Birdy: A Test of Loyalty
“Birdy,” an adaptation by Naomi Wallace of William Wharton’s once renowned 1978 novel is now playing at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the winter home of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. (In summer the company performs Shakespeare outdoors on the Boston Common.) Wharton’s best seller about a close, but unusual friendship between two boys, Birdy and Al, who came from a poor neighborhood in the suburbs of Philadelphia won the US National Book Award and was translated into twenty languages. A 1984 film version set during the Vietnam War directed by Alan Parker and starring Nicholas Cage and Matthew Modine received the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at Cannes. …