Night of the living 'Birds'

Why even try to do another adaptation of "The Birds," the 1952 Daphne du Maurier story on which Alfred Hitchcock based his 1963 feature film? Isn't the movie so iconic as to make such an effort seem like a fool's errand?

Not to Irish dramatist Conor McPherson, best known for "The Seafarer" and "Shining City," plays that have been staged in the Twin Cities.

"The original story is quite short and very different from Hitchcock's film," the playwright said from the Dublin home he shares with his painter wife, Fionnuala Ní Chiosain, and their 2-year-old daughter. "The only idea that Hitchcock took from the story is that birds are attacking people. Aside from that, it's an entirely different story set in an entirely different country with entirely different people. I've done the same."

In the Du Maurier story, nature is a mystifying and frightening force that threatens to end the world as these characters know it. In his film, Hitchcock explored the psychosexual tension among fearful, trapped people.

McPherson combines both in his stage version, which enlarges the element of claustrophobia, said Joe Dowling, artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, where "The Birds" opens Wednesday. "Forget the film. What you can achieve in the theater is that sense of feeling the world closing in. And I think this production in the studio [theater] is going to be potent."

Playwright McPherson staged the 2009 premiere in Dublin, a show that received mixed reviews in the Irish press. A flock of birds was released at the end of each performance, an element that will not be present in Minneapolis.

"When you direct, you don't think like a playwright anymore -- in fact, you hate the playwright because they've presented you with a lot of problems that you're trying to solve," said McPherson. "As a director, I'm constantly trying to fix the play, trying to get it to work. That's why you hire actors who are more intelligent than your work."

Irish new wave

McPherson and Martin McDonagh ("The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and "The Pillowman") are leading the next wave of Irish poets and playwrights behind luminaries such as Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney. McPherson thinks that Ireland's history and geography has contributed to its status as a literary superpower, despite a population of 4.5 million.

"There are structures that were built in Ireland before the pyramids, so it's a very old culture, pagan culture," McPherson said. "Then we experienced the trauma of being colonized by the Vikings, then the Normans, then the English. That has helped create this strange mix of fatalism and fun. 'Everything's terrible so let's have a party, since we're all going to die anyway.'"

That sense of foreboding is in "The Birds," where the animals hold a strange attraction for McPherson.

"The birds could be dogs, cats -- any animals attacking people," said McPherson. "But what's powerful about birds is that they're so biblical. They're like a plague, like locusts coming from the sky."

"I remember reading a story about Hitchcock meeting with the screenwriter," he said. "The screenwriter tells him that he assumes he doesn't want to see the birds, that he's more interested in the people in the story. Hitchcock responds that he's only interested in the birds, this idea of nature breaking in. But I like the original screenwriter's point of view. This should be about the people. It's a story where you have people locked in a house, who don't know each other well. They have to ride out this crazy apocalyptic situation, like in a George Romero [zombie] film."

McPherson is keen to point out that the film and his play are very different. Yet they share more than source material.

"In the film, what happens in the world of nature represents a release of the sexual repression within the characters," said McPherson. "In the original, Daphne may be reflecting on the chilled, apocalyptic fear of the Cold War at the time. In mine, there's a more fundamental feeling of the unknowability of everything that's around you. We are conscious beings, but we are very fragile things. It's a mystery and a wonder that we're able to continue in the day-to-day. Once we turn just one thing out on its head, everything quickly falls apart."

"The Birds" represents a new phase in the playwright's career, whose dramas are peopled by raconteurs and rascals whose lives are influenced by supernatural things.