THE ORNITHOLOGISTS
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The central character is an all-purpose guy, named Guy, who’s tired of the rat race and enjoys nothing so much as his new hobby, birdwatching. So Guy quits his job and neglects his family. The hobby becomes an obsession. Gall, Guy’s wife, becomes alienated. And his son Jamie will do anything to regain his father’s attention, even test-pilot a pair of strap-on mechanical wings that Guy whips up in the garage. Of course, Jamie crashes and burns. In act two Guy takes Gail off to South America to make a fresh start. Guy’s obsession with birds shifts from observing them in the wild to possessing them. He acquires a rare and endangered parrot, but alas, it escapes its perch, and Guy runs off into the jungle after it just as Gall is delivering an ultimatum. In the end, both Gall and the bird take off and Guy is reduced to a sniveling wreck.
There’s not much to the plot, which moves like it’s dragging a broken leg. That Guy’s wife will leave him, or that he’ll have to choose between her and his bird-watching, is a foregone conclusion. During act two I could hear yawns and sighs all around me. And when the play reached its conclusion, there were no conclusions to be drawn. That’s the odd thing about The Ornithologists. There are over a half a dozen references in the play to “drawing conclusions” based on what is seen. A message, a point, is implied at every step of the way, yet one never materializes. Playwright Virginia Smiley even goes so far as to introduce placards with litlle slogans written on them throughout the play. But if slogans like “Things are never as they appear” or “It isn’t what you watch, it’s how you see” have any significance for you, then a trip to a Hallmark store must rank as a philosophical event.
Indeed, the whole play suffers from the law of diminishing returns. It’s as if Smiley sat down to write a play about bird-watching. So she needed some birds, and some people to watch them, and then, yeah, that’s it, the whole thing would get really blown out of proportion, and it would be a metaphor for something, life maybe. Yeah, why not?, And after God only knows how much free association, Smiley inflated a motif into a two-hour script. Then, Live Bait, the only local theater since the now-defunct Igloo with an ardently visual-arts approach, got their hands on this script and illustrated it with the imagination and abandon of kids captured indoors on a rainy day. Only problem is, Igloo had vision, and Live Bait’s director, Curt Columbus, has only eclectic taste and an eye for style.
