In April 2025, ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company announced the impending merger of their two performing arts organizations, and since then, the two companies have presented a joint season of plays at the longstanding home of ACT at 700 Union Street, now called Union Arts Center.
As part of this combined season, this spring, playwright Jiehae Park’s new work The Aves will receive a Seattle premiere production, directed by Sheila Daniels. Park’s story, which was a finalist for the 2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and later received its world premiere production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, centers on an older pair enjoying a summer day on a park bench, and contemplates topics ranging from family, to memory, aging, and pointedly, birds.
The title is based on the Latin word ave, which means bird. “I have no idea why birds show up in all my plays!” Park said. “But they do, perhaps something to do with being a city dweller and craving contact with the mystery of nature.” In the play, the man on the bench, played by R. Hamilton Wright, loves birds, while the woman, played by Kathy Hsieh, baldly states that she hates them. Some of the birds return the mixed feelings toward humans.
The idea for this bench-based play came to Park unexpectedly. “I went on a silent writing retreat led by Erik Ehn,” she recounted. “The week after I got back, I looked out the window and saw a man sitting on the park bench across the street, a man who sat there every morning, who I had noticed before but not thought about consciously.”
Park recalled that this man had been seated there in every past season, even as the weather and the leaves changed around him. This recollection spurred her to writing, and she started with a scene of an elderly woman joining this man for a conversation. “I didn’t know what would happen after, but I knew structurally that with each scene the configuration of youth and age onstage would be different,” she said.
This led Park to structure The Aves along the passing of the seasons. “I love feeling the seasons change, especially fall and winter,” she shared. “I lived in Southern California briefly in graduate school and it was really confusing to my body and mind.” Now that Park has two young children, the physical and emotional aspects of the calendar’s progression resonate even more strongly.
The Aves has itself changed over a period of years, from its first days as a commission for the McCarter Theatre Center, to its progression through several workshops in which Park was fortunate to have visual theatre designers in the room. “We could start to dream together how the world of the play might operate, which in turn helped me finish the writing of the text,” Park explained. Then, following last year’s world premiere, Park undertook more revisions to make sure each line of dialogue landed with the audience as intended.
Now, she’s delighted that this second production will proceed in the Pacific Northwest during spring, as the play’s cultivated outdoor setting of a park mirrors the built nature of Seattle in the midst of mountains, water, and islands. “The audience will be watching a representation of nature inside a theater, which is inside a big city surrounded by big nature as things start to grow,” Park mused. “The concentric rings of that is delightful to meditate on.”
Although Park is unable to join in the Seattle production locally, Union Arts Center is hosting several special events, including an Opening Night part, a community day on April 25, and a post-play chat with the cast on April 26. On May 2, the performance will feature several accessible options, including ASL and audio description, plus a youth event following the show.
Following this production, Park’s remaining seasons of 2026 are also full of plans, including multiple theatre commissions, as well as a new show for Apple TV based on a satirical mystery novel. “But big picture, I’m trying to figure out, like a lot of us, how to move forward in the chaos of the current world,” she admitted, “to not surrender to paralysis or overwhelm and to remember what is worth fighting for.
The Aves runs from April 18 to May 3 at the Falls Theatre at Union Arts Center, 700 Union Street, Seattle. More information and tickets here.
