Preposterous Romp by Natasha Sinha
Great new plays sweep us into other people’s lives before returning us to our own, with new articulations or questions about the world around us. The wild circumstances of Julia Izumi’s Regretfully, So the Birds Are spotlight the unknowable world by probing rather than preaching. This “farcical tragedy” eschews realism and didacticism, in favor of an ineffable strangeness. And couldn’t we benefit from a few more ways of taking things in, given the complicated world we’re all uniquely navigating?
Because while trapped within late capitalism and climate catastrophe, in the wake of a pandemic, on the heels of a kakistocracy, amidst multiple wars and the Great Recession – the absurd pile-up of our crisis-ridden lives doesn’t necessarily fit into straightforward storytelling. How would we survive through endless years of adversity if we wrestle with this chaos solely through naturalism and deduction? How would we even find a logic to follow?
In Regretfully, So the Birds Are, the situation surrounding the Whistler siblings is outlandish, but scrupulously constructed. The three siblings – Mora, Neel, and Illy – are unmoored within their family. Their mother is in prison for incinerating their father, who appears to them as a snowman; a sister is in a romantic relationship with her brother; and as transnational adoptees, none of them knows what country they’re from. This dysfunction is the reason why they made pacts with one another when they were younger – their lives didn’t follow normative rules, so they created their own, to establish some shared understanding. The pacts bind them together, but they continue to live in a relentlessly outrageous world, full of contradictions and lies and moral ambiguity – as we all do!
These adopted Asian American adults struggle to find authentic versions of themselves by trying to claim something of their own – a piece of the sky, a spotlight, simply knowing what country they were born in. But what does “authentic” actually mean anyway? An interest in authenticity is popular these days… but to what, and why? Julia sidesteps this question by instead taking us on a delightfully strange set of journeys. It’s thrilling to watch Asian American characters who are not primarily performing their race onstage – they wouldn’t know what to perform! – instead navigate so much else, on top of being in racialized bodies.
The American Theater often turns to weighty and informative plays that candidly foreground race via racism when including artists from a wider range of racial backgrounds than usual. (It’s a long-running joke that The American Theater repeatedly puts forth great plays that feature cogent arguments set on white families’ couches… so these “race plays” definitely add some color!) (Pun intended?)
But the onslaught of the last several years has exhausted us – American Exceptionalism is touted loud ‘n’ proud in a country that refuses to protect basic rights, while other countries are collapsing under dictators because of U.S. interference. So the frankness of many “couch” plays and “race” plays may not always speak to us. How do we logically reflect on what we’re observing, when daily life has felt so perplexing and it can be difficult to bring into focus any version of our future?
Julia’s answer is to let us laugh at America’s preoccupation with identity labels within this confounding world; it’s simultaneously painful and hilarious. Early in the play, Mora tells Neel a trait he has that he never knew about himself, as an insult. Surprisingly and oddly, this becomes a meaningful realization for Neel – one that propels him toward his journey. He wonders, “Isn’t it just insane that I had to learn something crucial about myself from someone else? Like, what else am I wrong about? Am I not 28? Is my favorite food not banana ice cream? Do I even have arms?”
In some ways, the siblings’ own unravelings begin with their quests to pin down their identities and wrest some control over their lives. This proves to be a disorienting and isolating undertaking. But this is a play that insists on characters of the global majority as multifaceted and idiosyncratic and sometimes just plain ol’ messy people. The gift of rich individuality and personality – outside of identity labels – tells us who Mora, Neel, and Illy are as they strike out on their own. And Julia’s impish wordsmithing and poetic non-sequiturs hurtle us forward. Maybe it’s a reminder of how laughter helps us forge ahead.
In this play that focuses on a mix of groundedness and heightenedness throughout, Julia wields her particular sense of humor along with a startling statement on the first page of the script: “These characters have no subtext.” There’s a bracing cleanness to this lack of spin; a deceptively simple use of language stemming from an unusual straightforwardness. And she deploys linguistic tools (semantics, malapropisms, miscommunications, poetic articulations, non-sequiturs that transform into deep narrative threads, inconsistencies that lead to one meaning in a pun making sense while the other doesn’t, and other wordplay) to create psychological distance and revel in a kind of incongruity that feels relatable. As multiple artists have infamously quoted, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
There's a deep benefit to the resulting resiliency that comes with comedy, as we continue to cope with our realities. Biologically, laughter is healing! It’s proven to improve our emotional and physical health by relaxing our muscles, increasing blood flow, and releasing endorphins. Or, as Tom Stoppard said (in a conversation about his farce, Jumpers, which is also full of verbal ingenuity), “I think of laughter as the sound of comprehension.”
If comprehension is one of the first steps to problem-solving, to coping, to grief, to healing – the irreverent Regretfully, So the Birds Are offers a visceral experience with surprising poignancy, as it admits life can be a preposterous romp. Sometimes we can’t wrap things up and tie them in a bow after a heavy conversation on a couch, but we can laugh about them and find enough buoyancy to make it to the next day.
