The hero of the new play “Year of the Rooster” is one angry bird.
“I think I could kill a cow if I put my mind to it,” Odysseus Rex rages. “I think I could kill a car. A house.”
Now that’s ambitious poultry.
Odie, as he’s nicknamed, is an 8-month-old gamecock. And in Eric Dufault’s dynamite show, back again after a short run last year, he’s played by Bobby Moreno, a handsome, agile 30-year-old.
Moreno needs just a fauxhawk, red-rimmed eyes and feathers glued to his shoulders and sneakers to bring this foul-mouthed fowl to life.
Odie stalks the stage with explosive righteous energy, ready to take on the universe: “Come on now, Sun,” he says in one of several inspired declarations of war, “get your ass up and get ready for your beating!”
To get Odie ready to fight, his sad-sack owner, Gil Pepper (Thomas Lyons), has conditioned him with combat practice, regular injections of steroids and a cannibalistic diet of McNuggets.
Odie is Gil’s ticket out of mediocrity. A 40-ish cashier at McDonald’s, he lives with his cranky homebound mom (Delphi Harrington) and is tormented by his aggro 19-year-old manager (Megan Tusing).
Also on Gil’s case is local mucky-muck Dickie Thimble (Denny Dale Bess), a blowhard with a champion rooster named Bat-Dolphin.
Yes, there’s a showdown in the offing, and it totally delivers.
Directed with a kinetic drive by John Giampietro, the play deals with hardscrabble folks in an unspecified Southern state. But it doesn’t indulge in cheap humor at their expense. And without ever being preachy, Dufault has a lot of sharp things to say about what we do to each other — and to animals — and about bullying.
Yet the most affecting moment isn’t violent at all.
In an attempt to sire an heir, Gil introduces Odie to Lucky Lady (Tusing again), a hen “specially designed by McDonald’s to be like two times the weight of a normal chicken, so she can’t really walk right.”
The scene is unexpected, but also oddly touching and emotional. When you find yourself rooting for chickens to find true love, you know a play’s achieved something special.