Birdbrains Gip Hoppe and company mine Aristophanes BY IRIS FANGER
	Cuckooland Written and directed by Gip Hoppe. Original songs by Stephen Russell and Gip Hoppe, with Daniel Baker. Set by Dan Joy. Lighting by Christopher Ostrom. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Sound by Daniel Baker. With Dan Joy, Ellen LeBow, Nathaniel McIntyre, Laura Given Napoli, Stephen Russell, and Caitlin Gibbon. At Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater through June 26.

Gip Hoppe, one of the funniest minds at work in New England theater, has come up with a new-old play based on Aristophanes’s The Birds, which was written in 414 BC. Back then, Athens was engaged in a disastrous war, so it’s no wonder that Hoppe picked up on Aristophanes’s yearning out loud for a higher existence free from the ravages inflicted by humankind on its home planet.

Aristophanes’s Cloud Cuckooland was a city hovering somewhere between Athens and Mount Olympus that would be shared by the winged creatures and those enlightened members of the human race who chose to join them. The realm that Hoppe imagines in his Cuckooland lies closer to home, tucked into a cove just down the Cape Cod coast from Wellfleet. The terrain is less familiar to the general public than the Kennedy-drenched milieu of Hoppe’s best-known work, Jackie: An American Life, or the skewed cable-television studio of last season’s A New War. But the character flaws that drive the satiric action are no less relevant.

We’re not talking original notions here when it comes to scavenging Greek drama for ideas. Neither are we seeing a perfect union of classical cadence and contemporary gags. Still, Hoppe, who also directs this world-premiere production, is a master of stagecraft who like a good vaudevillean takes every opportunity to woo the audience. If you can look beyond the preponderance of bird-poop jokes and four-letter words (not to mention an overdone portrayal of the gods, with a drunken Zeus lusting after his street tramp of a daughter Aphrodite, who’s dressed in a diaphanous mini-skirt that barely hides her thong underwear), there are a lot of laughs mixed in with Hoppe’s anger over the commercialization of the Cape.

Four actors, joined on stage by scenic designer Dan Joy and artist Ellen LeBow, portray a menagerie of fauna, some wrapped in skin and others in feathers. Each member of the cast plays multiple roles, including Joy and LeBow when they’re not drawing the series of backdrops that accompanies the unfolding of the story. Hoppe expands the tiny stage at WHAT in miraculous ways, making you believe in the time and space he has conjured while also letting you in on the secrets of the theatrical magic. Gail Astrid Buckley’s costumes and bird heads raise the visual effects a notch.

The plot — which evolves out of such one-liners as the town fathers threatening "a $400 fine for not carrying a Kate Spade beach tote" or a $600 charge for "appearing unpublished on the Wellfleet beach" — concerns two locals, Gooden Pisstoff and Lotta Goodhope (Pisthetairos and Euelpides in the original), who seek the mythical city of the birds where the local crazy, Old Hoopoe, has gone in search of peace. They find him, confront the Empress Cuckoo, and persuade her to let them build the city of hope where men and women can dwell alongside the birds, who are asked to forget about such past sins of humanity as hunting seasons, plumed hats, and Thanksgiving dinners.

The four actors — Nathaniel McIntyre, Stephen Russell, and Caitlin Gibbon, all veterans of the cast of A New War, joined by Laura Given Napoli — combine quick costume changes with performances reminiscent of the commedia dell’arte, where every sort of skill was needed. Each performer creates a variety of characters, sings, and dances; Russell also plays the guitar and is credited with two of the songs from a score that, unfortunately, never delivers wit comparable to Hoppe’s topical humor.

At the end, Gooden Pisstoff and Lotta Goodhope discover they’ve brought the ills of the human world — overweening pride and a sense of superiority — with them to ruin the dream. You might ask, does this theatrical enterprise have legs? Or, more in keeping with its conceit, will it fly? The answer, from this corner, is probably not. Yet for this particular time and place it resonates, and there’s joy in thinking that sometimes, as with politics, all theater is local.