‘Birds’ has lift
One of the most engrossing productions out there right now has to be The Three Birds by Joanna Laurens, currently playing at the GAle GAtes et al. gallery in DUMBO (NEST produces). The twenty-four-year-old UK playwright has already had it performed in London and appears poised to make continued waves in Germany and Hungary, where translations of the play are slated for premieres. Sam Gold (also twenty-four, for heaven’s sake) directs and keeps a taut line through this suspensefully constructed retelling of Ovid’s “Tereus”, about a man who lusts after and rapes his sister-in-law, then is avenged by his sister-in-law and wife with the murder of his son. This is one of those rare triumphs of collaboration where it becomes difficult to attribute the production’s power to a single artist: Is it actor Chime Day Serra’s tortured, inwardly-combusting approach to the lead character? Is it choreographer Leigh Garrett’s creation of a pressure-cooker atmosphere through her work with the chorus? Is it the three-leveled set designed by Andrew Lieberman, whose suspended rope net (from which the chorus moans its first lines before descending to the playing space) creates an early sense of entrapping fate? Is it the compellingly strange, often-graphic verse in which Ms. Laurens wrote the play? (Actually, I doubt it – I’ll explain why next week.) All elements merge into something uniquely powerful and seemingly possessed of a life of its own.
I have one or two significant reservations about The Three Birds, but I’ll save those for next week. There is enough of the exceptional in this production that it demands to be seen by anyone who wants to keep abreast of genuine developments in the theater.