If We Were Birds: a stunning new play

If We Were Birds

Written by Erin Shields
Directed by Alan Dilworth
Starring Tara Rosling, Philippa Domville and Geoffrey Pounsett
At Tarragon Theatre in Toronto

British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker has defined myth rather well as "the oblique image of an unwanted truth, reverberating through time."

In her stunning new play If We Were Birds, Erin Shields stares down one of those truths with feet firmly planted and stomach strongly girded. Her one-act brings a new, timely focus onto the Greek myth of the rape of Philomela by her warrior brother-in-law, Tereus, and their subsequent transformation into birds.

In a wryly poetic style, Shields channels her rage at the brutality inflicted on women in wars over the past century into this ancient tale. That she does so without ever dehumanizing the male perpetrators or losing sight of the fact that she is telling a specific, gripping, gruesome story is what is impressive.

Shields's version of events closely follows the Roman poet Ovid's in his Metamorphoses.

Tereus (Geoffrey Pounsett), the King of Thrace, is given the hand of princess Procne (Philippa Domville) as a reward from the King of Athens for his help in a military campaign against Thebes. Brought back to Thrace as a prize bride, Procne does fall in love with her husband and gives birth to a boy named Itys, but she misses her sister Philomela (Tara Rosling) and eventually sends Tereus to fetch her for a visit

Upon seeing the grown-up Philomela, however, Tereus's blood fills with quasi-incestful lust, and he diverts her to a cabin in the woods where he rapes her. When she screams to the Gods for justice, he slices out her tongue and imprisons her.

If Shields's retelling is brutal and filled with profanity, as least we don't have to deal with a description of Philomena's disembodied wiggling tongue as in Ovid.

The revenge Philomela and Procne enact once the truth comes out takes things to an even bloodier level. Suffice it to say that these sisters take a literal approach to the old adage about revenge being best served as a cold dish, then expand it into a buffet.

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus was inspired by the Philomela myth. More recently, Margaret Atwood and Wertenbaker have drawn upon it for similar feminist purposes as Shields. (Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale is where her definition of myth is stated.)

Shields' original invention is an individualized chorus of five slave women, captured by Tereus in Thebes and given to the King of Athens as a gift. The five women reveal tales of brutal rape all the more horrific for being drawn from real 20th-century atrocities from Nanking to Rwanda. While this sounds like a heavy-handed attempt to assert relevance, Shields never actually names these places, demonstrating an incredible ability to blend it all together smoothly.

Though the slave women warn Procne and Philomela, the sheltered sisters don't want to hear their stories and are each surprised when Tereus's brutality is revealed to them.

"You've dropped me like something half eaten," Philomela says, an incredulous then defiant anger filling the hole left in her by the trauma of her rape.

Later, Procne can't quite articulate her disbelief: "I knew he needed ... I knew he had to ... I thought there was a difference between family and war."

Even Tereus, it seems, is in denial about his own capacity for unspeakable cruelty. He delivers an absolutely chilling speech of self-justification, rendered unflinchingly by Pounsett, as he rapes Philomela: "It's my blood, not me."

If We Were Birds is written in a unique voice and very playable dialogue that shifts between heightened language, free-form verse and playful modern vernacular. Shields tells her story with thoughtful and often amusing anachronisms - as girls, Procne and Philomela play Marco Polo, suggesting a knowledge of travel writers that extends forward in time beyond Pausanias.

In the central characters' transformation into birds by the Gods, she has found a guiding metaphor. The chorus of women are all transmogrified as well, but wings haven't let them fully escape from the horrors they experienced as humans. They can fly, but they have been "shrunk to uncomfortable proportions" and become miniature monsters only able to release shards of shame and pain in twitches and squawks.

Alan Dilworth directs a fine cast with a steady hand and with inventive touches that never distract from the action, in front of a rope curtain designed by Jung-Hye Kim.

There are uneven aspects to all this. Some of the chorus roles are not as compellingly performed. The addition of an ingratiating servant into the story near the end is unnecessary and jarring. And occasionally Shields lets loose with lush language when inarticulateness might better express the situation.

But there's a furious imagination on display here. And with Dilworth's strong direction and a central brave performance from Rosling as Philomela, If We Were Birds is a necessary discovery for adventurous theatregoers unafraid of confronting the most unwanted of truths - that inhumanity is only human.

If We Were Birds runs until May 23.