Birdie ★★★★★

Agrupación Señor Serrano’s Birdie, performed at Lincoln Center as part of the Under the Radar Festival, is a brainy, densely packed piece of theatre that takes migration — ancient and ongoing — as both its subject and engine. The show toggles between our shared genetic history of human movement over centuries and the stark realities of migration today, when millions of people are displaced and fear is never far from the surface.

The show dissects a striking 2014 photograph: migrants clinging to a fence in Melilla — a Spanish city on the northern coast of Africa — while golfers play on European Union soil just meters away. The image is examined with forensic attention, every detail laid bare, down to the origin of a migrant’s red hoodie. This same scrutiny extends beyond the photograph, especially to the carefully placed scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The film’s inclusion goes beyond titular ties; like Hitchcock’s work, Birdie ultimately asks what is really driving our fears and why they so often attach themselves to the wrong targets.

The Barcelona-based company uses miniature sets, live-feed video, prerecorded footage, and a trio of endlessly game performers — Àlex Serrano, Pau Palacios, and David Muñiz, all aptly wearing golf shoes — who dash around this precarious world where every step must be taken with care. The performers navigate a terrain of some 2,000 miniature animals, moving with precision and turning caution into metaphor. Golf, the ultimate country-club sport, serves as the organizing image — an obsession with rules, territory, and winning — but Birdie is far more interested in what competition and borders reveal about power, capitalism, and exclusion.

A sharp sense of wit keeps Birdie from becoming emotionally overwhelming, while Roger Costa Vendrell’s sound design and soundtrack give the piece momentum and tonal coherence. Fortunately, humor doesn’t undercut the seriousness of the subject; it makes it bearable. Smart, playful, and unapologetically theatrical, Birdie reminds us how powerful it can be to watch artists lay the mechanisms of spectacle bare while asking us to look, very closely, at the world we’ve built.