Birds of a Feather
Stageworks Theatre, 1120 E. Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, through Feb. 15. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. $30. 813-374-2416, stageworkstheatre.org, review rating: 2 1/2 out of five stars.
In a promotional video for Stageworks’ production of Birds of a Feather, director Karla Hartley talks about a happy coincidence: On the day the company began rehearsals for the play, which is based on a true story about two male penguins that raised a chick together at NYC’s Central Park Zoo, gay marriage became legal in Florida.
We were pretty late to the game, of course, given that 35 states had already legalized same-sex unions by that point, but hey, Florida! And unless the Supreme Court goes insanely retro on us this spring, the rest of the country will soon follow.
Which is maybe one reason why Marc Acito’s play feels a bit dated. A lot has happened since it premiered in a Fairfax, Virginia theater in 2011, and since a children’s book about the two-daddy penguin family, And Tango Makes Three, became one of the most-banned books in America in 2005. The message that family is family is family — straight, gay, penguin, whatever — may still raise hackles in many sectors of American culture (see: Alabama), but for your average 2015 regional theater audience — or at least for this long-married gay man — it’s not exactly news.
But Acito’s not just writing about the penguins. He broadens his scope by interweaving the true stories of two other couples: the red-tailed hawks Pale Male and Lola, who famously nested atop one of Manhattan’s priciest co-ops, and residents Paula Zahn, the CNN anchor, and her husband, real estate magnate Richard Cohen, who was president of the co-op board when it removed the hawks’ nest in 2004. A female zookeeper who cares for the penguins, Roy and Silo, is a connective thread, providing a zoologist’s point of view on animal mating behavior, while bemoaning her own single status and cherishing the gay male friends who make up her ad hoc family.
A versatile four-person cast plays multiple roles, both bird and human, and does it so well that you may find yourself checking the playbill afterwards to make sure there were only four actors. Scott Daniel, best-known as half of the hilarious mother-son duo Scott & Patti (aka Matthew McGee), gets to spread his wings here. His show-tune-loving Roy is appealingly and familiarly over the top, but he also shows range as the cocky hawk Pale Male and goes full-on Church Lady as a censorious librarian. Robert Richards, Jr. does a nice job switching between the somber, cerebral Silo and the hysterics-prone Lola, and Molly Leigh Healy is appealing (if occasionally inaudible) as both the zookeeper and Zahn. Johnny Garde is a standout; he’s completely convincing as a dorky birdwatcher, a fire-breathing preacher and a shy schoolgirl, and even manages to breathe some life into the thankless role of Richard Cohen.
But the Cohen/Zahn scenes are emblematic of a central problem in the script. Like the relationships of the two avian couples, what we see jibes closely with the facts: yes, Zahn did have an affair with a golfing buddy of Cohen’s; yes, Pale Male had plenty of mates before Lola; yes, Silo did leave Roy for a female named Scrappy, and Tango, the penguin raised by the two males, wound up pairing with another female. But where you might hope that the fanciful premise of talking birds could send the play soaring beyond just the facts, the birds are just as grounded as Zahn and Cohen.
There are charming moments when the actors give us glimpses of bird behavior (a waddle, a cocked head, a tailfeather shake), and Acito has invented a lyrical vocabulary with which the birds describe their world (“the hard wall of sky”). Frank Chavez’s bird costuming is clever, too: Red Baron goggles, orange sneakers, asymmetrical cardigans that double as wings. But the script relies too much on avian aphorisms (“Who peed in your herring?”), Donald Trump jokes, and worse, sitcom gender stereotypes: the rich asshole with the indignant wife (“Don’t be such a dick, Richard”); the whining stay-at-home mom (Lola) and the macho hubby (Pale Male): “Why are females so obsessed with relationships?”; the gay male (Roy) whose flamboyance makes his partner (Silo) uncomfortable. And Roy and Silo’s final confrontation harks back uncomfortably to Boys in the Band-era gay self-hatred. Silo wants to make a distinction between being gay and having a gay relationship, and Roy responds tearfully, “Who wants to be gay?”
Really? That’s the gay-family-positive message this play wants to leave us with?
The best moments in the play, and the production, take place not between the three main couples but in encounters that we see only once apiece. Pale Male, alighting near Silo, reveals himself to be brutally homophobic but also asks sincere questions about how gay relationships work; Tango approaches Roy, now alone and sorrowful, and tells him, ever so tentatively, about her new girlfriend; and, in a scene which could be the germ of a whole different and arguably better play, the birdwatcher and the zookeeper meet and flirt in endearingly awkward fashion (she tells him her credit score; he tells her she’s “pick-up-a-ble”). In each of these, both the writing and the acting are surprising, deeply felt, and more about authentic connections in the moment than preaching — however entertainingly — to the choir.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2015.
