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STUDY GUIDE WRITTEN AND COMPILED BY Taylor M Wycoff SPECIAL THANKS TO Mike & Rhoda Auer; Bill & Judy Garret; Kamaya Jane & Diane Zeps, in honor of their mother Elaine Lipinsky; San Diego Commission for Arts & Culture; The County of San Diego This publication is to be used for educational purposes only. STUPID F**KING BIRD TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION 1- ABOUT THIS PRODUCTION From the Dramaturg ..................................................................................... 3 Play Synopsis............................................................................................... 4 Characters.................................................................................................... 4 Who Loves Whom ........................................................................................ 4 About the Playwright .................................................................................... 5 Production History ........................................................................................ 6 SECTION 2- THEMES & TOPICS The Seagull .................................................................................................. 6 Adaptations .................................................................................................. 7 A Brief History of Theatrical Forms .............................................................. 8 New Forms ................................................................................................... 9 SECTION 3- SEEING THE PRODUCTION Audience Etiquette ....................................................................................... 10 Post-Show Discussion Questions ................................................................ 11 SECTION 5- RESOURCES.............................................................................. 12 Cygnet Theatre Company values the feedback of patrons on the content and format of its Study Guides. We would appreciate your comments or suggestions on ways to improve future Study Guides. Comments may be directed to Taylor M. Wycoff by email at [email protected]. 2 SECTION 1 ABOUT THIS PRODUCTION FROM THE DRAMATURG TAYLOR WYCOFF First impressions are always interesting. It’s amazing the amount of information we gather the first time we encounter someone, and how instantaneously we make snap judgments (be they good or bad, conscious or not). The same goes for plays, and perhaps explains why playwrights often agonize over a title, changing them again and again until it’s published and no longer possible. Likewise, throw out a name like “Shakespeare” or “Ibsen” or “Chekhov” and a litany of assumptions are bound to cross a person’s mind: old, stuffy, irrelevant, boring, soooooo many symbols and metaphors, and blah blah blah. One of the things I love about Stupid Fucking Bird is the conundrum it presents to audiences and how it refuses to let you make those snap judgments or rest on your pre-conceived assumptions. My first encounter with the play went something like this: “ ’Stupid Fucking Bird?...’ Cool! Another play with the F-word in the title! I hope the rest of the script is just as bold and fearless. ‘Sort of adapted from … Chekhov!’ Wait, WHAT? Oh dear…” But what followed was a rollercoaster of emotions from hysterical laughter, absolute anger, romantic lust, devastating sorrow, and everything in-between. Aaron Posner has written a wonderfully fresh, raw, no-holds-barred play that challenges the notion of what theatre was, is, and could be. It doesn’t matter if you know Chekhov or not, like The Seagull or loathe it, love the classics or hate them. Stupid Fucking Bird is Posner’s highly personal riff that manages to make one of the most influential plays of the Western canon more accessible than it has ever been. 3 ABOUT THE PLAY SYNOPSIS Kind, hopeful Dev suffers from an unrequited love for Mash, who composes cleverly despairing songs on the ukulele. Mash is desperately in love with Con, a passionate playwright who is deeply in love with Nina, his beautiful, vibrant muse, and childhood friend. Nina seems to love him back, until she becomes entranced by Trig, a literary star who happens to be dating Con’s mother Emma, a successful actress who is hopelessly commercial, in the eyes of her son. With a dead bird, a gun, and a little help from the audience, Con might be able to win Nina’s heart again… or at least feed his own tentative, morbid creativity. In this edgy, funny, and compassionate reboot of Anton Chekhov’s famous Seagull, Aaron Posner has created a strong, energetic ensemble piece, a hilarious and moving meditation on love, art, life, and art. SETTING: By a lake, late afternoon in the fall; in a kitchen, the following night, and; by the lake, four years later. RUNNING TIME: Approx. 