The Aliens

"There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for it." Charles Bukowski

Bukowski ripples through The Aliens by New York's wunderkind director (and Pulitzer Prize winner, for her play The Flick) Annie Baker, playing at The Old Fitz Theatre in its Sydney premiere. Men, unattached, ambivalent and overflowing with emotion perform exaggerated versions of themselves to each other within a three-person ensemble in which the walls of the fictional theatre lose their integrity — characters perform songs and literature to each other, and to us, and more than once simply to themselves. 

College dropouts and delinquents, KJ and Jasper, loiter near the bins in the grubby backyard of a coffee house in Vermont. When Evan, a young employee, stumbles into their community, their outlier status is accentuated and explored, producing a delicately unfolding study in the most desolate reaches of human disconnection, and redemption through art.

Baker's body of work centres on the acuity of her reproductions of colloquial speech, which manifests onstage in awkward, unmannered exchanges; the stage directions call for "at least one-third of the play to be silent". Director Craig Baldwin's approach is to imbue these silences with humour, which doesn't always work but one gets the sense that the cadence of these moments will become more assured as the run continues.  

The Aliens takes up with the concept of the created self: the ways in which we self-consciously (and subconsciously) manufacture our identities. Within the single set-piece of the coffee house back lot, each character in the trio pulsates with a strange energy; sometimes spiritual, often pathetic, yet intensely, achingly heartfelt in their desire for affirmation.