Tongue of a Bird' debuts in Somerville

The art of creation can sometimes be a search for meaning. Sometimes -- in the best cases -- the artist's quest is one we as readers or viewers can empathize with. But in Ellen McLaughlin's play, Tongue of a Bird, it feels like she was searching for too many things at once. The play leaves the audience... searching.

While Ellen McLaughlin's play Tongue of a Bird receives a beautiful staging at the Theatre Cooperative in Somerville, the text ultimately leads the audience down too many fragmentary paths.

Searches-and-rescues, both metaphorical and actual, dominate the storyline of McLaughlin's play. The show opens after twelve-year old Charlotte (Alexandra Lewis) has been kidnapped in the local mountains and her mother Dessa (Kim Anton) is hiring a pilot to find her. The pilot she hires, Maxine (Korrine Hertz), is confronted with a personal search-and-rescue mission of her own, as she tries to discover the reason for her mother's suicide while she lives with her grandmother, Zofia (Maureen Adduci).

The script, or at least three-quarters of it, is divided into neat little scenes that have clearly defined beginnings, middles and ends, however, the storyline itself often branches off in too many directions. For example, the pilot's dead mother Evie (Eve Passeltiner) appears to Maxine in dreams over the course of the play, always dressed as Amelia Earhart, but by the time the two characters finally resolve their conflict, it is hard to even care about their revelations since so many other subplots and ideas have been introduced over the course of the production.

The relationship between Maxine and Dessa is the most human to develop in the play. After that bond is broken, the feeling that the play could end there is evoked -- yet it continues to go on about the relationship between the Maxine and her mother's ghost. In the last scene, they launch into these lengthy speeches which the audience ends up tuning out, since most of the emotion between the characters is being conveyed by the actors' physical attitudes and gestures, instead of the words themselves. In some ways, this play is aptly titled Tongue of a Bird since the characters communicate more through the tones of their chirping voices and swooping actions than through the actual dialogue.

The lighting design of Thomas M.J. Callahan also made the mistaken decision to go to blackout between every scene. With this type of play, the constant blackouts do more to kill the flow and rhythm of the story than they help to denote the end of a scene, which is always made very clear by breaks in the dialogue. The designers should have given playgoers more credit in their ability to suspend disbelief, especially when the production is staged in a small theater that relies so much on the audience's perceived intimacy with the actors.

The production design makes much better use of the play's unique format. The set is subdivided and none of the set pieces ever move from their original spots. Once one understands what each space represents (i.e. which characters inhabit it and where it is in reality), the consistency of the design gives the entire stage a physical and metaphorical unity that ties the whole show together.

Despite the setbacks of the script and lighting, the actors and the director manage to put up a pretty impressive production. The director, Lesley Chapman, has composed a show with a specific feeling. She has a great understanding of how people communicate underneath and aside from what they are saying. Each of the characters has a very clear, well-defined way of interacting with every single other personage in the play, and these developed relationships manage to transcend even the most irritating and lengthy bits of McLaughlin's dialogue.

The actors themselves do well to transcend the limitations of the script. Hertz as Maxine manages to take the audience with her on her journey by creating a character with many levels and many relatable qualities. Anton portrays the role of the kidnapped girls' mother with a finesse and power, and somehow knows exactly how to portray the two extremes of hysteria, both the comic and the tragic. Most impressive, perhaps, is Aducci, who pulls off her role as Maxine's grandmother with a built-in tension and old-folk frankness resembling so many first generation American immigrants.

The play is important because it presents the lives of several women who might not otherwise make it onto the stage. Yet somehow the search for their identities becomes more than muddled throughout the play, and if not for the lovely aesthetics of human connection that this performance produces, one might have been searching for an exit before the curtain fell.