Desire Denied

A Soapbox Response to The Misgotten New Hope of the Dirty Bird

By Alex Aguirre

Last Friday I saw The Misgotten New Hope of the Dirty Bird, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull written and directed by Whit Flint. The production was staged at Erf Gallery, a charmingly industrial warehouse venue that used to be a WeWork, and is now thankfully host to far more exciting projects. Rather than the metaphysical mess of a one-act play that usually opens Chekhov’s bittersweet masterpiece, Dirty Bird kicks off with a screening of an experimental short film directed by the young and troubled filmmaker/playwright Konstantin (decidedly non-binary in this production and played with sensual angst by River Knight). The film introduces Nina (played with an intoxicatingly giddy earnestness by AJ Molder), but the whole affair is met by disdainful laughs from his mother, Irina (played with bourgeois acerbity by Mary Bacon). Masha (played by Fiona Rose Dyer) is a visual focus point in the minimalist yet sleek production, as she appears in a full-on mall goth look, a wonderful homage to the notorious melancholy of the character. Many moments were directed towards those familiar with The Seagull, such as Konstantin’s line early on that “I’m going to kill myself, soon” which got a hearty laugh from the audience.

Alex Trigorin (played with golden-era hipster chillness by Neal Bedslow) can’t be bothered to feel much of anything, that is, until he is jolted into the famous monologue to Nina about his compulsiveness to turn everything into a note for a story. I do think that this adaptation missed a few moments for comedic modernization and this was one of them, but overall the script of Dirty Bird portrayed a Trigorin that is truly in pain when having to talk about his own career, because he knows that him caring about it so deeply is holding him back. This is a much more thematically faithful adaptation than Thomas Bradshaw’s The Seagull/Woodstock, NY (for example) is. Flint stays close to the archetypal and sociological core of these characters, drawing upon their contrasts sharply to emphasize the emotionally mismatched yet fatefully aligned nature of their relationships. AJ Molder’s take on Nina was one steeped in vulnerability and curiosity and figured perfectly into the overall sense of dread that was baked into this production so effortlessly and moodily.

Out of all versions of this play I have seen and read, I picked up on a curious parallel I never have before: that of Konstantin and Medvedenko (played with mercurial brilliance by Trever Clarkson and called Simon in this production). Both characters begin the play with complaints that could be seen as petty and commonplace: Konstantin feels under-appreciated and misunderstood, and Simon feels overworked and unlucky. Both characters suffer the tortures of unrequited love, with Nina abandoning Konstantin for Trigorin and Masha bluntly rejecting Simon’s love. Traditionally, Konstantin has the more memorable and resonant end since Nina’s abandonment of him ends in suicide, but this version’s portrayal of Masha’s reluctant marriage to Simon is equally painful and bleak. There is a moment towards the end where Masha wipes her makeup off in front of the camcorder (which is live-projected at the far end of the traverse stage), a beautiful and heartbreaking symbolic triumph that drove home just how effectively this play addresses the coarse stifling of desire. Konstantin’s life burns out due to an excess of passion whereas Simon’s is stripped of all inherent meaning in his career and his relationship with Masha, yet he clings to life in spite of the resounding emptiness within it. This show demonstrates the fluctuations of the characters’ deeply entrenched existential ailments with style and steely yet palpable compassion. The lead-up to Konstantin’s demise is orchestrated perfectly in this production with Nina’s final return (after being used and discarded by Trigorin) performed in an increasingly hallucinatory and bloody loop as Konstantin’s psyche implodes. Even after a burst of success, they just couldn’t let go of their dirty bird.

AJ Molder and River Knight - Photo by Joey Damore

Dirty Bird is running until September 20th at ErF Gallery, tickets available here: https://dice.fm/bundles/dirty-bird-27mm

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