The Birds

The March 2023 production of Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan’s adaption of The Birds, presented at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, British Columbia, reframes Aristophanes’s work to consider both an Indigenous utopia and a serious rejection of utopia altogether. Directed by Michelle Olson, a First Nations MFA student in Directing at UBC, The Birds poses the question of whether Indigenous communities can or should strive for utopia, given its historic location within Western and White notions of the perfect future. Within Nolan’s adaptation, the entire cast of birds are women who reject the notion that the gods are worth quarreling with or over, but they also reject the idea, in the end, that a city built in the sky will create an equitable future for birds. This rejection is based largely on the fact that the city in the sky is still a replication of the city of men on earth. After all, the idea for Cloudcuckooland is developed by Jack and Gulliver (Pisthetaerus and Euelpides as they are called in Aristophanes’s original), who travel to the land of the birds from the city.Nolan’s The Birds is very clearly positioned in the future. Jack (played by Christian Billet) and Gulliver (Simon Auclair-Troughton) intimate that the cities of men not only are hot and polluted but that, in fact, birds no longer reside there, creating an entirely different space, place, and time than our contemporary climate and environmental crisis. The astonishing removal of birds from urban society, as well as the changes in the environment that Jack and Gulliver highlight, position the play as science fiction—the world of Nolan’s The Birds does not exist within our timeline but instead in a yet-to-be-manifested future that demonstrates the disintegration of the society of (White) men, who have constituted an urban dystopia through carelessness and greed.In Nolan’s adaptation, Jack and Gulliver escape the city in search of a better life. Having heard of the supposed paradise in which birds live in the wilderness, they venture forth and encounter first the Hoopoe, who leads them in turn to Raven. Significantly, Raven is also the creator of the world in many Norwest Pacific tribal stories. Raven is angered by the appearance of two men, but ultimately gathers all the birds together to discuss Jack’s and Gulliver’s presence. As a group, the birds and men discuss whether the two men will be allowed to become birds themselves, like the Hoopoe, who used to be a man and was turned into a bird. When Jack proposes the creation of the city in the sky, all the birds discuss the possibility through song and story, retelling a popular Indigenous creation story of Muskrat and Turtle Island. In this enactment, Nightingale (played by Rachel Angco) becomes Muskrat, raising a handful of earth from the ocean beneath to create land. At the end of the birds’ retelling of this creation story, they determine to undertake the construction of a wall and the city in the sky. However, the construction process for the wall in the sky draws the attention of capitalistic, business-oriented birds, demonstrating how “civilization,” as it is currently rendered, replicates colonial ideology. As Cloudcuckooland is being built, surveyors, lawyers, and agents show up to claim parts of Cloudcuckooland for themselves, highlighting the constructed and indeed fictional nature of land ownership.In Olson’s production of The Birds, the wall that surrounds Cloudcuckooland is almost the first image and first moment of the play. Sandpiper, played by Peihwen J. Tai, enters the thrust theatre space and sits in the audience while the house lights are still at half, disrupting the fourth wall and the insistence that the show start with the audience in anonymity. As the lights are taken to a quarter, Tai pulls two ropes, each attached to a bird on her wrists, across the stage, making a linear, parallel space that is then hoisted vertically as she disappears beyond the blacks that mask the offstage areas. The wall exists in the gap between the two ropes.This striking appearance of a wall constructed by the two ropes hung aloft a wingspan’s distance apart signifies a break in linear time, given that the wall around Cloudcuckooland has not yet been built within the narrative of the play. These two ropes are also the only visual representation of Cloudcuckooland that the production creates.The birds themselves are depicted in a somewhat abstract fashion: the actors use capes as wings and demonstrate a great deal of care and commitment in their bird-like mannerisms, and without masks or, in general, prosthetics. Their costumes are constructed from many different patches of fabric, foam, metals, and other seemingly found materials, conveying the resourcefulness of a magpie gathering trinkets. Some of the costumes have a quiltlike appearance, while others’ patched materials are fastened loosely, giving them the movement of feathers. This abstract quality furthers a sense of the alternative island, as does the set, which leaves the wires, pipes, and electrical boxes of the backstage exposed, modified in places by twigs and branches. This design choice gives the impression that the birds, too, live with the workings of machines and technology, that there is no wilderness that has not been touched by human hands, no matter how remote and unique it may be.Nolan’s adaptation of The Birds demonstrates a complex and metaphorical examination of colonialism and the survival of First Nations and Native American peoples despite genocide and oppression. The work also discusses the epidemic of missing, murdered, and raped Indigenous women throughout the United States and Canada. Through the song and dance of Angco’s Nightingale, the audience hears of how Nightingale was once a human and, because of the rape of her sister, she had her own tongue cut out and was banished but found the birds and became one with them. While its subject matter is heavy at times, Nolan’s work strives to uplift and empower through Indigenous Futurisms that do not reject Western society but refuse to conform to it or to recreate it within their own communities.Overall, Nolan’s and Olson’s work explores the act of becoming a bird in a much richer and deeper way than Aristophanes’s original. For Aristophanes, while the birds are magnificent, they are also largely the means both to make Pisthetaerus and Euelpides more powerful and to make a utopia not only for birds but for the men of Athens. In Nolan’s work, the birds ultimately reject the wall and the city, as its construction brings greed, corruption, and issues of ownership and capitalism into the world of the birds. At the play’s end, Nightingale—who also plays Muskrat in the retelling of the creation of Turtle Island—takes the very same handful of dirt that Muskrat brought from the bottom of the ocean and blows it out across the stage. As Olson states in her director’s note in the program, “Awakening to the violence in the making of [Canada], we must challenge the perpetual remaking of it in its own image.” In this respect, the act of blowing the dirt to create the world symbolizes a recreation, a starting of the world of the birds anew, without the need to conform to the expectations of Western Civilization.

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