“Dirty Bird” Goes Beautifully Off the Rails – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Off-Off-Broadway Theatre Review: A Radical “Seagull” Takes Flight in Brooklyn

By Ross

“Do what you love, or die trying.” Walking into Twenty Somethings Productions and Riot Act’s Dirty Bird feels a little like walking into an artistic experiment that has already gone dangerously off the rails. Director Whit Flint’s radical new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull begins with Konstantin screening an abstract film starring Nina, the woman he loves, but the atmosphere is combative before the film even begins. Irina’s laughter shatters whatever fragile mood might have been holding the gathering together, and suddenly this summer house party in a Brooklyn warehouse feels like a dream gone terribly right and terribly wrong all at the same time. Flint (“Tragic Figure“) taps into the rebellious spirit already pulsing through Chekhov’s original and lets it loose in this unlikely warehouse setting filled with filmmakers, actors, artists, and damaged egos. His production, running at ErF Gallery, embraces the bohemian energy of the space and turns Chekhov’s gathering into a volatile collision of ego, desire, neglect, and narcissism.

Flint’s adaptation moves these characters into the contemporary worlds of film, television, and artistic culture, where everyone seems to be performing some version of themselves while desperately wanting to be seen and heard. We are told that “art has to be pretentious enough… not a rom-com,” and the production takes that framing and runs with it, interrogating the pretension while keeping its emotional stakes firmly in view. Standing center stage unwaveringly, River Knight (GPS’s Twelfth Night) gives Konstantin an intensely vulnerable vibration, exposing the young artist’s desperate need for recognition and love, while AJ Molder’s Nina moves through the space beautifully, undergoing an especially effective transformation from innocent aspiring actress to a young woman hardened by experience. Neal Bledsoe (Broadway’s Othello) brings a magnetic, world-weary presence to Alex, while Mary Bacon (Public Theater’s Coal Country) gives Irina, Konstantin’s narcissistic mother, a complicated and clever balance of compassion, cruelty, and self-centered awareness. Peter Sorin (Cullen Wheeler), Paulina Andreevna (Lindsay Brill), and Dr. Dorn (Johnny Sparks), however, fade further into the background than expected, leaving less of an impression within the ensemble. The characters are constantly reaching for one another and failing, and Flint finds the violence in that failure without losing sight of the ridiculousness of a family destroying itself through ego.

The production’s use of the microphone for confessions gives those private wounds an unexpected theatrical force. Quiet pleas suddenly become electric, as though thoughts that might normally remain buried have been given their own amplifier. That idea extends into the lighting (Nick Cozzo), which helps turn the gallery into a space that feels closer to punk and indie performance art than a traditional theatrical rendering of Chekhov. The rawness of the environment, designed by Connor Gallerani (New Light’s Lean-To), becomes part of the storytelling, while the sound (Lola Basiliere) and video (Max Van) keep the emotional landscape unstable. Bowie, the Pixies, the Zombies, and other music choices give the production a jagged contemporary pulse, allowing the artistic world surrounding these characters to feel messy, rebellious, and alive. The costumes, too, designed by Madeline Rostmeyer (Adult FilmNYC’s Moonshiner), contribute to the sense that these people have constructed identities for themselves and are now struggling with the consequences of those performances.

The production becomes most fascinating when it turns its attention to grief. “The receipt for love is grief” lands with particular force as a dead bird is tossed across the space, an image of love and loss made brutally physical. Then Flint rewinds Nina and Konstantin’s reunion, forcing us to watch the encounter again and again while Konstantin falls further apart under the weight of what he has lost. The repetition changes the emotional temperature of the scene, making memory itself feel like an act of violence. Knight allows Konstantin’s naked vulnerability to become almost unbearable, while Molder lets us see the distance travelled by Nina, whose earlier innocence has given way to a much harder understanding of the world she has entered.

That emotional violence connects Dirty Bird directly to the rebellious theatrical spirit of Chekhov while allowing Flint to attack the material through contemporary questions of celebrity, artistic ambition, gender identity, and the power held by older successful artists over younger ones. The production is interested in desire as something capable of transcendence and destruction, particularly when the people experiencing it have no idea how to separate love from possession, ambition from validation, or artistic expression from the need to be admired. The family dynamics become an examination of neglect and narcissism, with each character carrying some version of an ache that keeps colliding with everyone else’s. The result is a deliberately twisted gathering where the characters keep hurting one another while insisting, in one form or another, that they are simply trying to make something beautiful.

And perhaps that is the strange and beautiful beating heart of Dirty Bird. These people are artists who want to create, lovers who want to be loved, children who want to be seen, and parents who want to remain important, yet their desires keep turning inward until the very things they reach for become weapons. The dead bird, the microphone, the film, the replayed reunion, and the music crashing through the gallery all become pieces of a world where art cannot protect anyone from grief. Flint leaves us inside that volatile space, surrounded by people who keep trying to turn their pain into something meaningful, even as their need threatens to destroy the people standing closest to them.