Fowl Play: Conference of the Birds is an experimental play. Let’s get that out of the way before anything else, as without that knowledge, the viewing experience will be quite confusing.
Now, Fowl Play is also not a puppet theater. Let’s get that out of the way, too, as, again, without that knowledge, the viewing experience will be quite confusing.
Instead, Fowl Play is an object theater rock opera inspired by Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th-century Sufi poem “The Conference of the Birds,” as re-told by contemporary illustrator and author Peter Sís. It follows a group of birds trying to choose a leader for the flock. But that’s easier said than done, and the negotiations are followed by infighting, alliance-building and bickering. The birds set out on a journey to find their leader, and along the way, they meet challenges that bring them closer together.
The original poem was written in 1177 by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. It’s an allegorical epic exploring the path toward enlightenment and unity. The story begins with birds from all over the world gathering to find a king. One particularly wise bird, the hoopoe, suggests they seek the Simorgh, a mythical bird symbolizing divine unity and perfection. (The Simorgh is a benevolent bird from Persian mythology.) To find this legendary creature, the birds travel through seven symbolic valleys, each representing a stage of spiritual awakening.
Along the journey, some of the birds abandon the group for various reasons, and after passing the trials of the seven valleys, only 30 birds reach the Simorgh’s dwelling. To their surprise, they find no external king; instead, the Simorgh is a reflection of themselves. The name “Simorgh” itself is a play on two words in Persian: “si” means thirty, and “morgh” means bird, symbolizing their unity and collective divine essence.
It seems pretty straightforward, but it turns out that when adapting it to the stage, it can get really weird (not necessarily in a bad way).
The weirdness started even before the (figurative) curtains opened; in the foyer, the waiting audience members were joined by the actors dressed sort of like birds, who walked around the room with shopping carts and trash (mostly plastic bottles) hanging around their necks (presumably symbolizing the plastic epidemic humanity has forced upon our feathered friends).
Now, for this next part, remember again that this is experimental theater.
The plot of the play follows roughly the story of the original poem. The birds, ten in total, played by nine actors, gathered in a cacophony of cackling as they tried to choose their leader before the hoopoe convinced them to go search for the Simorgh.
But they didn’t really look like birds; rather, the actors wore odd combinations of feathers, cloaks, ill-matching costume pieces and “regular” clothing. It seemed like they had all been asked to go back to their childhood homes and search whatever boxes their parents had kept in their attics because the budget couldn’t accommodate actual bird outfits.
I can’t tell if the actors were allowed to improvise or experiment haphazardly throughout the play, but it sometimes looked like they had rehearsed for about an hour and a half, the morning of the show. The movements, or lack thereof, gave the play the unfortunate appearance of the final project of a beginner’s acting class.
The story was also occasionally interrupted by a “scholar” who, bearing a white beard and dressed in a brown gown, provided context to one thing or another; this breaking of the fourth wall didn’t get any explanation and didn’t feel entirely necessary. After a while, however, he stopped appearing, with equally little explanation.
This is, I found myself thinking about 20 minutes in, a fundamentally unserious play. To be fair, I think the appearance of being fundamentally unserious was sort of the point and perhaps part of its “genius”; the hodgepodge outfits, the lack of structure, the unexpected song-and-dance scenes, were all a little too obvious not to be at least a little purposeful.
The problem was that even though it’s easy to see that a lot of fun had been had in creating this rather wacky performance and everyone — the actors, the dancers, the band — did a terrific job creating this illusion of amateurism, it was all a little too distracting to land the core themes of the story convincingly with the audience.
Get high beforehand
Too often, it felt like what was happening on stage didn’t serve the overall narrative. There was no apparent purpose as to why there occasionally was dance, nor what role the scholar played. Some decisions made about the plot — like when the birds went to sleep (or did they die?) and became a new species of fowl, or when they all became communists (at least it looked and sounded that way — and the costumes — why did the parrot wear a cage on its head for part of the play but not all the way through — were perhaps a little too experimental.
The music, composed by Brooklyn-based Avi Fox-Rosen, was the strongest part of the play.
I don’t know who exactly I’d recommend this for. But as the gentleman beside me in the audience said after, “Get high beforehand!”
Fowl Play, Nov. 22 – Dec 8 ; La Mama Etc., 66 East 4th Street, 2nd floor
