Lonely island: Phoenix Theatre premieres 'Love Bird'

Nigel pitches woo to an unresponsive girlfriend.

Phoenix Theatre feathers its nest with a gentle, intense spectacle about love for this Valentine's season, through Feb. 20. Solitude is in some sense the condition all of us share, but loneliness is a menacing distortion.

K.T. Peterson's "Love Bird" draws its inspiration from the widely publicized true story of a solitary bird drawn to a small island off the coast of New Zealand and fixated on courting a group of concrete imitations of its kind.

The gannet's courtship in vain ended with the bird's death in 2018. Other gannets lured to the island in an attempt to restock the seabirds were not deceived, but Nigel stayed and persisted in his attempt to woo a mate. In extravagant style well-supported by Phoenix's technical team, two actors embody in human terms Peterson's spun-off rhapsody on the ways the need for love can overcome all sorts of discouragements.

As seen February 11,  the production enchants even as it initially baffles. Jolene Mentink Moffat directs with a sure sense of the play's fantastic style. Scot Greenwell plays Nigel, the island's lone human inhabitant, until Norman (Bill Simmons) arrives on the scene, fulfilling a long-smoldering ambition for closer acquaintance that had germinated in the workaday environment each man has left behind. Both characters have birdlike characteristics, as if both love and the misery of its absence force us out of ourselves into a potentially sustaining otherness. Beck Jones' costume design is redolent of birds and Robinson-Crusoe-like craftsmanship alike.

Nigel tries to process his island visitor's extravagance.

Nigel and Norman astonish each other — an effect audiences are certain to experience as well. Nigel has fashioned for himself two girlfriend figures out of scraps washed up on the shore of the desert isle he calls home, given substance and jerrybuilt integrity in Kyle Ragsdale's set design.  One of the "girls," dragged out of a cramped cave for his attempts at engagement, is standoffish and emotionally remote, which doesn't surprise us but nettles Nigel no end. The other, attached upside down to a tree, is apparently capable of dialogue but prone to argue. In other words, each represents a different type of familiar dead-end relationship. 

Greenwell managed Nigel's verbose opening monologue with unceasing virtuosity. The echo chamber all lonely people design for themselves is highly resonant in his case; strident outbursts and raucous giggles find the actor adept in all vocal registers. His whole-body characterization includes shuffling, jogging, and idiosyncratic dancing. 

When Norman comes on the scene, a different set of physical and vocal characteristics are basic to Simmons' performance. Gestural allusions to the life of the stage and a flamboyant oratorical manner occasionally subside to such reflections as "Maybe there's a whole lot of the best in everybody we just aren't seeing because...we're not looking."  The newcomer rants as well, and when he focuses on his purpose for being there, shouts his growing love for Nigel in the midst of two blazing thunderstorms. 

The weather events are a synesthetic triumph of Jordan Munson's sound and Michael Moffatt's lighting designs. The classic theater representation of raging in the teeth of nature is of course the maddened King Lear on the heath. Of Shakespeare's four major tragic heroes, Lear is the one without a trace of erotic drive. But "Love Bird" is a comedy, and Eros is the god or demon motivating both Norman and Nigel. Love is the destiny of both men, and their weirdness cannot obscure that goal. Nigel's girlfriend charades are as futile as Norman's hilarious recital of the "fun facts" he once spouted to his peers in a futile attempt to be one of the cool kids.

Not knowing of K.T. Peterson's inspirations for this sweet, daring play beyond the poignant seabird story, I found oddly suggestive of "Love Bird"'s meaning a villanelle by Theodore Roethke called "The Waking." It would be awkward to quote in full here, but the first six lines point the way into the elaborate interior lives Norman and Nigel are both struggling to reach beyond: "I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I feel my fate in what I cannot fear./ I learn by going where I have to go. / We  think by feeling. What is there to know? / I hear my being dance from ear to ear. / I wake to sleep and take my waking slow."

In a sea-girt world of detritus, spiritual driftwood, and castoff odds and ends shored against ruin and subject to  the violence of nature,  Norman and Nigel work out a way to set love at the center. Following the repetitive demands of its form,  "The Waking" reassuringly ends, perhaps with epigraphic force for this production:

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

[Photos by Gray Dragon Photography]