Review: BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA at Odyssey Theatre

Birds of North America Is a brilliantly well produced drama with a quiet, luminous, elegiac quality, at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles. With exquisite subtlety and sensitivity in the writing by award-winning playwright Anna Ouyang Moench, it chronicles the relationship of a father and daughter over the course of roughly a decade.

Birds of North America explores the complexity, beauty, yearning, and frustration of family.  It has the quality of a thoughtful, slow, poetic meditation.  There are only two characters in the drama, and the simplicity of this play is part of its appeal.  It reminds me of the brilliant Richard Linklater film Boyhood, capturing that strange and lyrical magic trick, the passage of time.  Richard Linklater shot Boyhood over twelves years to show the same family cast in everyday activities as their lives shift, contract, and expand, allowing the mundane to become poetic and significant.

Chinese-American playwright and screenwriter Anna Ouyang Moench (Apple TV+, Netflix, A24, Universal) achieves a similar archival feat with perceptive writing.   She is a thoughtful and observant writer, working with almost documentary precision, with a fine delicacy reminiscent of great 19th century writers like Edith Wharton and Henry James.  Drama is discovered in small, gossamer fleeting moments.  The transformation of the actors is also quite extraordinary.  Actor Arye Gross performs a striking aging process, purely through his brilliant acting, where he seems to go from robust, vital mid life to a stooped, elderly, frail man losing his beloved wife, and incredibly, we as an audience even witness his face change before our eyes.

Arye Gross’s performance is mesmerizing, lending many intricate shadings to his character, conjuring a wry humor, lovability, and unexpected depth underneath all his crustiness.  He has great acting chemistry with Jacqueline Misaye, beautifully playing his daughter.  Both actors are completely committed to something that is truthful, complex, and engaging, pulling us deeply into the unspoken yearnings and nuanced emotional palette of their family.  Arye Gross has a brilliantly funny rant about his reasons for viewing travel to Italy as frivolous and the saga of attempting to make garlic bread out of 89 cent discount bread.  It is an absolute comedic treasure.  Jacqueline Misaye’s monologue about experiencing callous treatment in the hospital for her miscarriage and ultimately confronting her infertility is haunting and gut-wrenching.  It is one of the moving moments onstage I have witnessed.

The bird watching passion of the father is both an escape from and an invitation to more closeness with his daughter.  Immersive, brilliant sound design by Costandina J. Daros brings the unseen birds to vibrant life, capturing the haunting sound of the wind and the shimmering feeling of being outside in the autumn.  The gorgeous rich persimmons and russets of the exceptional dramatic staging by Mark Guirguis, and the silky, papery autumn leaves and lovely props design by Jenine MacDonald add to the imaginatively created, ethereal outdoor space.

Bird watching, and the small notebook where the father records the birds he watches, achieve a lyrical quality of metaphor, as we watch the seasons pass, climate change altering their birds’ migration patterns, and their rich biodiversity shrink.  In the end, the father’s notebook is discovered in the yard after his death by a pile of leaves.  Anna Ouyang Moench’s work is so subtle that trying to specify its meaning almost coarsens it, but something quite lovely and ineffable is achieved here on stage, capturing the interwoven complexity, the loss and fragility of things.

With inspired, tonally astute direction by accomplished theatre veteran Peter Richards and the supremely talented creative team at Odyssey Theatre including powerhouse producer Beth Hogan, Birds of North America is a rich theatrical treasure, a work of exquisite restraint and quiet power. This is one not to be missed.

Photos by Jenny Graham

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