In The Aliens, KJ and Jasper—an affable yet listless duo of drop-outs—hold court on the weathered back patio of a Vermont coffeehouse, filling their languid days with Bukowski references, ’shroom-spiked tea, and discussions of Jasper’s beat-inspired novel (still in progress). When hapless barista Evan Shelmerdine attempts to evict them from their makeshift perch, the twosome recruit the smart but awkward teen as their summer protégé. The Aliens shares the trademark humor and pathos with the rest of Annie Baker’s work—Studio produced her sharply comic Circle Mirror Transformation in 2010—while eschewing the sentimentality of traditional coming of age stories, instead serving up a subtle ode to unlikely friendship, philosophy, and the restorative power of art.
The play features original songs on calculus, frogmen, and other eccentricities, and Baker complements this literal musicality with the precise rhythm and pattern of her carefully crafted dialogue, or lack thereof. Baker dictates that at least one-third, if not half, of the play is silence. This economy of language is essential to her pursuit of the conversational fluidity of ordinary people. “The way human beings speak is so heartbreaking to me—we never sound the way we want to sound,” she says. “We’re always stopping ourselves in mid–sentence because we’re terrified of saying the wrong thing. Speaking is a kind of misery. And I guess I comfort myself by finding the rhythms and accidental poetry in everyone’s inadequate attempts to articulate their thoughts. We’re all sort of quietly suffering as we go about our days, trying and failing to communicate to other people what we want and what we believe.”
As Baker excavates the surprising profundity of ineloquence through this meticulous construction of speech and silence, The Aliens unveils the theatricality implicit in everyday life. The insights and catharses of the play’s trio reveal themselves in trailing thoughts, inelegant interactions, and extended pauses—the spaces where language fails to convey meaning. Baker’s steady accumulation of these small, truthful moments ultimately offers a deceptively unassuming tribute to the unexpected forces that irrevocably change our lives.
—Lauren Halvorsen