The Story of NYC Hawk Pale Male Lands Onstage in "Pecking Order"

New York is what novelist Jack London once called "a story city," a place so full of stories, legends, and myths that its very name conjures visions and memories. Of New York's innumerable recent legends, the story of two hawks–Pale Male and his mate Lola–apex predators nesting above the pediment of an elegant Fifth Avenue building, thrilled New Yorkers for many years.

Journalist Marie Winn chronicled their story in a best-selling book, Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park, and the major papers regularly tracked their comings and goings. Those living with the raptors, who often tore their prey to pieces in the sky, were less thrilled. When neighbor Woody Allen, for example, found himself cleaning up entrails from his penthouse terrace he said, "I am two with nature."

In 2004, after 11 years of co-habiting with the hawks, the building's co-op board decided to evict the birds and ordered their nest destroyed. All hell broke loose, New York-style. Celebrities were outraged. The Audubon Society mobilized members. Birders picketed. Mary Tyler Moore called the destruction "pointless and heartless."

The building was forced to build the hawks a new nest.

It's a fine story, and as a metaphor, pecking order is a fine concept for birds and for us. We all live with hierarchies in which some individuals–birds or people–are more important or stronger than others. The promise of Robin Rice's play at 59E59, Pecking Order, is that it will examine these ideas. Alas, it stops short.

The play chooses a few useful urban remnants of the story. It opens with a loud, frightened tweet, as a yellow warbler crashes into a glass door on set and falls to the ground. The bird becomes May, a young woman with "hair a mess, pale dress wrinkled, blood streak on a cheek where she hit the door," says the script. (Magic realism apparently.) Doorman Albert Jones, a birder from the Bronx, carries binoculars with him at all times. His goal in life is to work at the Wild Bird Rescue Fund, a slight renaming of the important Wild Bird Fund on the West Side. First, he must save enough money to help his sister, Rosa, with an operation for her gangrened leg.

Another character, newly hired doorman Tony, is introduced, a truly repellent young man identified as Italian-American. Nearly every sentence involves a malapropism that surely no one says, such as “People don’t respectorate you if you don’t respecorate yourself.”

Meanwhile, visiting his sister, also a birder, Albert tells her, "Pale spent this morning in the Park, close enough so Lola could see him, but not so close as to let on he's thinking about mating season. She sat tall in the nest, admiring him from the corner of her eye. She thinks he is the most handsome red-tail in all the world. He brought her a satisfying snack of one plump pigeon and two rats. Then they began refurbishing."

The birder details are the play's best elements.

May (the bird-turned-woman) is warily watching hawks flying over Central Park, across Fifth Avenue when Albert returns. He is humming "El Condor Pasa," made famous by Simon & Garfunkel: "I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail. . ." He's delighted to see her, but noticing that she's fearful, he says, "Some people don't like hawks 'cause they eat smaller birds. It's precision hunting. They drop out of the sky like a bullet and bam!  knock 'em out. The little bird falls to the ground and . . . It's okay. It's part of life. Little birds are scared of big birds. Bugs are scared of little birds that eat them."

This is the core of the play–big birds eat smaller birds, and powerful human beings treat weaker human beings shabbily. Which is a shame, because in the real story, human beings rallied to save the hawks. There's a compelling performance by Caroline Portante as a dreadful spoiled resident whose much-married father has once again deserted her. But the point of her role–or most of the other characters–isn't at all clear.

Surely the playwright started with a vision, which at some point got lost in multiple storylines. Cheri Wicks, the co-producing artistic director of American Bard Theater Company, which originally workshopped Pecking Order, says in an interview: “We spent this past summer workshopping the play. Robin gets a lot of credit for being an open and receptive playwright. She re-wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote.”

Perhaps that's the problem–too much re-writing and not enough of the playwright's vision.