Swan by Elizabeth Egloff

Swan is set in a small town in Nebraska, present day. Dora, a divorced and widowed nurse, is awakened one night when a swan flies into her window. Dora takes the bird in, becoming passionate about nursing him back to health, and soon realizes that this swan is turning into a man whom she consequently names Bill. Bill is, indeed, becoming man-like, but he still has bird-like tendencies and behaviors.

Dora is presently in a relationship with a man named Kevin, a milkman nonetheless, who quickly becomes troubled by this new bird/man in Dora's life. Kevin, who is already married, becomes so annoyed by Bill's presence, in fact, that he insists that he and Dora go to talk to a marriage therapist. Dora is a character who has not been lucky in love -- to say the least. One marriage ended in divorce, another marriage ended when her husband killed himself, and another ended when her husband left her.

There is something that Dora finds quite beautiful in the swan, something that other men in her life -- including her new lover -- have not been able to give her. There is something that she cannot trust in Kevin (e.g., his promises to leave his wife and his constant rescheduling of therapist's appointments though it was his idea in the first place) and Bill seems to be the antithesis to Kevin. Though he is not quite perfect either (after all, he is/was a bird).

Despite Dora's unluckiness in love and marriage, she still believes in both love and marriage. Dora tells Bill at a certain point in the play that she doesn't believe that people were meant to be alone and that she doesn't believe that she is meant for loneliness. She insists that it is when she is alone that bad things happen to her (could one of those things be a bird-man creature flying into her window?).

Dora tells a story of a strange man walking through her front door one night while she was lying down having a cigarette. She looks at him and thinks about human beings as the saddest people on earth and that the only thing that really matters at all is love. But then the man leaves. Dora is a sad human being herself and rather neurotic too and she thinks that it is only through another that she can find happiness within herself.

Bill upsets Dora's life in too many ways to count -- from wrecking her house to shaking her relationship with Kevin. Dora is forced to strip away her ideas about what love is and what it has meant to her with her past husbands, her current married lover, and even with Bill, the swan-man. Dora, though human, is forced to look deep down into herself and face her own inner animal.

She obviously feels an animal attraction to Bill (sometimes sexual, sometimes not), but she is forced to find out what it all means in the scheme of her life. For Dora, this is all an intense psychological struggle. Bill loves Dora and Kevin seems to.