A Regretful Journey to Self-Discovery at Playwrights Horizons

When I was a freshman in college, I went on a journey to find myself. No, I don’t mean the journey to Ann Arbor, where I was (or should’ve been) faithfully attending class. That year, I struggled in the claustrophobic limbo between adolescence and adulthood, asking all of the selfish questions characteristic of a late-stage teen: who am I, if not for my family? If not for Nebraska, my home? If not for my talents or my relationships? What really makes me me? 

My friend and I hit the road headed south toward Nashville, and picked up a friend in St. Louis along the way. We followed a band. I got a tattoo. Something had broken, and we traveled thousands of miles over the course of four days to fix it, searching tirelessly for the missing pieces.

Often, as in my case, those heroes' journeys break more than they fix — a lesson the adoptive siblings in Julia Izumi’s new work Regretfully, So the Birds Are, learn in a literal trial by fire. 

Playwrights Horizons has been widely known as a bastion of punk work with a shiny finish, and Izumi’s piece perfectly fits the mold. The three Whistler siblings, each in their mid-to-late twenties, live in a half-burnt New Jersey home, flanked by a treehouse and a snowman. They are Asian-American, though their exact countries of origin are shrouded in mystery. 

As Obie Award-winning theater maker Haruna Lee puts it, “Not only have they been denied access to their birth information for their entire lives, they were cursed with a white adoptive mother recently incarcerated for arson and murder, and an adoptive white father killed by said arsonist and who built a life around his fetish of sexualizing Asian women and culture and aggressively preaching his Orientalist musings.” 

Each sibling sets off on their own delusional journey to self discovery. Neel, portrayed by a deep and dopy Sky Smith, traipses to Nebraska to muse with the cowboys (this was my favorite part — not only because it induced side-stitch-level laughter, but because I always feel a spike of pride when my home state gets a shout out). Shannon Tyo’s messy Mora makes an ill-fated pilgrimage to Cambodia to find her birth mom. 

Though Izumi may have a gift for writing fast-paced jokes and pithy plot-lines, don’t let that fool you. Deft actors help to fulfill the piece’s potential as a “farcical tragedy,” the self-prescribed descriptor written plainly in the script. Illy, the show’s centerpiece played by a sparkling Sasha Diamond, is left behind in the wake of her siblings’ departures. Her accolades — an accomplished viola career, a burgeoning bank account, even a slice of the sky — are futile in mending her broken identity.

She’s left alone center-stage, suitcase in hand, a forced smile on her face.

“I have this great plan to find mys-,” she starts. “I have this…great…” She can’t finish. What does she have? If not for all that striving, what makes Illy Illy?

Written in April, 2023. Images: Chelcie Parry.