2.5 hours, including intermission. PERFORMANCE RATING: R for suggestive themes, strong language, sexual content and nudity. CHARACTERS CON: A melancholy playwright. NINA’S boyfriend. EMMA: A successful commercial actress. Mother to CON. TRIG’s lover. A dominating presence who is always performing herself to some extent. TRIG: A famous author. EMMA’s lover. NINA: An aspiring young actress. CON’s girlfriend and muse. SORN: An intellectual. EMMA’s older brother, CON’s uncle. MASH: (pronounced “mosh” like the pit, not what you do to potatoes) EMMA’s part-time helper and neighbor. A depressed songwriter. Longtime friend of Dev. In love with CON. DEV: A tutor. CON’s best friend. Longtime friend of Mash. In love with MASH. WHO LOVES WHOM DEV MASH CON NINA 4 TRIG EMMA ABOUT THE PLAY ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT AARON POSNER (Playwright) Aaron Posner (Playwright) is a Helen Hayes and Barrymore Award-winning director and playwright. He is a founder and former Artistic Director of Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre, an Associate Artist at both the Folger Theatre and Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, and has directed at major regional theatres from coast to coast. His adaptations include Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev (both of which have enjoyed successful runs at more than 50 theatres across the country and the latter of which ran for ten months Off-Broadway in 2012/13 and won both the Outer Circle Critics Award for Best New OffBroadway play and the John Gassner Award), as well as Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, Mark Twain’s A Murder, A Mystery and A Marriage, an adaptations of three Kurt Vonnegut short stories, entitled Who Am I This Time? (and other conundrums of love). Aaron was raised in Eugene Oregon, graduated from Northwestern University, is an Eisenhower Fellow, and lives near Washington, DC. PRODUCTION HISTORY Stupid Fucking Bird debuted at Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC in 2013 and won the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Resident Play as well as the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Play or Musical. It has since been produced in cities across the country including Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, and more. The LA production at Theatre@Boston Court received nine Ovation Award nominations including Best Playwright. “Angsty, raw, and real, this play does not shy away from the hard, but well-discussed philosophical questions about art, reality, love and life and what it all means. Yet, it does so in a way that’s likely to engage contemporary theatrically savvy audiences.” —BroadwayWorld.com. “…an accessible and unfailingly delightful jaunt into misery (or maybe we should say compromised happiness)…It’s absorbing in its every glance and revealing in its every sigh.” —Washington City Paper. “…a refreshing splash of cool water on dry, well-trod terrain…STUPID FUCKING BIRD is what you get from a writer who not only adores the material he’s adapting, but understands it precisely.” —DCist.com. 5 SECTION 2 THEMES & TOPICS THE SEAGULL PLOT SYNOPSIS Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons ANTON CHEKHOV 1860-1904 The family and friends of the retired Sorin gather at his country home for the summer, where his nephew Konstantin has chosen to make his debut as (in his mind) a revolutionary symbolist playwright. His aim? To tear down everything that his mother, actress Irina Arkadina, and her generation of artists stand for. With the help of farm manager Shamrayev, his wife, Polina, their daughter Masha and the local school teacher Medvedenko, Konstantin has constructed a small stage on the edge of the lake on which to premier his new work, starring his girlfriend Nina. Also present are Arkadina’s lover, the famous populist writer Trigorin, and the family physician Dr. Dorn. When the play goes awry, the relationship between mother and son reveals itself as quite complex and everyone finds themself in love with precisely the wrong the person. Later, sensing her fondness for Trigorin, Konstantin places a dead seagull at Nina’s feet and claims that he will soon kill himself. Nina declares that she can no longer relate to him and within a week, Konstantin has attempted suicide. Threats are made and promises are broken as self-interest takes over with all of the trouble culminating in Arkadina and Trigorin’s departure to the big city. In the final act we return to Sorin’s home two years later during midwinter. Sorin’s failing health has brought his sister back for the first time in two years with Trigorin following close behind. Konstantin has found success as a fiction writer and seems to have put the pain and frustration of the past behind him until Nina returns unannounced in a crazed state, pushing Konstantin over the edge one last time. HISTORICAL CONTEXT Part of the historical significance of the play is rooted in its 1898 Moscow premier. Not only did it mark Chekhov’s first critical success, but it was also the first of his plays directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and was the first major success of Stanislavski’s new Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). While critics panned The Seagull’s first premier in St. Petersburg, the second opening at the MAT was so successful that the theatre adopted the seagull as its emblem. Stanislavski’s approach to Chekhov’s work, and his new “system” for teaching actors further ushered in the revolutionary new era of realism, ultimately inspiring what we now know as “method acting” taught by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and countless other 20th century New York masters. 6 THEMES & TOPICS ADAPTATIONS “While I am still building plays on the bones of an existing piece of literature, my Chekhov variations are anything but reverential. I am not serving Chekhov. If anything, I am subverting him. Or perverting him. Or lovingly deconstructing him or something. The original work is just a jumping off place or an inciting incident for my own personal explorations.” -Aaron Posner in an interview for The Playwright’s Playground Chekhov reading The Seagull to the Moscow Art Theatre. