WET's The Mormon Bird Play Confounds
Washington Ensemble Theatre continues their exciting eighth season, a season entirely devoted to original works by Seattle artists, with The Mormon Bird Play, written and directed by recent Gregory Award-nominee Roger Benington (SEXTET, O Lovely Glowworm). The "sketches for an allegoric dream" of which the play is constructed are drawn with very soft edges, leaving most of the work of digging out logic or meaning to the attendee.
Or maybe the employment of logic runs contrary to appreciating the show as intended? Maybe the show is meant to appeal foremost to our senses of intuition or our gut-level instincts for metaphor? This head-scratcher of a journey through confounding worlds and rituals poses more questions than it offers answers, seemingly going out of its way not to bog itself down with closed moments or rationalities.
The play, several parts coming-of-age tale, revolves around six young children in Salt Lake City, four of them girls, two of them boys, most of them mormon, all of them portrayed by grown men (although I have no strong suggestion as to why). Most of the pot-stirring is inadvertently perpetrated by Ivona, a bald, mostly-silent creature seemingly of another spiritual realm. When Ivona discovers and resuscitates a wounded bird outside the LDS temple, thus adding to her strangeness and mystique, she becomes a source of admiration, scorn, and curiosity.
It isn't very deep into the first act that The Mormon Bird Play progresses beyond this already-bizarre premise, for some time abandoning Ivona to transport us to a ritual-wrought land of freemason-esque bird-people, replete with secret handshakes, codewords and discomfiting rites. As inexplicably as the reality-shift comes on it passes, and then is left behind and unaddressed for the duration of the production.
Following a momentary resettling into a more familiar reality the children become a band of mormon pioneers in turmoil, contending with the death of an infant--presumably a metaphor for the Ivona's dead bird, the imagistic engine of the show. Some beautiful performances are turned in here, some moving moments are accomplished, yet just as jarringly as we have been transported we are ripped away, and left without a substantive thread to connect the weird things we've seen with the many other weird things we've seen.
The Mormon Bird Play at its best is a taste of childhood wonder and exploration. A visually tantalizing show, it presents some beautiful images to drive to the heart several touching and complicated moments. Where it runs into trouble is in not coalescing to form a unified narrative, leaving so much promising dramatic potential without context enough to resonate. Put another way, it resides too much in a confusing and incidental dreamscape to stick.
Thursday through Monday at 7:30 p.m., through November 21 // Washington Ensemble Theatre, 608 19th Ave // $10, tickets available through Brown Paper Tickets
