking a lot about birds lately. Birds have been around for 10s of millions of years. Humans are but a blip in bird evolution. Some birds will outlive us just as they survived the great extinction event of the dinosaurs.

I’ve been thinking about how important birds must be to us. Whether we are aware of them or not, they are in our consciousness - poetry, song lyrics, Shakespeare, logos, idiomatic phrases, national symbols. They are literally everywhere. And yet we mostly take them for granted.

Birds are a passion for some even if I rarely notice birds or pay attention to seeing them in their manifold specificity.

However, this summer I got a call from my tenant: “there’s a dying baby bird in the backyard.” And indeed there it was looking blind and obviously dying. The next day I read about the mysterious illness that was killing starlings and blue jays and robins all over the mid-Atlantic. What’s killing the birds?!

On the other hand, a birder’s notes can be poetry:

Mar 11
Deb reported Mergansers off the beach

March 13
Hearing warblers in pines...
Cowbirds on deck.

March 22
At evening light, two lovely Carolina Wrens sat on deck rail.

March 23
A group of grackles, crows, pursued an osprey. He didn’t care.
Titmouse reappears.

April 4
Wow! Two snowy CATTLE egrets, one great egret and one green heron.

[Thank you to (Prop Artisan) Deb Thomas for sharing one of her Mom’s Birdwatching Journals with me. It made me cry thinking of my grandmother’s similar passion.]

How beautiful to have a play before us about a cross-generational passion for birdwatching. Who ever heard of such such a play?

Each bird song is unique.

Some people can recognize bird songs; for the rest of us it’s just a pretty or unusual set of sounds… when a loved one can’t hear our specific song - it hurts. How beautiful it is that every one of us on this earth is unique.

Some people can actually “see” another person. See their uniqueness. When someone - a parent, a teacher, a lover - sees us that way, it is the most wonderful thing. When someone we love can’t see that we’re a scarlet tanager, not a summer tanager, it can be very painful.

“Why can’t you see that I’m a cardinal, not a bluejay?”

In North America we’ve also got ourselves divided in ways that make “seeing” each other hard and hearing each other even harder. Perhaps everyone can identify with this struggle to be seen and understood.

This play is at least partly about that longing and that struggle to be seen and heard. And it’s about a father and a daughter in that struggle, which makes their attempt poignant and their failure tragic.

Mosaic’s production also takes advantage of the opportunity to cast a mixed-race family. Here we are drawing on the playwright’s own casting instructions and drawing on her own background. How privileged we are to have the opportunity to explore with this production some of the dynamics of a mixed race family, something I personally am interested in.

Time is also crucial in this play. Time plays an important role in any narrative - often creating suspense. The clock ticks down as the players in Squid Games race for their lives. In the play, time is telescoped with each of the ten scenes marking another year passing. The audience becomes more aware of the passage of time. Which is important because we all know our time is limited, but we mostly act like we’ll live forever. In the play, we know the characters are running out of time. Why don’t they!?

Time is also a critical element of the climate crisis we are in… we all know we’re running out time. Greta Thunberg emphasized this in her recent UN speech. “They’ve now had 30 years of blah blah blah and where has that led us?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UryIL4kUcx8

Apparently we humans need to be reminded again and again about how short our time is.

The next hurricane, the next fire... we seem incapable of staying connected to the factor of TIME. We hold it in the moment… but some other impulse erases it when the sun comes out and the smoke clears. Plus it changes so slowly… over time. So that we hardly notice until it’s too late.

I am glad this play will be another reminder about our climate crisis. For the sake of our children and grandchildren it needs to be a factor in all our choices as individuals and as a society.

So too our characters Caitlyn and John keep forgetting that their time to see and hear each other is running out.

Anna Ouyang Moench has written a subtle and carefully crafted play. Like birders - audience members need to pay careful attention - listening and looking for helpful details about time in the play. (Among other things.)

For example, if you can adopt some birder attributes you’ll hear in the dialogue that the play begins in the past (listen to references to the Iraq War) and slowly works it’s way to the present (maybe even the future.) When the play is nearly over we realize the story has been a series of memories or imaginings from the point of view of the present, perhaps Caitlyn’s.

I was wondering about these characters, Caitlyn and John, and about birders.

According to one source:
“If you were looking for a profession to compare with bird watching, you could do worse than detective work. Both occupations require a similar set of skills. There is the eye for detail… that telltale eye stripe that marks the bird out as a rarity. There is also patience - the ability to wait for as long as it takes for the quarry to reveal themselves, and when they do, to have that particular kind of alertness to detect the faintest twitch or a whisper of movement among the branches. Most of all, they must embraces the solitude that comes with their profession, the isolation, the separation from the crowd. They have chosen to watch rather than participate, to operate on the margins rather than within the mainstream. It is a lonely landscape they inhabit, but it is their chosen one.”

To summarize, Birds of North America seems simple because it has only two-person, realistic scenes between the same two characters, takes place in the same location, takes place at the same time of the year over many years, and utilizes the same birdwatching conceit for all 10 scenes.

But for all the reasons I’ve just shared, this is actually a deceptively complex play.

Such plays are also challenging because as an artistic team we have to deliver a dramatic experience using very few theatrical tools. Minimalism means stripping down your tools. There is no reveal of a stunning costume or scene change to provide added entertainment. It’s about the birds and the characters.

Did you read the article in the Washington Post:

The “Lord God Bird” is dead.

The ivory-billed woodpecker, a ghostly bird whose long-rumored survival in the bottomland swamps of the South has haunted seekers for generations, will be officially declared extinct by U.S. officials after years of futile efforts to save it. It earned its nickname because it was so big and so beautiful that those blessed to spot it blurted out the Lord’s name.

Even the scientist who wrote the obit cried.

“This is not an easy thing,” said Amy Trahan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who reviewed the evidence and wrote the report concluding that the ivory bill “no longer exists.”

“Nobody wants to be a part of that,” she added, choking up in a Zoom interview. “Just having to write those words was quite difficult. It took me a while.”

[These commonalities aside, however, individual birdwatchers are as varied in their approach as detectives. There are the casual types, the Easy Rawlins bird watcher, one might call them, who drift through their birding day picking up whatever sightings come their way. There are the dedicated drudges, the Sam Spade birders, unspectacular but methodical, putting in the hard yards, slogging through the toughest terrain in all weathers, the gumshoe equivalent of pounding the mean streets on the seedy side of town, while a veil of grey rain soaks them to the skin. Finally, there are the hunters, the dog-with-a-bone obsessives, unwilling, perhaps even unable, to let the pursuit go until they have run their quarry to ground.]

A Note From Birds of North America Director, Serge Seiden