![\"\u2018Birds](\"https:\/\/sduptownnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/web-DSC_1929_hires_v1-300x283.jpg\" "\\"web")
Residents of the building were not amused, and Pale Male and Lola were evicted.<\/p>\n
The other pair, Chinstrap male penguins named Roy and Silo, lived in Central Park Zoo, where they incubated a fertile egg slipped to them by the zookeeper, who took pity on them when they tried to hatch a rock. The same-sex pair successfully hatched and raised a daughter named Tango. The resulting book, Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson\u2019s \u201cAnd Tango Makes Three,\u201d has been on the banned-book list ever since it was published in 2005.<\/p>\n
Enter novelist Marc Acito, who has had a lot of San Diego exposure on a grand scale. He recently wrote the book and additional lyrics for the musicals \u201cAllegiance\u201d and \u201cRoom With a View\u201d at the Old Globe. Acito now makes further inroads, this time at Diversionary Theatre with his 2012 Helen Hayes Award-winning play, \u201cBirds of a Feather,\u201d which intertwines the stories of the two bird pairs: Lola and Pale Male and Roy and Silo.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe play came to me literally in a dream,\u201d Acito said, who was walking his dog in Central Park when reached by phone. \u201cI\u2019d read about both situations when I came down with a really bad flu, the kind where you can\u2019t get your head off the pillow; the kind where you say, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m sure I can get up now,\u2019 and when you sit up you lie right back down again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two stories began orbiting around one another in what Acito said was a fever dream. \u201cAs soon as I could sit up, I grabbed my computer and started writing. Because I\u2019d thought about it so long, I wrote the first draft in 11 days. I\u2019ve never written anything so fast.\u201d Of course there were rewrites before the piece premiered at The Hub Theatre in Fairfax, Va. in 2011.<\/p>\n
Director James V\u00e1squez will mount the second production and West Coast premiere of \u201cBirds of a Feather\u201d at Diversionary Theatre. At the time of this interview, V\u00e1squez was recovering from his own flu. His particular fever dream involved Acito\u2019s play, its two mating pairs, and four actors \u2013 Mike Sears, Steve Gunderson, Kevin Koppman-Gue and Rachael VanWormer \u2013 who play 27 characters in scenes set in six locations, including a zoo and a window ledge, of course.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m spoiled rotten with this cast,\u201d V\u00e1squez said. \u201cThe show sounds so simple at the heart of it, and it is, really. It\u2019s about love and it\u2019s about family and what defines a family. It\u2019s about self worth and the struggles we have to accept who we are. It\u2019s fascinating to watch these characters living these human emotions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gunderson plays the more flamboyant penguin; in V\u00e1squez\u2019s words: \u201cout loud and proud and comfortable with himself.\u201d Sears plays his same-sex partner, who struggles a bit with his sexuality.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, before our eyes in the middle of a scene, they become the hawks. Steve plays Pale Male, and Mike [plays] Pale Male\u2019s girlfriend, Lola. We get to see each actor take on a really masculine role and then an equally strong, yet feminine character,\u201d V\u00e1squez said.<\/p>\n
When \u201cRoom With a View\u201d played at the Old Globe, Acito met with V\u00e1squez, who had been recommended as a potential director for \u201cBirds of a Feather.\u201d V\u00e1squez said he had read and loved the play, as well as Acito\u2019s writing, which he finds poetic and lyrical.<\/p>\n That is no surprise. Acito is a former opera singer.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd not a very good one,\u201d he said. \u201cI came to opera from the theater and played character roles: the mad scientist, the hunchback, the dwarf and the drunk. Opera spans 400 years of Western culture, not to mention a real understanding of comedy and comedic roles, which I was playing. Ultimately, I became more interested in creating my own work than in interpreting someone else\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n In throes of what he describes as a midlife crisis, Acito moved to New York to become a playwright. \u201cAllegiance\u201d will move to Broadway sometime this season, and \u201cRoom With a View\u201d is scheduled for another production, somewhere Acito said he cannot reveal. \u201cAnd then we\u2019ll see,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The openly gay Acito has been in a long-term relationship since he was 20, which heavily influenced \u201cBirds of a Feather.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s now 26 years,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know a lot, but I know about marriage from first-hand experience. Our marriage is all over this play, kaleidoscopically. There are pieces of us in snippets of conversation throughout. Relationships require an immense amount of work [and] to find them and to sustain them is difficult. A line in the play sticks out to me: \u2018Love is indeed a rare bird.\u2019 It is, indeed, an illusive, delicate thing that has to be cared for.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBirds of a Feather\u201d plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays, through March 3. The official opening night is Feb. 9. Diversionary Theatre is located at 4545 Park Blvd. in University Heights. Tickets range from $25 to $45, with discounts for groups, seniors and military. Student rush tickets are $12 and available one hour prior to curtain, with proper identification. For complete show times and tickets, visit diversionary.org or call 619-220-0097.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Marc Acito and James V\u00e1squez return for Diversionary Theatre\u2019s latest By Charlene Baldridge | SDUN Reporter During the early part of 21st century, citizens of New York City as well as avid avian admirers nationwide were thoroughly captivated by two nesting couples. One pair, red-tailed hawks named Pale Male and Lola incubated, hatched and fed […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":245772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"\u2018Birds of a Feather\u2019","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11547,11551,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-features","category-news","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\u2018Birds](\"https:\/\/sduptownnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/web-Marc_Acito_print-224x300.jpg\" "\\"web")