Birds of North America is a two-person play about a father and daughter over a series of autumn bird watching sessions. The father is a staunch environmentalist and prides himself on a scientific mindset and the daughter finds her initial career doing copyediting for a conservative website he rather disapproves of.
The characters, played by Stephen Spencer and Denki Rongé, are both well realized and the bird watching does give a chance to track the world shifting around them. I think Denki, playing the daughter Caitlyn, in particular had a chance to show a lot of emotional range as she tried to maintain an often painful relationship and Stephen showed how John brought the same outlook when he was, by my politics, right and when he was sabotaging his own work or committing one of the most painful acts of mansplaining I’ve seen on stage. The Urbanite theater staging was evocative and had good sound design for the bird watching itself. I’ll definitely keep the Urbanite in mind in future trips. Spoilers after the cut.
The play does a good job of exploring present culture anxieties around parenting, e.g. the recent coverage of polling on parenting that had prompted a Ross Douthat column on workism as a driving force for the upper class:
On the other hand, when you ask them to give weight to professional aspirations versus personal ones, to compare the importance of their kids being “financially independent” or happy in their work to their getting married and having kids, finances and jobs win out easily — by an extraordinary margin, in fact. According to Pew, 88 percent of American parents rate financial success and professional happiness as either “extremely” or “very” important for their kids. Only about 20 percent give the same rating to eventual marriage and children.
…Only 35 percent of respondents say that shared religious beliefs are “extremely” or “very” important — OK, in a country with declining religiosity, maybe that makes sense. But only 16 percent say it’s important for their kids to inherit similar political beliefs; does that really seem plausible in a country as afflicted by polarization as our own? A country where soaring numbers of partisans say they’d be disappointed at merely acquiring a daughter-in-law or son-in-law of a different political party?
That column, as an insightful friend pointed out, does miss the extent to which upper class answers are not necessarily driven by prioritizing work über alles. Instead, she notes:
Like what I see in those answers is both the American embrace of individualism in parenting, and unwavering love; more like saying, I want them to be their own person, and yes I’ll love them even if we disagree about politics.
I think John ends up embodying the attitude Douthat describes. When Caitlyn is unemployed and single, he encourages her to be job searching over trying out a dating app. His most colossal misfire is attempting to comfort her after a miscarriage at 8 weeks in which he argues that the key thing to remember is how common miscarriages and ultimately that she shouldn’t put too much weight on this experience. Their relationship ruptures later when he takes a low blow over her character that ties in her infertility. Setting aside how he handles what he sees as her mercenary field of employment, simply not being a know-it-all dick about personal life matters would have prevented a lot of trouble.
I think playwright Anna Ouyang Moench leaves open how we should respond to John’s sometimes wavering embrace of love. My own take is that he’s bad at helping his daughter find a “job’s a job” style employment. He instead pushes her towards a entry level position at a nonprofit answering phones, which she hates. He also has a contempt for marketing that the play shows to over the top in his botching an interview with a reporter about his own vocation. Caitlyn doesn’t seem to be in agreement with her Oil and Gas company ultimate employer, so much as she just doesn’t care and faces some path dependency. But John would have a lot more room for comprise if he adopted a “do no harm” approach rather than trying to push her to live his values and blaming her lack of diligence for the divergence. I think the play is consistent with Douthat’s point on work-ism. John can be that nagging voice of meritocracy.He is tough on himself here too, benefiting from his wife’s success he was able to work multiple decades towards attempting to development a vaccine that ultimately did not pan out.
John does not appear in the final scene and Caitlyn speaks to the last question she was unable to ask him “was he ever satisfied?” My interpretation of that scene is that he’d likely taken his own life after losing his wife to a rapid onset cancer. I think the play does provide an answer to that question: yes. He was greatly satisfied to spot rare birds or by a home improvement project that did not just offer efficient solar energy but also heated floors for his wife. But those moments appeared to not be sufficient to sustain him. Which I think gets to a critique of workism that religious critiques like Douthat’s and mine own liberalism can agree on. What solace does it offer failures and common people working to get by? By the standards of meritocracy, most of us individually and even our organizations can end up facing disappointment and have reason to anxiously live in fear of relegation for ourselves and our children. John’s environmentalism and work ethic is not sufficient to overcome that. He would perhaps most benefit from a better understanding of the needs of those operating with a different mindset than his own, but we all deserve a more merciful creed than the one he suffers and inflicts suffering under.
Bird watching is a small but important solace that brings the father and daughter together and offers a note of hope and ongoing relationship with the departed at the end. It also echoes John’s lofty standards. He humorously dismisses the LBJs, little brown job (LBJ) birds, swallows and such that aren’t worth tracking. Not so bad as a form of snobbery, but as Kate pointed out, to grow bored with cardinals is to go too far. Happily he does raise a possibility of synergy when he pronounces his delight with female cardinals ,finding them more beautiful than their showy male counterparts. Caitlyn meanwhile cultivates her skill at birding and gains a greater appreciation for the difference between even humble LBJs.
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