Each person in this play passionately loves someone who is busy loving someone else. Conrad loves Nina, who idolizes Trigorin, Emma’s lover. Meanwhile, Con’s friend Dev yearns for Mash, who is hopelessly in love with Con. It’s not a love triangle. It’s a mess.

This is the mess that Chekhov created in his 1895 masterpiece The Seagull, a portrait of the Russian bourgeoisie at a lakeside estate, tragi-comically trapped in their misery together. Our playwright, Aaron Posner, hilariously updates the Chekhov into a wild exploration of love and life and art, a tumult that can only barely be contained by a stage.

The main character in Stupid F**king Bird, Con, is a playwright himself, obsessed with finding new forms of theater, forms that get closer to TRUTH (whatever that is) than the old-fashioned plays his diva mother Emma has made a career acting in. He knows ART can’t save us from heartbreak, though. Maybe it only gets us in deeper. I don’t know. These characters will have to find their way towards their own ways to embrace life as it is, in its sublime pain and its ridiculous beauty.

 We’re all along for that ride.