journal (1 page)

/Describing/

Last semester on October 9th, my boyfriend and I attended the production of "Stupid F---ing Bird by Aaron Posner" performed at Studio 88 by the Miami Department of Theatre. We just went for fun, not knowing anything about the actual play. I once practiced lines of this piece with my friend, and came away from that thinking it was a comedy. This was NOT a comedy. Before the show started, all actors were passing out playbills, and responded to people coming into the studio as their characters, not themselves. They took on the attitude of the people in the play. The playbill gave us the insight on things that may have been slightly adapted from the original production, and the show included original music composed by the actors as well as different interpretations of a few scenes from the original show. It also included various interaction with the audience where there would be long pauses of silence with the on stage actors waiting for the audience's response (they didn't move on with the show until someone responded. Some of that took a while.) The description of the performance provided by the Department of Theatre is as follows:

"Love, death, beauty, despair and one unfortunate seagull collide in this unabashedly provocative riff on Chekhov’s classic. Con is a burgeoning playwright in love with his ingénue; his mother, an aging actress, is involved with a famous novelist; the novelist, in turn, is increasingly enchanted with Con’s girlfriend; and everyone else suffers on the sidelines. Chekhov’s characters still ruminate on love, revolution and the pursuit of happiness, but this time convention is severely compromised."

(I wish I had known this information before, because honestly it would have better prepared me for what I was about to deal with emotionally.)

/Interpreting/

Having the characters passing out playbills rather than just someone not in the show giving them out was an interesting way to meet the characters before we saw them perform on stage. Even when we greeted someone who we knew, he acted as though he never met us before and didn't know why we called him by a different name. All of them took it very seriously and played it out well. It added an extra layer of depth to each character. While I often feel like added original songs are unnecessary and tend to take away from the show rather than add to it, I will admit that the lyrics of each song they performed set the mood for the scene that would directly follow. There were also many times where actors would go off-stage and perform dialogue in different places in the audience, or sound effects would be heard to inform us that something happened. This added to the overall effect of having the audience be included in what was transpiring on stage/off-stage. Many times when the characters would speak, it would be as though they were speaking directly to us rather than to another character on stage. At the end of the show especially, this played a large role in having the audience believe there were things we could have done to change the outcome of the story in some way. The inclusion of characters speaking to and convincing the audience that we were a part of the show added to the experience of watching their story.

/Analyzing/

Not knowing what this production was about and believing it to be a comedy I feel had greatly changed the way I felt during, and after the production. The performance was very VERY dark and brooding, and thought provoking. My boyfriend and I have both struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts on different occasions, and at the very end of the show when we were left to wonder whether or not the main character had killed himself, we both had nothing to say. We left the studio and said nothing the entire way home, then came into my room and just cried for probably a solid hour (honestly I'm getting emotional just thinking about it). The show portrayed love and loss in such realistic ways that it resonated with us very deeply. It gave us the progression of mental illness and it almost felt like we were watching ourselves and learning how we came to feel the way we do now. At the end of the show, I don't remember if anyone clapped or not. I don't know if it was because I was so lost in my own mind after the ending, or because everyone else was too.

I would and would not recommend this event at the same time. I didn't like the way that I felt (and the way I feel remembering it), however I believe the performance is truly thought provoking, and it does make you think about where your life is at right now. In a way, it opened a door for my boyfriend and I to talk about the struggles we had and were having in that moment. Just be mentally prepared. It isn't a comedy.