In late May 2018, a traffic jam that persisted for three days on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway made the headlines, not because of the pileup itself but its cause—a party or pride of peacocks marching down the side of the highway, escapees from the nearby Philadelphia Zoo. The four birds kept successfully evading capture, despite the efforts of zoo officials and state police. In the end, two exhausted birds were finally returned to the zoo, with one other found hit by a car and the remaining bird, the youngest of them . . . well, we don’t know quite where he turned up or if he ever will.
The fascination of this story, combined with my interests in the last few years about animal rights and climate change, has resulted in this play—these remarkable birds weren’t wandering aimlessly but were marching with purpose, on a top-secret mission. While that mission is ordinarily unknowable to us as humans, I have my theories of how they view things—and so here is my suggested take on what happened to them from their point of view.