Bird

Twenty-two is a strange age for women, not quite grown up but not quite naive. It’s the awkward stage where we’re not swans nor ducklings, more like some kind of brutish in-betweener. Some 22-year-olds are getting married, some are graduating college, and some have achieved so much it makes the rest of us look bad. Like the one performing an original one-woman-show across the country, Kylie Vincent. What started as a pandemic journal evolved into a minimalist play on the winding pathway to healing from the past. Healing from the kind of pain Vincent described as taboo, but not uncommon: sexual abuse.

In late June, I purchased my ticket to Bird with not much of an idea of what to expect. I kept hearing about this girl around my age, who had been traveling the country on her own performing a show. The show had found its way to Los Angeles as a month-long residency at a performance space in Silver Lake. The Lyric Hyperion is a moody mullet of a theater venue: a cafe in the front and a theater in the back. The evening started with Kylie’s opener, stand up comedian Miranda Meadows, whose big blonde curly hair and bigger voice got the crowd warmed up. After Meadows slipped backstage through the black glitter curtains, a booming voice off stage said “Give it up for the absolute trainwreck herself Kylie Vincent!”

Vincent performing at Lyric Hyperion. Shot by Kiel Phillips.

Vincent walked out and if she’s an absolute trainwreck I don’t even want to know what I am. Vincent stepped on stage wearing the uniform of a Gen-Z city dweller, a t-shirt, jeans and Doc Martens. But, as she spoke, an inherent difference between Vincent and other young people was clear; she spoke with the confidence of a seasoned comedian beyond her years. What started like a classic stand-up performance, with a microphone in hand on stage, quickly turned to something more self-aware and reflective.

Bird opens with a sex joke, she makes it clear its not a sexy sex joke. She then cues audio from a past show, and we listen to her talking about dating women. Vincent talks about a group of men who followed her on social media after the show. She said one of them took it upon themselves to send an unsolicited dick picture. Rather than inviting the audience to laugh along in rhythmic predictability like stand-up, the troubling realities of the story begged to be pondered.

The logline for Bird is part stand-up, part memoir, part fever dream. And there is a dreamy sense from the audience, the story is told not linearly but rather more like spotlights from the mind’s eye. Memories of being whittled down from a person to a sexual object, by strangers, friends, even family… and the journey forward, even upward. I sat down with Vincent over Zoom, tuning in from Atlanta where she’d dwell before flying off for another performance. Vincent described the conception of Bird as if she had followed mental threads to see what paths they led to. It was March 2020 the first lockdown in Brooklyn, New York, and the kids Vincent nannied suddenly became fully online. To pass the time, she started journaling.

“I was watching people throughout their childhood. I started talking about my childhood and I started writing about my family members as animals,” she said. “And I feel like that was easier to get to the more traumatic, abusive parts of my childhood. I've never written it on paper or said it out loud to anyone.”

In performance, Vincent is the bird. She yearns to fly from place to place. Her older sister is the gazelle. Her mother is the deer, caught in headlights. And her father is the gorilla. The gorilla comes from a place beyond metaphor, it was more so an alter ego.

Promotional picture for Bird.

"Whenever my dad would get angry, we called it the gorilla face because he just looked like an ape,” said Vincent. “I already knew who the gorilla was in that situation. And then, it's almost like when we do stand up and you're like, riffing and you just keep going with it. I sort of just kept going in that way and found that it was easy to identify myself as a bird.”

The gorilla did bad things — unspeakable things — and yet Vincent found a way to speak about it. What started as a shrouded secret she carried, turned into a touring show that people at times drove hours to see.

Vincent’s first performance of Bird was in a living room two years ago, with the captive audience of quarantined companions. After six months of writing, and rewriting, Vincent sent a draft to her mentor Barbara Pitts McAdams, co-creator of The Laramie Project and many other social change centered works.

“I thought ‘Oh God, I hate reading people's first drafts,’ because I feel like I don't have any imagination generally when I read something on the page of what it could become,” said McAdams. “So I thought, ‘I'll read it and I'll write back a few nice things.'”

