A Soaring Adventure

Ellen McLaughlin’s wondrous new “Tongue of a Bird,” at the Mark Taper Forum, is a rare bird: an adventure story that intrigues on both exterior and interior levels, spoken in a stage-worthy language that’s richly lyrical yet remarkably accessible.

McLaughlin sketches sharp portraits of several particular women, providing vivid roles for five actresses led by the redoubtable Cherry Jones, with nary a man in sight. But McLaughlin’s play leaps beyond individuals, transcends gender, and becomes a moving meditation on the eternal tussle between our competing human impulses: to explore and to stay grounded, to reach for the heavens and to return home.

Although the central metaphor is flight, and McLaughlin’s words often take wings, she also instills a down-to-earth quality into her play. Not just a collection of airy reveries, it has a sturdy narrative spine that conjures up some suspense. Splashes of dark humor repeatedly stave off incipient preciousness.

It helps that the central character, Maxine, has a no-nonsense job that she does very well. She’s a search-and-rescue pilot with an unbroken string of successes. When she goes up, she has a specific goal in mind.

Right now, her task is to find a 12-year-old who was abducted in the snowy Adirondack Mountains by a man in a black pickup. The girl has already been missing for 11 days. Her mother is desperate.

Maxine appears confident. But underneath her professionalism, she’s a stew of personal insecurities. She’s more of a searcher than a rescuer. When she discovers lost hikers from above, others go in and make contact with them. Maxine feels unable to get close to people.

This isn’t surprising, for we soon learn that her mother committed suicide when Maxine was just a little girl. The mother now appears to Maxine in dreams and visions, dressed like Amelia Earhart, off on her own lost flight in a netherworld located within Maxine’s brain.

The pattern of flight in this family goes back even further. Maxine’s temporary home base during this Adirondacks assignment is the house in which she spent her childhood--and it’s still occupied by her maternal grandmother, Zofia, who raised her. When Zofia was quite young, she fled Poland as a war refugee, arriving in America without any tangible trace of her former existence except her accent. She now appears ready to take flight again, this time into the great unknown of death--but not before she tells Maxine about yet another ancestor who was a “traveling woman”--an Old Country term for an actual witch, of the kind that flies across a moonlit sky.

Meanwhile, back in the Adirondacks, Maxine is making genuine contact with the increasingly distraught Dessa, the mother of the lost girl. When they go up together for a night flight, the two of them share achingly beautiful wishes of what their lives might be like, if Maxine’s mother hadn’t died and if Dessa’s daughter were to survive into old age. Diane Venora’s rough-hewn Dessa is indelible, in this scene and elsewhere.

Charlotte (Ashley Johnson), Dessa’s daughter, also puts in several appearances--but they’re part of Maxine’s dreams, and eventually the girl raises doubts about whether she’s Charlotte or someone more closely related to Maxine herself. Throughout, McLaughlin keeps us wondering not only whether the real Charlotte will be found, but also whether the real Maxine will be found.

Director Lisa Peterson has artfully assembled a haunting production, tied together by Jones’ remarkably uncluttered yet mixed-up Maxine. In hiking boots and jeans, Jones couldn’t look less like her career-defining role as “The Heiress,” when her emotions had to work their way through 19th century armor--but her face is just as splendidly transparent.

Marian Seldes’ Zofia looks elegantly aristocratic--how could she be related to Jones’ down-home Maxine? But she and Jones strike sparks together. Sharon Lawrence spends most of her time as Maxine’s mother in aerial rigging similar to what playwright McLaughlin wore as the actress who played the main title role in “Angels in America.” At first her movements are purposefully rigid, but she becomes more graceful as the character loosens up.

Rachel Hauck’s cloud-strewn backdrop and Gina Leishman’s pensive music and sound design (with additional sound by Jon Gottlieb) create an evocative arena for this gripping search-and-rescue mission into the human soul.

* “Tongue of a Bird,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 7. $29-$40. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Cherry Jones: Maxine

Marian Seldes: Zofia

Sharon Lawrence: Evie

Diane Venora: Dessa

Ashley Johnson: Charlotte

Written by Ellen McLaughlin. Directed by Lisa Peterson. Set by Rachel Hauck. Costumes by Candice Cain. Lighting by Mary Louise Geiger. Original music and sound by Gina Leishman. Additional sound by Jon Gottlieb. Production stage manager Mary K. Klinger.