Notes on “Regretfully, So the Birds Are”
Welcome to The Madness: a convo between two Artistic Directors
Adam Greenfield, Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons: I’ve started typing this sentence about twelve times, each time an attempt to find the perfect first words of welcome to the wild, caffeinated world of Julia Izumi’s new play. Lisa McNulty, my partner-in-crime, do you have that experience as well? When I start to call this play a comedy – and it is insanely funny – that feels profoundly insufficient. And when I lead with it as a story of three adopted siblings facing the void of their self-knowledge, I feel like I’m calling the cops on a really great party. How do you describe this play to folks who don’t yet know it?
Lisa McNulty, Artistic Director of WP Theater: I know what you mean! When I try to explain it to folks I feel like I ping-pong between calling it bonkers and hilarious and also one of the most affecting family stories I’ve read in an age. And also…there’s a snowman? I guess that the thing that makes this play so much fun, and ultimately so emotionally truthful, is also the thing that makes it so hard to describe. Maybe your calling it a party makes the most sense– It’s one of those great, fun, fizzy parties where you laugh all night, but you also have a life-changing conversation in the corner with someone you love.
AG: (The best parties are fizzy!) I was just looking back at some notes I jotted down when I first read this play in late December 2020 (that awesome moment in time) and was struck by how well this play balances order with chaos. One of my notes read, “A wild ride, constantly surprising, often hilarious, unexpectedly moving; it proceeds quickly, lightly, and would seem to have little sense or order were it not for the sharpness of the writing itself, and its clarity of purpose. Just when you’re not sure Julia’s in control of what she’s doing, the play has a way of coalescing into great beauty and/or comedy and/or pain, frequently all at once.”
I like a play that knows how to be confidently messy, that’s always just in danger of running off the rails. It's become sort of a popular note for writers, that they should “kill their darlings.” More and more, I find I’m a defender of darlings, and that I’m less interested in how a play behaves than in how it misbehaves. That’s something I’ve always loved about your work at WP Theater – every choice surprises me – and it’s one of the reasons this collaboration seems so right. Is that a quality you’re consciously pursuing when you put together a season? Or is it just your taste?
LM: I’m absolutely with you about embracing the oddities and the particular, especially now. We’ve all just spent two years of our lives in front of one kind of screen or another, so I’ve been craving storytelling that can only exist in the big, messy immediacy that is the theater. Let’s get weird, let’s get specific!
…And that’s incredibly kind! I absolutely feel the same about Playwrights Horizons. I come to you all to be knocked sideways by a new way of telling a story, to find the unexpected. It didn’t surprise me at all that both Playwrights and WP would coalesce around this playful, wild new play, and that we both supported Julia early in her career.
I’m not sure that we have a particular quality that we’re looking for in a play when we’re assembling a season, as much as we think about how each project in the season serves our mission. We’re a gender-focused institution, so in some way every season tells the larger story of what’s on our community’s mind. Now that’s a tall order for any three plays, right? Still, it can be really clarifying to ask those kinds of questions as we’re assembling a season: who’s represented? what stories are we telling? is there a balance of kinds of theater-making? For example, this season we started off with a rock opera based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, then we move on to a really beautifully emotionally sticky story of two sisters, told while a big pot of sancocho bubbles on the stove, and then we get together with you all to fly with the birds. Balance looks different every year, but it’s always exciting.
How do you guys come together to make a season?
AG: Just as you describe at WP, putting a season together at PH is really an entirely new journey every year. I never went to graduate school. My only degree is a BFA in Acting. In one of my acting classes, I had this sudden clarity that all of the technique I was learning was to help me keep my performance new each time – to enter the play knowing nothing, so that the story can unfold always in the present tense. What we love about theater is its live-ness, and to keep it live it has to stay new every night.
That lesson extends, I think, to just about every aspect of theater-making. You build experience over time, and assemble a bigger tool-kit to solve problems, but you have to enter the experience knowing nothing and discover everything for the first time. I think that, especially when you’re a theater like our two theaters are – with a specific focus on new work – you have to be wary of rules and precedent, and you have to defy expectation. There are no laurels sturdy enough to rest on, and no failures indelible enough to stick.
So, like you, there’s nothing in particular I’m searching for when programming a season, except the rush of fear and excitement that comes when we encounter something genuinely new. I’m often asked, “What’s a Playwrights Horizons kind of play?,” and I never know how to answer that. I think I probably shouldn’t be able to answer that. I mean, the word “horizons” is in our name. The second I can touch the horizon, it’s no longer a horizon.
Which circles me back to Regretfully, So The Birds Are. From a producing perspective, it’s thrilling and scary and unlike anything else I’ve personally experienced. (Which we bonded over in our first conversation about it!) Not just in the form it takes – which is constantly shape-shifting – but in the very human story of these siblings, this family, and their manic restlessness. I can’t tell if it’s the characters who make the world insane, or the world who makes the characters insane, you know?
LM: That’s the thing, right? The joy and the madness of new work at its best is that it shows us the world in an absolutely new way. I love nothing more than seeing through someone else’s eyes for a while. That’s also the free fall of it as well–as producers and artists, we’re tasked with building the world anew every single time. I was absolutely on the edge of my seat at the design presentation for Birds. What physical life could possibly contain this play’s full-throttle humor, its tenderness, its muscular whimsy? What a thrill it was to see this incredible team take every bit of that brief and conjure it into a pretty spectacularly delightful physical reality. It’s my favorite thing about this work–reading a play as wonderfully eccentric and particular as Birds, and programming it with absolutely no idea how it could possibly live in space. We make this leap of faith every time that we’ll find the perfect collection of artists who will kick the doors down and show us the play in new ways, and then it happens and it’s magic. I’m in love with this play and this team!
(P.S. I didn’t go to grad school either. I love that we’re both unpedigreed!)
AG: …And once again, I started typing this sentence about twelve different ways. And I kept deleting and deleting, because to say too much more about the madness would be a disservice to the fun-house dramaturgy of Julia’s writing, and to all the surprising depths it mines and heights it reaches. I look forward to seeing it unleashed on the world, and to taking this ride with the creative team, as well as with the staff members, audiences and extended communities of both our theaters. Egads! What will happen next?
