Clockwise from left: Sky Smith, Shannon Tyo, Sasha Diamond, Kristine Nielsen in Regretfully, So the Birds Are. Photo: Chelcie Parry

The Whistler siblings have emerged from a turbulent childhood in three completely different places: Mora, the eldest, is a chaotic disaster, stumbling through a series of dead-end romances and deader-end jobs. Neel is hapless but basically content, working in a corporate job so boring that his sister/lover (it’s okay, they’re all adopted–weird, yes, but technically not incest?) can barely remember what he does and gliding through life ambition- and introspection-free until suddenly confronted by his lack of self-knowledge. And Illy is driven and wildly successful, a lavishly awarded classical musician, meeting every stereotype of Asian American achievement and outstripping it by miles. 

“This play is a farcical tragedy,” says playwright Julia Izumi’s script note at the beginning of Regretfully, So the Birds. When you pile on enough tragedies, don’t they start to turn into farce? And the tragedies keep piling up. Mora just found out Illy and Neel are romantically involved even though they’ve been together for years. (It’s not an affair; as everyone who is not Mora is grammar-nerdy enough to insist, neither of them is married, so it’s not an affair.) Their opioid-addicted mother, Elinore (the sublime Kristine Nielsen), is in jail for murdering their father and nearly burning down their house. That father, Cam (Gibson Frazier, mixing perfect pedantry with congeniality), was a mediocre professor of Asian history who came to his field of study from some unholy mixture of fetish (talk about affairs…) and white savior complex. Some combination of the two led to the white Whistlers adopting three children who’ve always been told they’re from three different Asian countries, but not which ones. None of the siblings knows the first thing about their family of origin, in fact–and the closest they get to therapy is heart-to-hearts with the snowman out front who somehow is channeling their father. (The snowman, with cutouts for Frazier’s hands and a little hinged door for his face, is the best thing about You-Shin Chen’s set.) Ecological catastrophe seems just around the corner. Illy (Sasha Diamond, so wound up she might start spinning like a top) is planning to build a house on the new plot of sky she just bought (you haven’t heard about the human-to-sky migration?), and the birds are not happy about it. Mora (Shannon Tyo, the play’s emotionally bewildered beating heart), is turning thirty and has absolutely no idea how to live in the world. And the only son, Neel (Sky Smith, happy-go-lucky almost by force of will), has just realized he’s tone-deaf. (One of the joys of the play is that this is just as shattering a revelation as Mora finding her birth country; the blocks on which we build our sense of self are multifold.) 

And Izumi keeps raising the stakes, and director Jenny Koons just keeps ratcheting up the pitch, on both the farce and tragedy, keeping them finely balanced. The tone here operates at a high level of complexity, and Koons and the cast navigate its nuances expertly. On the one hand: The ridiculousness of the human-to-sky migration. Neel setting off on a journey to find the heart of country music in Nebraska (a journey kicked off, as are most of the voyages of self-discovery here, by the iconic opening bars of “Don’t Stop Believin”… Journey, get it?). Kristine Nielsen doing something impossibly hilarious with the word “salad spinner.” (There’s an echo of Christopher Durang in some of the more over-the-top exchanges with Elinore–all too fitting given Nielsen’s frequent appearances in his work.) On the other hand: Illy’s desperate yearning to find something she can call her own. Mora’s heartbreakingly ambitious plan to ask every person in Cambodia if they gave up a baby girl for adoption thirty years ago. Neel pouring his heart out to the first person in Nebraska who’s willing to listen. 

And, poised somewhere stiller and stranger than either, two other pieces: a flock of deeply aggrieved birds (puppets designed by Dan Jones with the same sense of precision and whimsy that marks the play’s tone and puppeteers by the whole cast), and a Cambodian woman Mora encounters in a Chinese airport, which will remake her whole life. (Pearl Sun brings a gravitas to this characters that’s in an intentionally different realm from the rest of the performances.) Those two pieces, which seem at first anomalous both narratively and tonally, are ultimately the key to the play’s sense of hope.

As the piece balances between comedy and tragedy, so too does it balance between the micro and the macro scales. It’s the story of one very individual, very messed-up family in agonizing (and hilarious) detail. Izuma and Koons have such tenderness toward all of these broken people (even, in Cam the Snowman’s “fun facts,” a little bit of empathy for Pol Pot), but no sentimentality about how damaged they are, or how much damage they’ve done. But it’s also sharply, wryly, engaging with larger questions about how we know ourselves and how we define and are defined by the pieces that comprise our sense of identity–our heritage, our appearance, our family, our nationality, our traits. How much can we control, and how much is imposed on us by the world? (One of the play’s more pointed running jokes–of which there are many; everyone here has an excellent time with a callback–is about the panicky, and so frequently ineffectual, scramble to find substitutes for potentially racist language.) What happens when we find out we’ve built all of that on a foundation of lies? (Or, are the Whistler siblings thoroughly ungrounded because they don’t know their roots or because they were raised by damaged, damaging people?) What are our obligations to ourselves, to one another, to the planet? Can a bad man be simultaneously a good father? Can an addict be also a good mother? How do we learn to act ethically in the world, and where do the consequences fall of getting that wrong? 

One foundational premise for the Whistler siblings is that their lives began with a break from their natal family and their country of origin. ”In order to be adopted, you first have to lose your entire family,” says one of the women interviewed for a feature in last week’s New Yorker, by Larissa MacFarquhar, about living in adoption’s emotional aftermath. MacFarquhar writes, “Many adoptees have a persistent sense that they don’t exist, or aren’t real, or aren’t human—that they weren’t born from a woman but came from nowhere, or from space.” I kept thinking of Mora and Neel and Illy while reading that article–fictional characters embodying rich truths.

“These characters have no subtext,” says Izuma’s opening note. Don’t try to analyze what’s hidden in their words: They’re openly grappling, at the surface, with what it means to be who they are. They’re openly yearning to understand themselves. They’re not sure they came from anywhere, but they’re trying to figure it out.