Review: The Hyacinth Macaw

The Loeb Mainstage, Oct. 24, 25, 26, 30, 31, Nov. 1

by Juli Min

At first, everything seems perfectly simple in the world of The Hyacinth Macaw. A small white house stands in the background, adorned with storm windows, a small red door, laundry hanging limply from a line. The set opens on a kitchen with checkered tiling, fenced in with a white picket fence, surrounded by a green lawn. Knowing little about the play, I expected to see a typical, middle class American family come out onto the stage.

Boy was I in for a shock.

The Hyacinth Macaw was one of the most psychologically complex, linguistically convoluted, and absurdly plot-driven plays I have ever experienced. And it was, simply put, mind-blowing.

Let me start with a brief synopsis. The nuclear family of Susannah (Tali Friedman) and her parents Dora (Sarah Sherman) and Ray (Alex Breaux) are visited one day by a strange outer-galactic man named Hard (Jack Cutmore-Scott). He comes bearing an almost indecipherable letter stating more or less that Ray is actually a duplicate of a man and must return to another land, as the moon is sick and dying. As Ray leaves the family (by way of magical refrigerator), young Susannah and Hard complete the task of burying the sick moon in the yard, as Dora searches for meaning in her life. The most intricate of the characters, Dora eventually finds a kind of salvation through her relation with Mad Woo (Zach Sniderman), a wandering minstral/vagabond bard. The play ends with Dora running away from her empty home, reiterating her orphaned status.

Like the deceptively ordinary stage set for such a bizarre play, the prototypical characters of man, wife, and child are each surprisingly hyper-eloquent existential studies of the elements of the American family. It is in this vein that they often break out into long-winded, wordy soliloquies about the nature of their personal existences. The actors do well in their interactions with one another, but it is in their respective soliloquies that they (and Mac Wellman’s playwriting) really shine. Through the use of what I will call “existential lists,” the characters will stop their actions, the play will change form (through spotlights, freezing of other characters, speaking through microphones), and spew forth distant memories, names of seemingly unrelated objects, sensations, colors. Like the plot of the play, as is the letter that the family receives from Hard, these long soliloquies are intricate, jumbled, too wordy, and abstract. The play becomes necessarily less an exercise in understanding what is happening (as these characters are too articulate to be articulate), but in sensing a tenuous truth in the lists, patterns, movements of phrase, and the actors’ articulations.

In this way, the play demands a different kind of viewing experience from the viewer. The play is very hard to follow, yet it is consistently entertaining, often very funny. The words are consistently obtuse, and yet their meanings manage to leak through the cracks. The plot is out of this world, and yet strikes a distinctly human and sentimental chord. We see these unhappy, over-articulate, and emotionally suffocated people reaching out to be understood. And we see them failing to grasp one another. This is the truest conflict of family life.

Sarah Sherman was very convincing as an unhappy housewife and mother. Her acting was natural, and the shades of her confused emotion were subtle and precise. Jack Cutmore-Scott does a very fair job with Hard. His monotone voice and accent captured the out-of-this-worldness of his character. His remarkably graceful movements were a pleasure to watch. Truly graceful, confident movement is a rarity in college theater, and Cutmore-Scott, who had to do everything from jump, to bend, to die, was as precise as a dancer: his hands were as articulate as his words. At times, however it did seem he was having a little too much fun with the audience, turning his character into a kind of farce.

Precocious children are always hard to play. Talisa Friedman had a Natalie Portman-esque quality to her acting. It seemed at the same time too juvenile and too precocious, sometimes on target, but often slightly irritating. It was self-aware acting, the kind where we knew she knew her lines before they were even uttered. As Ray, Alex Breaux stole the show for a good twenty minutes. His rendition of the business man with a constant flux of primal sexual desires, ironic tendencies, and hilarious lines was not only well timed, but convinginly acted. Zach Sniderman’s portrayal of Mad Woo left something to be desired. He portrayed his vagabond character so casually, so unpassionately (his hands skim over the guitar lifelessly, he hugs Dora after sex so languidly, he smiles so abstractedly) that his message regarding music and the redemptive quality of love becomes somewhat unconvincing.

As the play concluded, Dora running off with Mad Woo, Hard dying in the center of the stage, and Susannah running away from home, I walked out of the theater in shock of what I had just witnessed.

I remained in a strange mood the rest of that night. What can one do after experiencing a play that makes such claims as, “We are all sleepwalkers in a boiling furnace of flames,” and asks the question over and over again, “Does anyone really love me?” How can we really know the meanings of things that happen and that we experience, when all we can truly feel are the ruses and shades of emotion, all we can articulate are the objects, memories, and things in our quick, terrestrial lives? The Hyacinth Macaw gives a glimmer of an answer, but questions the ability to truly understand the events and people around us. In its power to provoke central existential questions about life, and to do so in a way that creates a completely alienating and yet honest experience for the viewer, the show was overall brilliantly conceived and executed.