What do we talk about when we talk about the weather? We talk about the planet’s slow boil: the seasons that change without our consent, the arrow of time that pierces our lives regardless of our armors. Medical researcher John and his adult daughter Caitlyn talk about the weather constantly in In Birds of North America; nearly every scene of Anna Ouyang Moench’s one-act play touches on the subject. Set in suburban Maryland and unfolding over a decade, the play tracks their relationship like an ornithologist watching the sky: full of hope, yet braced for disappointment. Species of bird appear late, vanish early or never arrive at all. Their altered patterns mirror a filial relationship that keeps missing its own landing, circling ground without touching down.
Birds of North America | Photograph: Evan Hanover, Courtesy A Red Orchid Theatre
The play opens at the dawn of the Iraq War—a moral backdrop that weighs heavily on John, a lifelong liberal, eco-warrior and former doctor who sacrificed professional success to pursue a cure for Dengue fever. He catalogs the world with scientific precision, logging birds in his red palm-sized notebook while flattening human emotion with the same rigor. (He speaks of Caitlyn’s miscarriage as casually as he might note a species count in decline.) Caitlyn, meanwhile, works as a copy editor for a right-wing news site, a compromise she frames as a temporary shelter from the torment of capitalism rather than a personal conviction. She dreams of a novel she can't yet articulate, unsure of her voice.
Much of the play’s tension lives in how father and daughter understand privilege. Caitlyn believes that principles are a luxury afforded to those with financial safety, even as she repeatedly migrates to her parents’ home if she needs refuge. John, by contrast, speaks fluently in moral absolutes—except when they threaten his professional prospects; his environmentalism accommodates pro-GMO stances when they are advantageous to his research—and sees his daughter as having flown off course, trading conviction for comfort. While John has faith in his own classifications, Caitlyn retreats into familiar compartments, afraid of mislabeling herself.
As Caitlyn, Cassidy Slaughterhouse-Mason moves with a visible yearning to be seen by the often preoccupied John. She offers bird facts like nervous peace offerings: a way of reaching for her father on the only terrain he respects, in the hope of being celebrated (or at least recognized). John occasionally goes along with her—confirming a sighting or identifying a call—but he just as often retreats into the safety of family gossip and Caitlyn's ongoing job hunt. He can diagnose an ecosystem’s failures more easily than his own distance from his daughter.
Birds of North America | Photograph: Evan Hanover, Courtesy A Red Orchid Theatre
A Red Orchid Theatre’s immersive set design traps the audience inside this stalled habitat. By transforming the black box into John’s backyard—complete with synthetic astroturf and a picket fence choked by branches—director Kirsten Fitzgerald and scenic designer Morgan Laszlo create a space that is equal parts pastoral and claustrophobic. Ethan Korvne’s evocative sound design, which weaves guitar and flute into a mimicry of birdsong, underscores the fragility of this world. This is where birds used to congregate, and where John and Caitlyn still wait for them to show up on schedule, even as a changing climate rewrites the rules. It’s a world defined more by what has vanished than by what remains.
Birds of North America confines itself a bit too tightly to this single perch. Without context beyond its backyard exchanges, certain revelations feel overly packaged, and John’s emotional coldness seems underexamined. Still, the play’s final impact lingers. Caitlyn’s repeated returns—to the yard, to the conversation, to the hope of acceptance—parallel the tragic persistence of birds following ancestral routes to landscapes that no longer sustain them. Birds of North America conveys this ache deeply: the grief of adaptation, the dangers of loyalty and the devastation of finding out that change comes whether we’re ready or not.
Birds of North America. A Red Orchid Theatre. By Anna Ouyang Moench. Directed by Kirsten Fitzgerald. With John Judd, Cassidy Slaughter-Mason. Running time: 1hr 30mins. No intermission.
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