The outsider character in Roger Benington’s The Mormon Bird Play, the one who may or may not represent Benington himself—or all of us, or the other characters’ sins, or something—was mostly mute. And maybe mentally handicapped. And maybe magic. I’m still not sure.
She (played by actor Parker Matthews—the cast is all male) did or didn’t bring dead animals back to life, discover buried treasure, and cough up money. She definitely wore a dead bird around her neck. She either was or wasn’t a magic bird princess and/or priestess. So I’m confused, and I think that’s all right. The Mormon Bird Play doesn’t want you to be comfortable. It meanders then rushes through reality and unrealities (dreamscapes, fantasies) while players drop character to announce scene changes and occasionally glance at scripts. Straightforwardness isn’t on the agenda, sometimes to the point of obnoxious inscrutability.
A half-dozen actors, all young handsome men, play a variety of characters, mostly young Mormon girls in Utah. Parents and priests are mentioned, but this is a land built and ruled by children—which is truly creepy, since in the land of children, along with play ceremonies and games and gossip, there is also fucking and fighting and shunning. A world with no grown-ups is a dangerous place. The kids filter their intensely religious life through the strange lens of childish ignorance, and inflict on each other whatever abuses they’ve suffered.
The basic structure is this: Ivona, the outsider, has come from Idaho to live with her extended family in Utah after an unexplained tragedy. She almost never speaks and doesn’t much interact with her cousins or newfound “friends.” Vacant-eyed, vaguely demented, and doomed, Ivona is the new center of these kids’ world, and they play with her like a new pet or toy.
As Ivona, Parker Matthews is consistently compelling. Keep your eyes on him when other people are the focus of a scene—you won’t regret it. The rest of the adults play children well; their body language and the way they talk embody that odd mix of innocence and growing awareness of the larger world. “Birds die while they’re flying, you know. Grandpa had a heart attack in his car. It’s the same thing,” one kid explains early on, in the let-me-teach-you-about-the-world voice kids use to share acquired wisdom. They’re mostly swallowing and regurgitating their parents’ religion, but the weirdness of Mormonism multiplied by the weirdness of kids’ imaginations makes the whole thing sound like an epic joke. “Sometimes I wonder if Jesus really wants me for a sunbeam,” sighs one girl in a contemplative moment.
Overall, The Mormon Bird Play feels disjointed. Some scenes seem harvested directly from Benington’s last acid trip (an extended fantasy/dream sequence where bird-people in fringed satin capes force the bully character through odd Mormon temple–style rituals), some of them seem to come from real backyard conversations. The mix of silliness and abuse never congeals into a unified tone, but most of the performances are entertaining as all hell—and if you like to feel emotionally sore after a show, this one’ll do that for you. 
The actors worked hard, but I think the playwright was just too far up his own hindquarters when he wrote it. At a certain point, I started to regard it as obscurity for its own sake.
This was the kind of mind-tweaking work I’ve come to rely upon WET for. I have very minor complaints about the production I saw last Friday, and left feeling very satisfied. Not fucked-with, but challenged with a purpose. The disjointedness is there, but it is not purposeless. I felt guided and cared for by a writer and director with both a sense of humor and a sense of urgency. It successfully depicts the brilliant cruelty of childhood and the propensity to project ourselves into vacuums (as the characters do to the perplexing, vacant Ivona). For me, Mormon Bird Play is terrific and very live theatre.
I, too, actually liked the production and was fine with not getting everything I saw. I think though, that the disjointedness comes from how the script was originally developed. From the program it appears that the play and the characters were developed by the actors who originated the roles in the first production of the play. Ensemble-developed shows often have the wonderful quality of pushing the envelope in new and unexpected ways, but likewise can sometimes feel disjointed if the original director and/or writer doesn’t then sculpt the pieces into a more cohesive form. But for some reason I think it was this quality that gave this production some of its magic – as soon as I thought I had one thing figured out, the play went in a completely different direction. It was completely unpredictable. So as long as you’re willing to go along for ride, it definitely made for an intriguing journey.