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons There’s a reason that so many people have tried their hand at adapting the script of The Seagull. The themes of hope, unrequited love, and artistic fulfillment transcend time, so while Chekhov was writing in end of the 19th century, the piece still resonates with todays audiences. Still the question remains, if The Seagull is already held in such high regard, why bother adapting it when you can just use Chekhov’s original mastery? Not to be mistaken with translating a script from one language to another, adapting texts transforms the work into a new form while still retaining the original’s message, structure, and tone. Posner speaks to this idea in an interview for The Playwright’s Playground, explaining his desires for crafting a remix of The Seagull: “I love Chekhov in theory, but I have rarely loved seeing it. He was a brilliant, insightful, revolutionary, paradigm-shifting author, but then… the paradigm shifted. He won. The majority of the plays written in the past 100 years owe a great debt to him, but this huge influence has served to make what was once revolutionary feel historical and often even hackneyed… So I was hoping if I wrote honestly about things that I really cared about and tried to put them in a form that would wake me up, not put me to sleep; that would make me a little bit surprise or even a tiny bit shocked; that would make me sit forward in my chair and not sit back— then that might be an interesting thing to do.” Here is a small sampling of plays adapted from Chekhov’s classic: • • • • • • The Notebook of Trigorin by Tennessee Williams (1981) Drowning Crow by Regina Taylor (2004) A Seagull in the Hamptons by Emily Mann (2008) Ten Chimneys by Jeffrey Hatcher (2012) Stupid Fucking Bird by Aaron Posner (2013) The Misbegotten Hope of the Dirty Bird (or A Meditation on the Proper Use of Firearms in Dramatic Literature) by Whit Herford (2015) 7 THEMES & TOPICS A BRIEF HISTORY OF THEATRICAL FORMS TRADITIONAL THEATRE Western theatre has its roots in classical Greek theatre, which established the most basic play genres of comedy and tragedy. As western drama has evolved over the years, different styles have been created, which reflect the artistic advances as well as specific interests and values of the times. Some of these styles include: 7th-15th CENTURY • Liturgical Dramas that enacted certain parts of the Catholic mass, particularly in the Easter liturgy, and led to the development of Mystery Plays, Miracle Plays, and Morality Plays th 16 CENTURY • Elizabethan Tragedies, often involving revenge, murder, and death • Elizabethan Comedies, that mixed elements of farce, comedy of manners, romantic comedy and black comedy • Commedia Dell’Arte, which explored relationships among different social classes through improvised scenes between stock characters using caricatured masks, placed in stock situations th 19 CENTURY • Melodramas, the most popular form of theatre for the majority of the 19th century, were light-hearted plays that revolved around extremes of good and bad, dealt with sensationalist stories, lacked subtlety in acting, and served as a means of escapism th 20 CENTURY • Naturalism and Realism reacting against the popular melodramatic forms that preceded them, brought real-life issues and complex characters to the stage and shifted reliance from action to dialogue NON-TRADITIONAL THEATRE While more realistic stories started being portrayed onstage beginning in the 20th century, non-traditional forms of theatre began to flourish as well. Styles such as Surrealism, Theatre of the Absurd, and Avant-garde/Experimentalism began to emerge, and likewise had a significant influence on the traditional theatre landscape. DID YOU KNOW? Despite rampant unrequited love, tragic decisions and even more heartbreaking outcomes, Chekhov insisted that The Seagull was in fact a comedy. 8 THEMES & TOPICS NEW FORMS In Stupid Fucking Bird CON cries for new forms: “In real life, people do not spend every minute in shooting each other, hanging themselves or declaring their love for each other. They don’t devote all their time to trying to say witty things. Rather they are engaged in eating, drinking, flirting and talking about trivialities—and that is what should be happening on stage… On stage everything should be just as complicated and just as simple as in life. People eat their meals, and in the meantime their fortune is made or their life ruined.” -Anton Chekhov DISCUSSION POINT “But seriously, Good Christ, we need new forms, new passions, new ideas—something real, you know? Something REAL. Or what the fuck’s the point? ... New forms of theatre that can actually make you feel like living better or fuller or or or…MORE. New forms that open up new possibilities, new ways of being in the world.” (p.26) This argument, like much of the plot and themes of the play, is pulled directly from its inspiration, The Seagull, in which KONSTANTIN states: “But, as I see it, our theatre is in a rut—it’s so damn conventional … We need new forms. New forms. And if they’re not to be found, then better nothing at all.” (Milton Ehre, Chekhov for the Stage, p. 22) When Chekhov was writing, realism was practically unheard of as melodramas dominated the theatre scene. And Chekhov, like his character KONSTANTIN, was desperate for a new kind of theater. Up to that point, the idea that theatre should attempt to present a picture of the world as it really is never occurred to the theoreticians or practitioners