Alessandro Marino and Amanda Perez (Photo by Nika Burnett)
Reviewed by Catherine Crouch
Blue Pen Theatre at MiViDa
Through June 7
RECOMMENDED
Stupid F*cking Bird is playwright Aaron Posner’s 2013 retelling of Anton Chekov’s legendary 1895 play, The Seagull. Here, Posner dramatizes the messy entanglements — romantic, artistic, and existential — between four central characters: struggling playwright Conrad (Nick Samson), Con’s mother Emma (Nalini Sharma), a judgmental, mid-career actress, his beautiful and fame-seeking girlfriend Nina (Amanda Perez), and his mother’s lover, renowned writer Trigorin (Alessandro Marino). Over three acts, the characters muse (and argue) about love, the meaning of art, and how to get by when life doesn’t give you what you’ve dreamed of.
Directed by Connor del Rio, Stupid F*cking Bird is the first production out of Blue Pen Theatre, an independent company, founded in 2024, that’s hoping to bring actor-forward theater to Los Angeles. The production is presented as part of Everfound Art’s NEW FORMS, a multidisciplinary exhibition of theatre and visual art. The play is set at Emma’s country home, first at a gathering to watch a showing of one of Con’s new plays, and then, four years later, to celebrate Emma’s sister Sorn (Marjo-Riikka Mäkelä) and her 60th birthday. The characters include Con’s good friends Mash (Nika Burnett), lovesick for Con, and Dev (Soloman Astley), lovesick for Mash.
Act I begins with Con’s experimental play-within-a-play, featuring aspiring actress Nina who hopes to win Emma’s approval. But Emma disparages the script and mocks Nina’s performance, so Con blows up, stops the show, and storms out, angry and humiliated. Mash follows after him, and though Nina knows she should as well, she lingers to accept the unexpected praise and attention she receives from Trigorin. As Con hotly questions if his mother loves him, ignoring Dev and Sorn’s support, Nina begins to develop feelings for this older man, lured by his fame and the access to stardom a relationship with him might bring. As she openly flirts with him, Con grows paranoid, his paranoia only deepened when his mother denies Trigorin’s reciprocation. When Con tries and fails to kill himself, the people around him are left to ruminate on how to cope with disappointment, unrequited love, and the realization that maybe, just maybe, your art sucks. Does this, and should this, define one’s life?
Despite the simplicity of the set and costumes, and the relative youth of the cast, Stupid F*cking Bird manages to mostly avoid the impression of a scrappy student theater production through intentional parody of its own limitations. When Con shoots a seagull as a token of his love for Nina, the actor charges to center stage in a blood-splattered tank and melodramatically snips the dead bird from a rope that another actor has lowered from the ceiling in plain view of the audience. It’s campy, farcical, and at the end of the day, just plain fun.
While the production sticks to Posner’s script, it sometimes feels long and tangential. Del Rio has staged each act with its own set, which requires audiences to twice get out of their chairs. It feels clunky and cumbersome, but once you’re re-seated, the actors are quick to reground the audience in their world. Overall, the production’s minor bumps are less a reflection of poor characterizations than they are of a group of newcomers figuring out how to make meaningful art. Which, after all, is the point of the play at hand.
Stupid F*cking Bird shines brightest with Perez’s Nina. Posner’s dialogue is strongest with her, and Perez nimbly embodies the naivety and lust central to the play’s messaging. Nina’s dreams of celebrity and adoration may be shallow, but Perez’s performance is earnest and sincere — you cannot help but hope she achieves them. Perez anchors the performers around her, even while she flits around in a pink sweatsuit and tosses her long hair. When Act III lets audiences meet a very different, hardened yet cracked-wide-open Nina, Perez sustains true gravitas, even in her character’s darkest moments.
Stupid F*cking Bird posits that even when we feel pathetic and directionless, we must not give into the voices that tell us to quit. Art comes from suffering, but it also comes from the resilient will to live and persist despite it. While The Seagull concludes with the suicide of Konstantin, on whom Con is based, Stupid F*cking Bird refuses to pull the trigger. Even in bleak times, we must do as Nina does: choose to “go on.”
MiViDa, 2415 Eads St., Frogtown. Sat.-Sun., 7:30 pm; thru June 7. Halfway through its run, Stupid F*cking Bird will adopt a gender-swapped cast. Running time: Approximately 135 minutes with intermission.
