About the Play:

Tongue of a Bird has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Tongue of a Bird is a full-length drama by Ellen McLaughlin. The play follows the emotional collapse of a female search-and-rescue pilot as she tries to look for a kidnapped child while trying to come to terms with the loss of her own mother. Tongue of a Bird is about one woman's lost child, and another's lost childhood.

Tongue of a Bird is the powerful and poetic story of a search-and-rescue pilot who hunts for an abducted girl, while simultaneously coming to terms with her mother's suicide. Maxine returns in midwinter to her childhood home in the Adirondacks. There she conducts a search for a girl who, while on a field trip in the mountains, was abducted by a stranger in a black pick up truck. The search lasts for three days. Each night Maxine must face the girl's distraught mother, Dessa, and her own grandmother, Zofia, a reclusive Polish refugee. In sleep, Maxine is prey to nightmares and fragmented memories of a mother who abandoned her in childhood and was lost to insanity. Tongue of a Bird is a powerful consideration of the notions of loss, motherhood and the vexed yearning for release.

Tongue of a Bird premiered in 1997 at the Intiman Theater in Seattle and everyone in the cast, design and production team was female. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 5 female

What people say:

"Emotionally powerful...and intensely satisfying." — Seattle Times

About the Playwright:

Ellen McLaughlin is an American playwright and actress who has worked on and off Broadway and is perhaps best known to theatre fans for originating the role of "The Angel" in Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning juggernaut, Angels In America. Her plays have enjoyed popular off-Broadway, regional and international productions.