of pre-modern drama. The theatre was an art, and art was artifice. But with the rise of the scientific world view came the idea that the stage could not only reproduce an accurate image of “real life”, but should also become like an instrument of scientific inquiry into human behavior, a laboratory in which the laws governing the interaction of human beings and social classes could be studied. (Martin Esslin, Chekhov and the Modern Drama) And while Zola was the first to formulate the theoretical concept of the theatre of naturalism and Ibsen was the first to gain gradual acceptance for it as he did away with the soliloquy and the “aside” (trademark devices of theatre at the time), Chekhov took things a decisive step further by rebelling against the artificiality of the conventional dramatic structure. He preferred illustrating the quirks, futility, and circularity of human behavior over traditional playwriting tools of tight plotlines and predictable dramatic conflicts. Do you think Aaron Posner’s work in Stupid F**king Bird is the start of a new form in theatre? Why? 9 SECTION 3 SEEING THE PRODUCTION AUDIENCE ETIQUETTE Going to the theatre is a unique experience, and we all need to be mindful of “audience etiquette,” or how to behave at the theatre. When we visit the theatre we are attending a live performance with actors that are working right in front of us, and the audience plays an essential role in the performance of a play. After all, without an audience, the actors are still only rehearsing. Audience members’ concentrated silence and responses (such as laughing, gasping, and applauding) provide energy to the actors as they work to bring the performance to life. Since the actors can see and hear the audience, it is important not to engage in behaviors that might disturb or distract them, as well as your fellow audience members. These actions include: • Talking • Texting • Allowing cell phones to ring • Taking photographs or video • Getting up to leave before intermission or the end of the show • Eating or drinking • Unwrapping candy or cough drops • Touching the stage or leaning into the aisles And remember that we follow these rules because the better an audience you can be, the better the actors can be. DISCUSSION POINT If you were onstage performing a play, how would you want the audience to behave? Audience Awareness Activity: Before coming to Cygnet Theatre for the first time, consider the differences between seeing a live play versus: • Going to the movies • Attending a live sporting event • Watching television 10 SEEING THE PRODUCTION POST-SHOW DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Depending on the time available and your group members’ interests, guide them to respond to questions selected from those suggested below. Encourage everyone to participate, while having respect for differing opinions. Individuals can share their thoughts with a partner or in a small group. Ask for several volunteers to share their groups’ answers with the larger group. • Overall, how did you feel while watching the play? Engaged? Distanced? Entertained? Bored? Confused? Inspired? What made you feel this way? • What did you enjoy most about the play? What did you have trouble connecting to? • What did you learn about the craft of acting from experiencing the play? What did you learn about the design and production of the play? • What did you appreciate most about the performances by the actors? • How did the set, props, lighting and visuals contribute to your experience of the play? • How does Stupid F**king Bird compare to Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull? What is similar? What is different? • Are the themes and values of this play relevant today or are they outdated? • What do you think constitutes “new forms” in theatre? Do you think Stupid F**king Bird is a new form? • How did you feel when the actors engaged you as an audience member directly? Was this theatrical device helpful in communicating the play’s plot, subtext, themes, etc? • Is Stupid F**king Bird a comedy or a tragedy? Why? • Would you recommend Stupid F**king Bird to other theatregoers? Why, or why not? 11 SECTION 4 RESOURCES WATCH Aaron Posner explain why he wrote Stupid Fucking Bird at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNJTocwwH0A&nohtml5=False. WATCH Aaron Posner explain what happened at Woolly Mammoth to induce writing Stupid Fucking Bird at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93SjcP1nnCc. WATCH Aaron Posner discuss his relationship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcdB8TEMjjk. with Chekhov at LEARN about Aaron Posner’s work as playwright by reading his interview with The Playwright’s Playground at http://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2014/07/31/playwrightsplayground-aaron-posner-stupid-fucking-bird/. READ other plays by Aaron Posner like Life Sucks, The Chosen, My Name Is Asher Lev, and Who Am I This Time? (and other conundrums of love). LEARN about Anton Chekhov and the impact he had on the theatrical landscape in Checking out Chekhov by Sharon Marie Carnicke. LEARN about Anton Chekhov’s innovative approach to theatre in Chekhov and the modern Drama by Martin Esslin. READ Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, along with his other classics like The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya. READ other adaptations of The Seagull, like The Notebook of Trigorin by Tennessee Williams, Drowning Crow by Regina Taylor, and Ten Chimneys by Jeffrey Hatcher. 12