Featherbaby

World premieres are always unpredictable. David Templeton’s Featherbaby takes that truth and runs with it — or rather, flies with it. This is a play told largely through the mind of Featherbaby, a rambunctious, foul-mouthed Amazon parrot who narrates, manipulates, and disrupts the lives of the humans around it.

The central tension comes when Angie, a quirky crime-scene photographer, brings Mason, a reserved puzzle competitor, into her world. Featherbaby does not approve.

Feeling threatened and territorial, the parrot wages war on Mason, biting (literally drawing blood), cursing, and scheming to sabotage the relationship. It’s needy, vulgar, and aggressively manipulative — not, from my perspective, an attractive character at all. But that is the point: this is a parrot with personality to spare, and the play’s drama and comedy spring from its relentless, often unsettling behavior.

At Spreckels, the title role alternates between Gina Alvarado and Matthew Cadigan. On the night I attended, it was Alvarado’s turn. She threw herself into the part with fearless commitment. At times her performance tipped toward the theatrical extreme, but always with conviction. She made the parrot magnetic and disturbing in equal measure, pulling the audience into a surreal but oddly familiar emotional tug-of-war.

Mercedes Murphy, Gina Alvarado, Nate Musser

The other characters — Mercedes Murphy as Angie and Nate Musser as Mason — provide the human framework. Yet in many ways they function as enablers, allowing Featherbaby’s bad behavior to dominate. Director Skylar Evans leans into this imbalance, crafting a production where the bird’s chaos drives the arc from conflict to an unexpected, if uneasy, connection between Featherbaby and Mason.

The design team reinforces this off-kilter world. Eddy Hansen’s lighting and set sketch out an environment where reality blurs into imagination, while Jessica Johnson’s sound design sharpens every moment of comic violence or tenderness.

Featherbaby is not cozy theater. It’s messy, bold, and occasionally vulgar. But that’s exactly its strength. Templeton has written a play that dares to put an unlikeable character at the center and challenges the audience to wrestle with it. And with Gina Alvarado’s performance, Featherbaby becomes hard to forget.