SECOND BIRD ONE STONE
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The program for Second Bird One Stone describes Audrey, its focal character, as a copywriter and “poetess.” Audrey wears her hair in a fountain of frizz and speaks in a soft nasal twitter punctuated by glass-shattering shrieks of “Oh, my God! I don’t believe it!” She answers the phone to talk business in the middle of making love, and has to be reminded to put her clothes back on before leaving the house. She claims that Paul, who writes novels (men write novels and women write poetry in this kind of play), is jealous because she is working and can write poems and songs. But we never see her write anything. For that matter, we never see Paul write anything, except one sentence in which he tells us that he’s not writing anything. If this isn’t enough to make writers everywhere form an antidefamation league, Audrey doesn’t even read–or so says Paul, who apparently doesn’t read either.
Ah, but Audrey does read Cosmopolitan magazine, which is where she allegedly gets the idea to test her relationship with Rej, her boyfriend since college days. She decides to have an affair with Paul, who still has a crush on her from those same school days. Her best friend, Petra, thinks this idea stinks, but offers all three of her old school chums advice and consolation. The progress of Audrey’s experiment is charted in a series of 60-second scenes written to resemble television commercials (complete with product titles like “Dr. Condom” and “Sweetest-Addiction Cigarettes”). Interspersed are flashbacks to their college days, when these “entanglements” all began. There are also several tete-a-tetes in which the characters discuss their feelings about their “alliances.” Since Paul and Petra are usually relegated to playing the foils in these interchanges, there is a running narrative that gives them the opportunity to tell us directly how they feel about matters. Eventually, the two men learn that Audrey has been using them in this stratagem to discover her true feelings about love and life and herself, and the three engage in some obligatory shouting and shoving before parting company forever. However, they return to the stage for an epilogue in which they tell us–you guessed it–how they feel about the whole thing years later.
