On Sunday, April 9, 2023, fiction writer Anu Jindal, dramaturg/producer Kari Olmon, and I (playwright Lucas Baisch) attended a matinee performance of Julia Izumi’s off-Broadway debut, Regretfully, So the Birds Are, at Playwrights Horizons. 

The play follows Illy, Neel, and Mora Whistler, three adopted twenty-somethings from three decidedly unknown Asian origins (they made a pact to never investigate their countries of birth to retain a somewhat inverted sense of unity). The family reels from the fallout of their father’s murder, their mother’s subsequent incarceration, and the introduction of a forbidden love between two seemingly non-biologically related siblings (the forthright musician Illy and pleasantly aimless Neel). While a synopsis could lay the groundwork for the traditional familial descent by tragic means, Izumi operates with a rushing irreverence.

As I searched for language from my scribbled show notes, Anu and Kari laughed at my proposition of the play’s “gleeful abjection.” I, too, thought, what the hell am I talking about? But as I sit, days later, organizing the text from our recorded conversation, I delight in the conjuring of such a contradictory effect. Abjection, in this instance, can be thought of as an act of moral impunity. This play lives in a world of deeply unsettling exchanges — a persistent Asian fetishization, sibling incest, arson manslaughter — bloomed by pillow fights, a ukulele cheer, and a clownish delivery of one-liners. Humor becomes the tool for a conscious refusal.

Inside Izumi’s magic act, her tricks become the place of cultural invention. Through farce, Izumi teaches audiences new ways to grieve, new ways to resist categorization, and the oversimplification of a personal origin story. She spotlights the roundabout lessons we might learn when forcing a journey, promoting the question: do we have to escape ourselves, exploit our frequent flier miles, to learn what’s been sitting in front of us the entire time?

Excerpts of this conversation have been condensed for clarity.

Lucas: There’s a learning curve to understanding tone here. [Julia Izumi] operates in a very specific realm of humor. It definitely takes a second to get on board with how logic is functioning.

Kari: Or not functioning.

Lucas: Or not functioning, right. The resistance to logic.

Anu: The humor is the salient aspect of this show. There's so much control around the way she's using laughter. I think it’s very skillful—her understanding of how to manipulate tone. I guess, maybe I'm speaking of this in a very facile way, but it feels like there's an element of discomfort to it. I never feel quite settled in the idea that we, the audience, are sharing in the jokes being told by the characters. In the way these characters deploy it, it feels like they’re using humor in order to mask something deeper or darker. It gets at the way people often feel uncomfortable talking about grief head-on, or things like murder or incest—all topics which the siblings are dealing with after the death of their father and incarceration of their mother for murdering him, and the characters Illy and Neel specifically having their incestuous relationship. People tend to shy away from these topics or, in this case, to laugh them off, and you see humor become a way of bypassing them.

Kari: Yeah. And something about the madcap antic pacing of the humor, especially at the beginning of the play, knocks you off-balance as an audience member. The characters are all vibrating at such extreme frequencies; no one is really stopping for breath. So it’s all the more noticeable and poignant when the play arrives at a moment of stillness.

Anu: It felt very seamless.

Lucas: Like a little gift to the audience, where brief circumstances or events are not really consequential to the story, but it's more like, “Oh, this is Julia winking at me.” Maybe in the same vein: there are so many things I could say I wanted to know more about, and Julia just won't give it to us. I find it kind of delightful.

Kari: Well, let's get into it. The play starts with an element of speculative fiction: humans are already moving up to the clouds and claiming pieces of aerial real estate. Illy brags to her siblings that she’s going to be the youngest person to join the migration. What’s going on with the human-to-sky migration? And what are the birds doing in there? 

Lucas: Why birds?

Anu: Why sky migration?

Lucas: I’m thinking of how all these characters are desperate to affix themselves to identity. For Illy, who ends up buying a plot of the sky and wants to be a part of the great sky migration, that’s her aspirational gesture. It’s a move born of fantasy. So, then it's like, okay, all these actions are born of fantasy. There’s an acknowledgment of how absurd it is to form identity inside static values. It returns with a conversation around AAPI communities and what kind of language we use to claim identity. Julia’s letting us have a breath as we're entering these conversations.

Anu: The bird thing. I kind of want to puzzle it out. You have this gathering of heterogeneous birds, each played by a puppet, convening a council so that they can vent about the humans destroying the environment and figure out if there’s a way to make them care... It's funny thinking how it's the single moment of consensus in the play. The birds are able to communicate with each other, regardless of their different species. It’s an ideal possibility. They each have their own point of view and perspective, and yet they're able to come to an agreement.

Kari: To the human outsider, they sound tonally deaf when they're communicating, but when they're communicating amongst themselves it sounds like beautiful music.

Lucas: It literally turns into song.

Kari: Exactly. From discordant chirping into... 

Lucas: Karaoke funeral.

Kari: Mhm.

Lucas: They kept saying the word change.

Kari: Because Neel seems to fully change into a bird, at least in some dimension.

Lucas: The whole shape reminds me of that Ursula K. Le Guin essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” [Le Guin] is talking about a structure of storytelling that mimics the penetrative, or the Hero's Journey, where we're tracking one person's transformation over time, looking at cause and effect as the basis of the story. Le Guin offers returning to a gatherer (over hunter) model of storytelling, where the writer holds a satchel or a pouch, and sustenance is born from the collecting of seeds or plants. What is it to create a story where you've made a vessel to be filled with all of these images, these metaphors? So that the progression of the story doesn't become cause and effect, and instead holds up a contrast, looking at ingredients in opposition to each other?

Anu: And then, after the play has collected all these situations and metaphors together, it leads to a kind of eruption at the end. The characters seem to have all these realizations, but in private, and without any real closure. It leaves us in an unresolved, uncertain space—a good representation maybe of what you were saying about identity. That it's not a neat, solvable thing, but constantly changing, shifting, uncertain...

