The Trials of Gertrude Moody

Why David Bowie?  Why a parrot?  Why fashion as opposed to any other human endeavor?  Kimberly Burke is the author of a theater-work, "The Trials of Gertrude Moody," previously on display at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (W.H.A.T.) on the outer Cape at Wellfleet, Massachusetts. This experimental play raises these questions but lacks the rigor or discipline to suggest any answers -- or, at least, any coherent response.  Almost completely obtuse, "The Trials of Gertrude Moody" involves a five-hundred year old parrot that has imprinted on human beings and, therefore, believes herself to be a person.  Born a flightless parrot in a place whimsically styled "New Zygoteland" -- presumably, modeled on New Zealand -- poor Gertrude suffers a series of losses:  her human father dies and, then, her best girlfriend gets married and abandons her relationship with the fowl.   Blessed with abundantly beautiful feathers, the bird wins several beauty contests, seemingly in Java, then, ages to the detriment of her appearance and is threatened with being converted into broth.  A kindly naturalist rescues the plucky heroine and she falls in love with him, dancing the waltz romantically with the Darwin-influenced scientist.  The naturalist dies of old age, but the immortal parrot lives on, encountering David Bowie and becoming a maven of the fashion industry.  Gertrude is sued for trademark infringement on the basis of her line of denim jeans -- "Moody Blues" -- succumbs to despair and, unsuccessfully, tries to commit suicide, knocking herself out cold.  When she awakes, the parrot speaks some poetic lines about reinventing herself (she will "rehatch") and the play ends with an optimistic dithyramb about starting anew, her egg simulating the bright moon,  This is the sort of theater that is advertised as being about feminism, oppression on the basis of beauty, human trafficking, fashion, gender and patriarchal privilege -- but, in fact, the work mentions these issues in a jokey, haphazard way, glances in their direction and, then, wanders off in search of some other gag or catch-phrase.  Nothing is explored in any depth and the characters are stereotypes drawn in the broadest and most obvious way.  Everything in the world has been crammed into the play and there are a couple of interesting moments, but the attempt at mythopoiesis doesn't hang together:  the various thematic aspects that the play addresses are sutured together like Frankenstein's monster:  it's ungainly, awkward, and doesn't hang together in the end.  The plot elements feel completely arbitrary, a mélange of odds and ends.  A lot of strong emotion is simulated, but the audience doesn't feel anything.  Furthermore, the play can't make up its mind about the title character:  is she a bird?  or a woman?  or a hybrid?  Sometimes, Gertrude gestures and preens herself like a parrot, other times, she's simply a woman who seems to imagine herself as a fowl.  When Gertrude's much-loved human father dies, the characters do some sort of Maori-influenced and ferocious dance over his corpse, eat a bit of his flesh, and this ritual, somehow, grants prescience to the parrot -- she can see the future but doesn't really make much use of this gift, although, it appears, that the play proceeds in a sort of continuous present-tense, possibly a memory-rhapsody based on Gertrude's capability of seeing all her life in one instant.  The grotesque dancing over the corpse, repeated later in the play, seems like something regurgitated from an old Hollywood movie about savages in the jungle -- it verges on the offensive and racist. The show is designed for only three characters -- Gertrude (Bethany Caputo) was stiff, I thought, her female sidekick, a role acted by an exceptionally gifted and athletic comic actress, Laura Latreille-- she prances around like the wicked Queen in Alice in Wonderland and wearing a piratical eye-patch impersonates the glam rocker, David Bowie with convincing and raw abandon), and a male part:  the father-figure, then, scientist-lover, roles that are radically under-written.  It's trite to observe that this play is neither fish nor fowl -- it's not convincing as a beast-fable, nor successful as an allegory; the show's politics are hopelessly muddled and the wild shifts of tone, from lyrical to grotesque to satiric, seem simply self-indulgent.   Compared to the similar, and infinitely better, "Trevor", a brilliant beast-fable (a chimpanzee who fancies himself a thespian) that has some themes in common with this show, this play is superficial, glib and irritating.  The stage-craft is reasonably competent -- there is some effective work with Balinese shadow-puppets and the rehatching scene, involving a great luminous moon, succeeds in spite of itself.