<b>✭✭✭✭✩</b><b>
</b><b>by Annie Baker, directed by Mitchell Cushman
Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Ave., Toronto
September 20-October 8, 2017
</b>
KJ: “Time and space weren’t meant for me”
You have to be patient when watching a play by Annie Baker. In her 2010 Obie-winner <i>The Aliens</i>, her three characters are largely inarticulate and don’t know how to converse. In her remarks on the play she recommends that at least a third of the playing time should be silence, with “pauses” of at least three seconds and “silences” of five to ten seconds noted on virtually every page. So much silence places emphasis on every seemingly inconsequential thing her characters say and on the way they say it. The play may be set in an ugly world, but Mitchell Cushman's production is stunningly beautiful, fully alive to the longing for meaning and belonging that Baker’s characters crave but can’t express.
All of the action takes place on the back patio of a coffee shop in a small town in Vermont. This is a grotty space reserved for staff only where the garbage and recycling bins are and where there are only a picnic table and a couple of chairs. Here we meet Jasper (Noah Reid) aged 31 and KJ (Will Greenblatt) aged 30 – the first a high school dropout, the second a college dropout. The action begins with KJ improvising a song about being from another dimension in outer space: “Time and space weren’t meant for me”. The line applies not just to the alien of his song but to Jasper and KJ themselves who have found nowhere they belong. KJ lives with is “New-Agey” mother and has clearly imbibed much of her philosophy.
Jasper has roommates but we have no idea what he lives on. He is writing a novel about a young man writing a novel some time during the 1960s. Charles Bukowski (1920-94) is his main literary inspiration. One of Bukowski’s poems is called “The Aliens” about people “who go through life with / very little / friction / or distress”. The speaker emphasizes, “But I am not one of / them. oh no, I am not even near / to being / one of / them / but they are / there / and I am / here”.
Sitting on the back patio of the coffee shop, KJ tries to console Jasper, whose girlfriend has just started sleeping with another guy. At various levels of wastedness the two may say phrases one after the other, but as often as not, each seems to be speaking to himself.
This changes when the geeky 17-year-old Evan (Maxwell Haynes) enters who has been working at the coffee shop for just two days. Timid and looking defeated before he even begins, Evan tries to tell the two men that they are not allowed to be there. Jasper claims that an employee, now on holiday, always let them hang out there so, despite the warning, they would be staying.
On Evan’s subsequent trips into the back to take out the trash, the two detain him longer and longer, seemingly eager to have someone to talk to other than each other. Evan gets drawn into these discussions for ever longer periods despite his duties inside the shop. Gradually, it dawns on us that Evan, too, really has no one he can talk to either. This becomes obvious when the two invite him to a Fourth of July party on the forbidden back patio, and Evan arrives with all sorts of supplies as if he believed they were really having a party.
Here we discover that Jasper and KJ once had a band together, a fact Jasper denies, and they comically rattle off a long list of names for the band that they could never decide on. One of these is The Aliens, a name Jasper says was inspired by Bukowski’s poem. Jasper and KJ sing the first song they ever wrote together for Evan, but this is interrupted by a fireworks display in the distance that unites all three in awe.
Annie Baker has trusted her audience to sit for about an hour listening to the incoherent musings about philosophy and sex by Jasper and KJ that have led nowhere because the two have already covered the same topics before <i>ad infinitum</i>. All that seems to happen is the gradual inclusion of the even less articulate Evan, who seems unable to make a definite statement about anything and whose only adjective of approval is “cool”. Act 1 has such a strong ending with the three all taken out of themselves together while they watch the fireworks that a person could very well think the play was over.
It isn’t. The action of Act 2 begins a week later after Evan has returned from being a counsellor-in-training a a Jewish music camp. A fundamental change has occurred to the world of Act 1, and Act 2 focusses on how the characters adjust to it. To say anything further would spoil the play except to say that from the apparently inconsequential, laid-back lead-up of Act 1, you will be totally unprepared for the massive emotional impact of Act 2.
As in Baker’s later play <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/F73439A5-14BB-4858-ACE8-641E0A443086">John</a></i> (2015), seen earlier this year, we discover that all of the remarks and actions of the earlier part of the play that we had regarded as trivial or pointless have, in fact, been guiding us to the deeper themes made more explicit later on. It is very easy to look at Act 1 of <i>Aliens</i> and think that it is only a portrait of today’s disaffected youth who can find no time or place for themselves in the world.