Kari: It's very anti-cathartic in an amusing way.

Anu: Yeah. Right.

Lucas: Oh, I love that. “Anti-cathartic.”

Kari: It's flipping the sort of heroic adoption narratives on their head, undermining the catharsis that we want from them.

Anu: The other thing I kept coming back to—even from the very beginning, just sitting there waiting for the play to start—was all the hints of violence. There's the burnt scene backdrop [scenic design by You-Shin Chen]. There's the broken shutter, a hinge hanging from around the window, whatever. And throughout the story too, violence is just there, lurking in the background. You have the prospect of the Cambodian genocide underneath it, some mentions of Pol Pot, the things that have happened immediately within the family—there's so much trauma. And then these kids want to find out who they really are, which entails learning about their place in this history, but is that going to fix anything?

Kari: Maybe that's why Neel transforms into a bird. He joins the bird chorus and starts to chirp along–in key, this time–and suddenly you realize the actor is holding a bird puppet of his own and he just disappears into the flock. 

Lucas: Even the moments of reverie or sweetness come with a gag.

Kari: I was asking myself, because another thing our Aristotelian-trained brains love to do is tease out the question, “Is there a protagonist?” Is the fact that Illy is left alone on stage pulling the curtain behind her to shut out all the action that preceded it – is the fact that she is the last one standing so to speak, does that make her the protagonist, or is it just that she's the one who hasn't been assassinated, ascended, transformed? 

Anu: What have you got for us, Lucas?

Lucas: I wrote “a gleeful abjection.”

Kari: Ooh.

Anu: What does that mean?

Lucas: It means nothing.

Anu: I want to know about that. What you saw in that. 

Kari: When did you write that?

Lucas: It was toward the beginning. Probably about – 

Anu: The incest stuff?

Lucas: Probably.

Anu: There wasn't really a moral standard in this play. Which is fun.

Kari: The mother actually incinerated their father, and it isn’t even the most momentous thing that’s happened in the history of this family.

Anu: She wasn't seeking any kind of forgiveness. It wasn't her story.

Kari: I loved that repetition with Illy every time she started to say, "But you don't loooooook [insert ethnic identity]" And then rewinding it either out of political correctness or out of deference to the siblings’ pact [in which they wouldn’t hunt down their adoptive lineage]. It’s a hearkening back to the cultural policing of which stories, whose stories, and who's allowed to tell them. And this – I don't know, it's the whole like, what's it called? 23andMe, Ancestry.com – our obsession with taxonomizing ourselves down to the last chromosome or percentage and thinking there's some profound meaning to be extracted from that. And maybe there is, but in the world of the play, there really isn’t. Because Illy is the only one who has the knowledge that their dad is really their dad and now they're half-white. After that, she walks in front of the stage by herself. She’s the only bearer of that knowledge.

Lucas: Julia loves a journey. Most of her plays have journeys in them. In the others, journeys happen in earnest, whereas in this one, it felt like there was an examination of what that journey is.

Anu: It’s almost like the futility of the journey. It's not going to give you what you need.

Lucas: I’m glad that Julia didn't shy away from any of that writing because it can be really easy to be deterred by, like, “Oh no, what if this is equipped by the wrong person in the audience.” But then, so many writers get to write whatever they want, so I'm glad Julia persisted.

Anu: I think it's really misanthropic. There's something bleakly abject about it.

Kari: Gleefully abject one might even say.

Lucas: Yeah, baby. Hell yeah. 

Kari: If in theater, you follow the mandate of authenticity to its most extreme version, then you have an autobiographical solo show performed by the author for one night only.

Anu: I wonder why incest.

Kari: I would say it's one of the last taboos. I'm doing my dissertation in Romantic-era drama, and the poetry and plays that came out of that period — those guys were all obsessed with incest. Shelley, Lord Byron, their work is filled with it. Byron was in love with his half-sister. It’s a major recurring motif in a lot of the literature from the era and it has something to do with the intense solipsism that the poets were wallowing in. Their selves were the only thing that mattered, the thing that fascinated them the most. A sibling is the closest they can get to seeing themselves, but in a separate body. It becomes irresistibly attractive to the protagonists of some of these Romantic poems and plays, who are basically falling in love with their own embodied reflections. It's interesting that in a play so focused on identity and searching for identity and looking for identity, Julia’s two more or less identity-less or identity-deprived siblings think they've fallen in love. What are they seeing in each other? They're both blank slates in a way. It's a weird fun house! Mirror to mirror. They're like a reflection of looking for something, but not seeing anything.

Lucas: Is this a secret language play?

Anu: Hm. Secret language play. The miscommunication and restatement, searching for the right phrasing of something, or what you mean to say. [Julia] embeds that into the language, into the dialogue. I feel like most other plays and screenplays don’t do that—that's up to the actor. But [Julia] finds it important enough that it’s part of the written dialogue in the script. It goes along with the phenomenon that comes up throughout the play of people struggling to find the right word, though the language they’re looking for sort of escapes them. And even the play’s repetition of “tone-deafness” [Neel is presented as being someone who is literally tone deaf, unable to sing on-key, but numerous times the characters also say things which are culturally tone deaf or express their deep anxiety about being perceived that way] feels like that too. It's not the right note. You're trying to get to the right note and you can't.

Lucas: There's not a lot of judgment in this play. It's impressive that Julia cultivates even a flash of empathy for all of these characters. She’s such a little trickster. I hope that's being read. The fact that there's some formal deviance happening here. Some story deviance. Like, how do you package a story about identity – or the refusal of identity – that doesn't look the way an audience might demand it to look? That accepts you the way you are? Julia is swimming in that question.