Review: "Dirty Bird" Uncages a New Adaptation of "The Seagull"

Dirty Bird

Written and directed by Whit Flint

Adapted from Anton Chekhov

Presented by Twenty Somethings Productions and Riot Act at ErF Gallery

1 Ingraham St, Brooklyn, NY 11206

September 4-20, 2026

AJ Molder and River Knight. Photo by Matt Street.

Anton Chekhov's works may seem to us now as the epitome of canonical, but, Svetlana Evdokimova reminds us, in own time, he "questioned the certainties that sustained traditional modes of social organization and morality as well as traditional ways of conceiving of the human self" and "sought to break out of tradition and convention through experimentation with new literary forms and a new kind of theater" (Staging Existence, 2023, pg. 239). As Whit Flint more succinctly puts it in the director's note for Dirty Bird, his adaptation of The Seagull, Chekhov was a "rebel." Dirty Bird, a joint presentation of NYC-based Twenty Somethings Productions and UK-based Riot Act, channels that rebellious spirit in its superb update of Chekhov for the screen age. Set in current-day New York, Dirty Bird gifts audiences something even better than a dead gull: a bold reimagining of a major play performed by an excellent ensemble.

The broad strokes remain in place from Dirty Bird's Chekhovian forebearer: veteran actor Irina (Mary Bacon) returns to the home owned by her ailing brother, Peter Sorin (Cullen Wheeler), and run by Eli Sham (Johnny Sánchez) and his wife, Paulina (Lindsay Brill). Paulina is in love with Dorn (Johnny Sparks), Peter Sorin's personal physician, but he won't quite commit to running off with her. Paulina's step-daughter Masha (Fiona Rose Dyer), here a full-on face-painted goth (who, in a very funny line, says that no one knows she's sad), also has an unrequited love–Irina's child, Konstantin (River Knight)–even as schoolteacher Simon (Trevor Clarkson), who couldn't be less goth, loves her in turn. Konstantin's affections, meanwhile, are unshakably directed at Nina (AJ Molder), a family friend with a tumultuous home life and aspirations to acting. When Irina arrives, it is with her latest lover, successful writer Alex Trigorin (Neal Bledsoe), in tow. Nina is starstruck, and Alex immediately evinces a more than friendly interest in this young admirer. None of this endears him to Konstantin, who also wants to be a writer but who wants to push their art forward into "new forms," as the slogan they paint on a roll of paper reads, and views Alex and Irina as representative of, to closely paraphrase them, old people doing old things in old ways. Rather than Chekhov's plays and literary fiction, the characters in Dirty Bird write and act, or want to, for film and television. The Nina-starring piece that Konstantin presents to everyone early in the play is, for instance, an experimental short film full of rapid cuts rather than an avant garde play, and Irina is a (past-her-prime) movie star rather than a stage actress, changes that create the opportunity for the play to make a few great meta jokes about theater and for the audience to reflect on how the nature of success and celebrity in the performing arts has–and hasn't–changed in the interim between The Seagull and Dirty Bird.

River Knight and AJ Molder. Photo by Matt Street.

The voiceover in Konstantin's experimental film (a film which Irina laughs loudly at while it is playing) asks how we exist in the vast, dark sea of reality and asserts that the soul is the only constant amidst unceasing change. These ideas, which return during Dirty Bird's conclusion, offer one frame for viewing its characters in all their complex humanity. Nina, for example, by a certain point knows that her attraction to Alex is not a good thing but nevertheless can't help her feelings, a situation that finds an inverse parallel in Masha's attempt to bury her own feelings in bourgeois normalcy. Irina has an honest, maternal talk with Konstantin in one scene while she tenderly bandages his self-inflicted wounds, but elsewhere doesn't even bother to see her child's new work and habitually misgenders them, with the seemingly older Sorin the one to keep correcting her. Even Alex, who could have been positioned as a straightforward villain, draws our sympathy with discussions of the burdens of the need to write, the feeling of never being quite an insider despite his success in the industry, and his conviction that he has never had the chance to really be in love but still might. Konstantin's genderqueerness not only adds another dimension to the character–and their relationship with Irina in particular–but represents a way of being that, while possessed of a long history across different cultures, constitutes, in a parallel to Konstantin's pursuit of new forms of art, a new form of living in this particular society. Similarly, in our post #MeToo era, the image produced by Alex and Nina of a male showbiz mentor taking advantage of younger women, while a situation that has been around at least as long as the phrase casting couch, takes on additional dimensions in comparison to its nineteenth-century original as well.

In its reimagining for the twenty-first century, Dirty Bird can and does bring onstage or make explicit some things that Chekhov's play left offstage or implied. To take one small example, we see the beginnings of a sexual encounter between Alex and Nina, and it is played in such a way as to emphasize a dynamic of dominance and submission between the two that resonates beyond the physical. And the production's fantastic conclusion concretizes psychological elements and presents a twist on The Seagull's own staging that results in a powerfully effective climax. The lighting design, by Nicholas Cozzo, is integral to its effect, and elsewhere its shifts in color and brightness modulate the mood or focus the audience's attention. Sound Designer Lola Basiliere and Associate Sound Designer/Board Operator Justin Ma shape a sonic landscape that at several important points externalizes, in concert with the lighting, Konstantin's inner state and that bookends the narrative with tracks from the Pixies and David Bowie. Set design, by Connor Gallerani, intersects with sound via the inclusion of a stand-mounted mic on a raised platform to which characters occasionally resort to deliver lines. The platform occupies one of the short ends of a rectangular space defined on two sides by walls of plastic sheeting, and the plastic behind the platform doubles as a surface for video projection (designed by Max Van), both Konstantin's pre-recorded video and live feeds from the camcorder also stationed on the platform. Most of the action takes place in the bare space (a table is added for a brief time) between the platform on one end and the suspended roll of paper on the other, with characters in conflict frequently positioned at opposite ends of the rectangle. The audience is seated along both longer sides of the space, giving them an intimate perspective on the actors, from Sánchez's very funny Eli, terminally nostalgic but with outbursts of resentment, and the outstanding Brill's perpetually frustrated Paulina to Dyer's spikily angsty Masha and Clarkson's hilariously pedantic Simon, both of whom convincingly sour over the course of the play. Wheeler's Sorin and Sparks's Dorn are similarly self-possessed, but the latter with a much more cynical bent than the former, who comes across as the most consistently tranquil and humane among a crowd of ultimately unhappy people. Molder lends an intensity to the metamorphosis of Nina's starstruck innocence into a kind of jaded resolve that is matched in the assured but ennui-laced magnetism that Bledsoe exudes as Alex. Bacon wonderfully exhibits an uneasy mixture of compassion, narcissism, and desperate self-awareness in Irina, and Knight gives us a Konstantin whose willingness to be achingly vulnerable and exposed is tangled up with the fervency of youthful emotion and conviction. If you prefer your Chekhov with (even) more punk edge, Dirty Bird will not do you dirty.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards