Review: ‘Birds of North America’ locks its characters in a cage of dramatic constraints

Birding is the language that Caitlyn (Jacqueline Misaye) must acquire to communicate with her emotionally inaccessible father, John (Arye Gross). His hobby is donning a pair of binoculars and identifying the various species of birds that alight on the trees in his Baltimore County backyard.

A medical researcher who was trained as a physician, John is not someone you would look to for solace in a crisis. Bluntly factual to an almost robotic extent, he lacks not so much the willingness but the building blocks of empathy. Bedside manner is beyond him.

In “Birds of North America,” now at the Odyssey Theatre in a production directed by Peter Richards, playwright Anna Ouyang Moench (“Man of God”) has created a tight-focused, two-character drama about a father and daughter who love each other but cannot reach each other. The play, a study in contrasts, pits a daughter’s need for connection against a father’s inability to transcend his own limitations.

Gruff, empirically exact and oblivious to feelings, John approaches the world as though it were his lab. Changes are notated with an air of neutrality. A progressive who is passionate about the environment and the increasingly evident reality of climate change, he can get worked up over politics. But there’s no such passion when dealing with family matters. He treats his daughter like a lowly associate, questioning her choices and criticizing her imprecision.

A struggling novelist when the play begins, Caitlyn earns a living as a copy editor at a right-wing website, which her father holds in contempt. Her personal life is of little interest to him. What concerns him is her professional standing, a priority she doesn’t share. Her accidental career makes her feel like one of those brown sparrows her father dismisses as LBJs (little brown jobs) on their regular bird-watching outings.

Why, Caitlyn wonders, does happiness — hers or his own — matter so little to him? She partakes of birding to be near him and attract his sympathetic interest. But she’d have better luck gaining his notice by growing a pair of wings and building a nest in a nearby tree.

The stubbornness of the situation — played out in a series of scenes that take place between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s — creates a repetitive drama. The seasons change along with the characters’ clothes, but the intractable conversational pattern between John and Caitlyn made me long for a third character to break the monotony.

An obvious choice would be Caitlyn’s doctor mother, who is the chief breadwinner in her marriage. Unseen in the play, this character could shed light on her husband’s deficiencies, which she has been accommodating and perhaps even enabling. But “Birds of North America” leaves out so much context. The play takes place in a world where father-daughter turmoil eclipses other realities.

Gross, a dab acting veteran with a sterling stage reputation, is almost too faithful to John’s limited emotional repertoire. To his credit, he refuses to sentimentalize the character. But John’s one-dimensional personality is a theatrical shortcoming the playwright and the director leave unaddressed.

Misaye, equally truthful, has more hues to reveal as Caitlyn, who powerfully stands up to her father when he minimizes her grief over a miscarriage in his coldly scientific manner. What’s most moving about her performance is the way she lets us see not only Caitlyn’s bristling frustration but also her determination to move beyond grievance. In the background of this father-daughter drama is the lengthening shadow of death.

The playwright is capable of working on a much larger canvas, as her 2019 play “Man of God” demonstrated. The focused scrutiny here is impressive in its psychological accuracy, but the play’s locked-in nature leads to a few dramatic missteps, one involving a helpless bird that falls victim to a family spat and the other concerning a rambling apologetic phone message that John messes up in his usual way.

The unconvincing nature of the violence of the bird incident is prompted as much by Caitlyn’s understandable rage at her father’s careless cruelty as by the play’s static nature. And the prolonged phone message that goes nowhere also seems to be tediously symptomatic of a character dynamic that has no other registers.

Arye Gross and Jacqueline Misaye in”Birds of North America” at the Odyssey Theatre.

(Jenny Graham)

The staging, featuring a set by Mark Guirguis of scattered leaves and a few backyard markers, is relatively simple. Nevertheless, the production was halted at the reviewed performance to deal with a lighting issue. Earlier in the run, there was apparently a sound problem.

Snafus of this kind are somewhat surprising in a production that is essentially an actors’ showcase. Beyond the warbling chorus of birds, the most noteworthy scenic element is the work of costume designer Lena Sands, whose shifting array of outfits helps track the changes wrought by nature and time.

“Birds of North America” cages its characters. Gross and Misaye, faultless in their authenticity, need more room to turn realism into compelling drama.