High-Flying ‘Stupid F##king Bird Takes off on Chekhov

When you think about Chekhov, the usual image is a stage filled with unhappy people, all yearning for something unattainable. That’s also what you get with Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird, a take-off on Chekhov’s The Seagull — but this is a hybrid, a parody with a certain amount of serious emotional soul, and so you also get an extended meditation on the art of play-writing. The protagonist, Con, is the spinmeister who sets the evening in motion and keeps it moving. He agonizes about the state of contemporary theater — all the “clevery, clevery” small-cast plays that don’t reveal anything new or in any way change the real world. The arts — as Auden once said of poetry — make nothing happen. Except that in some cultures and countries, they do. When Con mentions Eastern Europe, you may recall the role played by writers and musicians in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution.

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