But, McAdams ended up seeing a vision for the piece before she had even put it down.

“I was like, let's get in the rehearsal room, let's get a movement person,” said McAdams. “I got very switched on by it.”

Once McAdams and Vincent entered the rehearsal room for Bird, the long process began of building up and editing down to reach the ever changing product which is performed today. The pair worked on finding the intersection of theater and stand-up, making sure one never overtook the other. Originally, Barbara had imagined projections of animals on the walls, and dramatic movement to amplify the story. But, much like the portability of Vincent’s life on the road the show had to be adaptable.

“Kylie was so moving into the standup world. She was like, ‘You know I've done this in a standup club, and I just want it to be totally stripped down,’” said McAdams. “So little by little, we just kept taking away all the theatrical elements.”

The first theatrical run of Bird was in November 2021 at the Kraine Theater in Manhattan, one of the oldest theaters in New York City. It ran for five nights, and led to a year of driving cross country to tour the show and one month overseas at the Fringe Festival. Over the past year Vincent has lived out of her car with her disabled dog and traveled to 10 cities, in two countries, to perform Bird.

She coined the term ‘vag-abond’ to describe the nomadic lifestyle. She lived off of granola bars and slept in her car. While this might sound nightmarish for some, it was considered a privilege for this bird person.

“It felt like I was guest starring on other people's lives,” said Vincent. “I thrive on chaos and moving and changing and doing thing to thing.”

Between guest star appearances, Vincent would edit the show with McAdams, while driving. While not an advisable practice, there is something poetic about writing about being a bird while flying at 80 mph migrating south for more shows.

“She was on the road so much so she would just start free form, freestyling into her voice memo. Or, send me a text that would be a freestyling monologue,” said McAdams in an interview. “It's a nice thing about getting to work on something over time, it can evolve and change with her. It doesn't have to be frozen in this moment.”

There is definitely never a frozen moment for the evolution of Bird. Vincent performed at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland; a whopping 29 shows. As glamorous as it may sound from a bird’s eye view, the growing pains were real. For the first two weeks, nights were dedicated to gazing at ticket pre-sales whilst crying on the floor. And not all reviews were glowing. Matt Keely from the WeeReview, wrote the show's “subject matter is so brutal that perhaps the jokes aren’t quite enough to lift this into entertainment.”

When asked about criticism, Vincent pointed out a greater industry issue- of the white male persuasion. She said critics are a significant aspect of Fringe. During the festival, they cover a wide range of performers, but don't possess much of a demographical range.

"There wasn't a single woman reviewer that came to my show," said Vincent. "The reason you don't see shows like mine getting more attention is because there's nobody like me represented to review it."

Despite this apparent void of diverse criticism, Bird also recieved high praises during its residence at Fringe. Christopher Goulding, from Get Your Coats On, called his readers to action to “come for the laughs, stay for the heartbreak, and leave thinking a little more about the ups and downs of your own family life."

Vincent backstage at Lyric Hyperion. Shot by Kiel Phillips.

Although I was enthralled at my Bird viewing, there were a few audience members who squirmed in response to the show. This group of women at a back row table couldn’t help but make little comments in poorly veiled whispers. At times they heckled Vincent, fixating on the oat milk carton she had on stage. 'What's that?!' I asked Vincent about them after the show and she brushed it off, with complete understanding that people can’t always help their responses to trauma. I was surprised by the peace she had with being so personally vulnerable even in front of hecklers. Then I asked how she went from never opening up about her trauma to performing it in cities full of strangers.

“I think it felt so lonely before when I kept it really under wraps,” said Vincent. “Not only am I feeling so fulfilled and so supported by lots of amazing people, but it's tragically common.”

There lies the answer: shared experiences can make strangers feel not quite so strange. In the same room where Bird has repelled some, it has also brought others closer together. I met up with opener and longtime friend, Miranda Meadows, on the patio of the Comedy Store where she described the Los Angeles residency as nothing short of “magic."