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“You win some, you lose some,” the older lady wrapped in fur said to me as she and her husband exited the theater. This was intermission. I stood outside the 45th St. Theater and considered. Inside, the rest of the audience awaited the resumption of The Black Bird Returns, presented by the Roundtable Ensemble under the direction of Alexis Kozak. Certainly I’d stay to see how it turned out. This couple would not. The play’s premise: each person has his/her “one.” Misty-eyed and potentially tragic, this idea makes for easy dramatic dynamics: “Can I have him/her?” “Where did things go wrong?” “I love you.” “Forever.” As simplistic as these framing cues are, we know how messy these situations can get “in real life.” An old lover found again may hold another’s hand, may have changed, may both resemble and be a stranger to the one you remember. The second, third, eighth meeting is never but a shadow of the first. Like writing a letter, a resumed intimacy tells you way more about you than the receiver. So, onstage, characters can deepen as they struggle with past love. In The Black Bird Returns, almost the opposite happens. Once reacquainted and doe-eyed, the lovers grow thinner, less human, more like types. At the outset, you think: they have three dimensions, they’re feeling guilty, they’re sharper than their mates, this is kinda like when … Yet as they grow more infatuated with each other, you like these two less and less. You start to think, shit, these people are doing just fine in this second try, unlike what I remember. This is all finalities and hard edge and right-to-the-point, instead of jagged, confusing, and mercurial. Once they’ve rekindled their fire, the lovers get right down to remembering happily the best old times and cheating on their partners. Put lightly: two long-lost lovers, each involved in live-in relationships, meet and rekindle their old flame. The innocent partner of each is a complete zero who loves the hell out of the cranky boy/girlfriend. These poor second-love souls start suspicious and actually become less suspicious. Meanwhile, a sexless love storms between the reunited, with neither wanting to ask, “Why did you leave me?” And that very pressing question surfaces only after (twist coming!): the guy gets his real girlfriend pregnant, then announces he’s dying of an unspecified and quick moving cancer. He dies, and a sad denouement slides by between the women. The difficult thing about this all is that the audience -- I would bet to a person -- feels a pang at the memories such a direct story pushes up. Do we all have our one? Ummm, certainly we each know whom that may mean, we don’t want to talk about it, or we really do and it’s very fucked-up. In other words: we’ve all been there. To see two characters in very little pain, in a cliché-ridden flirting pattern, a have-a-milkshake romance, it’s tough. The reason: we’re right there with them at the heartsickness of return, but a bit embarrassed for them when they describe it. And one thing this play does is describe things. There is not a symbolic black bird that steadfastly follows the couple in a flashback. Instead, there is the two of them actually saying, almost literally, “Christ, that sure is a symbolic bird there! Hey, remember that important bird?” The story between them is already set, so they can look back in revelry, replenished by the fortitude of their love. The set was the same room regardless of which couple’s house we were in, and I dug that. I thought the staircase to the loft bed might have been employed in a more pronounced way, using the scene changes to have lovers pass in the night, silhouettes and such. The costumes were realistic and I was into the music. In a way, The Black Bird Returns makes it all -- love, separation, time -- too damn clean. The love affair is only stopped by death, not any living problems, not the original difficulties, not other people. If a relationship does take such a direct and finite route, it leaves little room for drama. It’s straight ahead. I would also be remiss if I didn’t note that my own first love lives just 10 blocks from the theater. I don’t see her for years at a time, and when I do, it is messier than a mud puddle. “You lose some,” I tell the older lady wrapped in fur. "The
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