Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A Solo Flight

Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris

AKT Up Productions and She Was Horrid Productions, Atwater Village Theatre

Through March 27

Recommended

Those who are of a certain age and grew up in a different century may recall Richard Bach’s “self-help” 1970 book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull – on the New York Times Bestseller List for 37 weeks – and Hall Bartlett’s grandiloquent and lugubrious 1973 flick that followed. The movie, accompanied by orchestration and a couple of songs by Neil Diamond, kept panning on foam-spewing waves crashing into rocks, and some truly gorgeous cinematography of seagull aeronautics and acrobatics. This was all part of the 1960s counterculture occurring in the throes of the War in Vietnam, celebrating individuality over conformity, i.e. the conformity of marching off to war, or off to the mall. It was in 1969, after all, that NASA plopped the first astronaut on the surface of the moon, a triumph of human imagination over gravity. Bach was a pilot, and it shows in some beautifully written details of a seagull working through the machinations of a dive, a roll, and a mid-air stall.

With director Paul Millet’s guidance, solo performer-adapter Andrew Thacher performs the story in a magnificent rendering that’s rife with emotion, wit and subtlety. In his version that hews closely to Bach’s book, Thacher is so good, he almost soars over the book’s shortcomings – almost. 

The central character in both book and movie is a seagull, Jonathan, who, by idiosyncratic temperament, is a daredevil (an Evel Knievel of the gull kingdom) – believing that flight has an aim loftier than stuffing one’s beak after rifling through garbage – an allegory for consumer society. All very well, except that the aim, eventually stated, is “perfection.” And here the story swerves into a generic and ultimately hollow theological realm, a blend of Western and eastern philosophy that holds reincarnation as a stepping stone to new planes of existence and new opportunities for enlightenment. For example, a gull named Fletcher crashes into a cliff and is instantly transported to a new, higher plane. This is a comforting, inspiring view of life and death, to say the least. Existence is simply an elevator.   

However, the book contains a maddening conflation: Imaginatively manipulating the laws of physics in order to reach the moon is of an entirely different order from merely imagining ourselves transformed from our living hell to a higher plane, without the help of mathematics and science. We don’t actually arrive on the moon by “willing” ourselves there. Well, maybe we do, in a pique of fantasy, but tell that to the Ukrainians whose apartment buildings and children’s hospitals are being bombed into oblivion. They’re not “willing” themselves to refuge in Poland by sheer dint of imagination. They’re trudging with screaming children in tow, facing down sniper fire. Try telling them, “Imagine yourselves in Poland, and you will be in Poland,” and see what they say. That’s the Oz-like s formula for escape served up in the book. Click your heels and poof — solipsism passing for enlightenment.

The book, and this production, contains the story of a gull, Maynard, with a paralyzed wing. Jonathan has now become Maynard’s flight instructor and guru who shows him how to “will” his wing to move. First, imagine flight, and then just do it. The Beatles published their song “Blackbird” in 1968 (“Take these broken wings and learn to fly”). The story of Maynard is cut from the same threadbare cloth. 

If my view is overly strident, perhaps you’ll forgive my personal experience with my stepfather, a man who held this very mind-over-matter belief system by withholding prescribed medicines and pain-relieving morphine from his wife, my mother, who was in the final stages of liver cancer. The power of her mind should kill the cancer, he intoned, while she writhed in agony, as though she could/should merely will herself to a new, painless relocation. This came with the cruel chastisement that she was too weak, too unenlightened, if she couldn’t. The intervention of hospice workers compelled his removal from her side. He blamed the doctors and the medicines for killing her.

And even with all this freight on my shoulders, Thacher commands respect by the power of his craft and his commitment to the story’s many moments of beauty. In Thacher’s hands, the trajectory of the gull, spurned by the flock for his ostentatious aeronautics, ignites empathy and engagement, visually supported by Fritz Davis’s projection design. On Jeff G. Rack’s Spartan set, strips of cloth and a framed circle serve as screens for panoramas of beach, swaths of ocean that morph into the cosmos. Unlike in Bartlett’s movie, there are no scenes of seagulls bloodied from squabbling over scraps, no waves crashing into boulders. The visual gentleness here comes supported by Drew Dalzell’s delicate sound design that aims for the subconscious. The sound is in scale and tone the antithesis of Bartlett’s ingratiating film, despite both having cinematic qualities. The design elements here offer tender support for Thacher’s wistful performance. Jonathan, as written, has a compelling sense of adventure but no sense of humor. When his divine fate leads him to become an instructor, he, and the book, become smug and self-satisfied.

Thacher works with all his heart to keep that smugness at bay. And he almost pulls it off.

Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater; Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; thru March 27. Playing time: 75 minutes without intermission. https://tix.com/ticket-sales/JLS-ASoloFlight/6883