Yet, while the play does portray that on the surface, it is also about much more. Baker uses a risky strategy of acquainting us with her three characters in such a way that we can dismiss their speculations, their fantasies and their lies about themselves as so much uninformed blather. But, as she shows us in Act 2, to regard the characters that way reveals our own biases that categorize the three as useless and thus gives us permission not to pay attention to what they say. They may see themselves as “aliens”, but Baker wants us to see them as humans and to ask how and why they have become “aliens” in their own country. and in their own minds.
As Act 2 reveals, the real themes of the play are no less than the eternal themes love, life, death and art. As for this last theme, we should have picked this up in the improvised songs KJ keeps singing, in the song that KJ and Jasper sing together and in Evan’s trip away to teach music to children. Even more obvious in Act 1 is Jasper’s reading of passages of his novel to KJ. Contrary to the general ineloquence of his everyday speech, Jasper’s novel is cohesive and makes sense. Baker wonderfully captures the mixture of talent and immaturity in the style of a first novel, but we ought to wonder how such an ability seems to come from someone who we thought possessed none. Had we not dismissed the three young men as losers, we ought to have see how art serves as an outlet and gives form to the otherwise confused feelings they can’t or are too afraid to express verbally.
Baker’s play is as delicate as a mobile and could go terribly awry in the wrong hands. Luckily, that is not the case here. Mitchell Cushman understands Baker’s style perfectly. She is renowned for capturing the way that real people speak and under Cushman’s direction, the fine cast make Baker’s language and her pauses feel absolutely natural. In fact, the three actors have sunk so deeply into their characters, it’s hard to believe they are acting at all.
Jasper and KJ are rather like modern equivalents of Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s <i><a href="perma://BLPageReference/7192A743-4D63-4767-8E3E-93C7E71CBF18">Waiting for Godot</a></i> (1953), except that they pass the time without even the pretence of waiting for anyone. They think their genius is what has excluded them from society and the time has already passed when it will ever be recognized. They therefore numb themselves – Jasper with cigarettes and drugs, KJ, who is already on meds for a mental problem, with magic mushrooms and alcohol. Like Beckett’s tramps, companionship is all that really keep the two going.
Jasper, like Vladimir, is the more level-headed of the two and Noah Reid conveys all the pent-up frustration of the character dampened though it may be by whatever drugs Jasper is taking. Reid’s Jasper seems to be in a state of constant brooding until Evan comes along whom he first treats as an amusement and gradually, half-jokingly as a kind of comrade. The massive excitement Reid lends Jasper after his successful bout of writing should lead us to see that there is more to Jasper than the indifferent façade he so often wears. The sternness Reid gives Jasper’s forbidding KJ to drink should also make us see that the two friends have not merely been flung together but actively care about each other’s well-being.
KJ, like Estragon, is the more physically-oriented of the two. Baker even gives him a stone in his shoe like the one Estragon keeps searching for. He is far more strung-out than Jasper even though his concern for Jasper is more evident. Given that his character is in an altered state of consciousness throughout the play, Will Greenblatt ensures that exactly how altered that state is has great variety. Greenblatt makes us feel that KJ is numbing himself against the many losses he has experienced. He has lost the hope of following any of the intellectual, artistic and emotional pursuits he once had, including his dream of a thesis about propositional calculus. He still has his mother, but Jasper is the only person who gives him any sense of self-worth. Greenblatt subtly shows that KJ is a little less willing to take on Evan as a comrade than Jasper which should lead us to see how jealous KJ is of his relationship to Jasper.
The breakout performance of the evening comes from Maxwell Haynes as Evan Shelmerdine. Baker has written the part so that we mentally write off Evan early on as a hopelessly ineffectual millennial, completely devoid of social skills or the ability or speak plainly about the most basic subjects. Haynes embodies this character so well that Evans’ awkwardness in everything becomes the main source of humour in the play.
Yet, what we may miss, a quality that Haynes also projects, is how dominated by fear and unhappiness Evan seems to be. Haynes subtly delineates how in the presence of Jasper and KJ, Evan begins to feel enough respite from his private worries that he comes to celebrate Independence Day (no accidental choice of Baker’s) with them.
In Act 2 Haynes made me experience the greatest emotional shift towards a character in a single play that I’ve felt in decades. I moved from regarding Evan with a mixture of amusement, pity and disdain to being overwhelmed with deep empathy for him by the end of the play. The effect was achieved by the perfect combination of Baker’s text, Cushman’s direction and Hayne’s fearless yet precisely controlled acting ability. Haynes’s performance is simply extraordinary.
Coal Mine Theatre has yet another hit on its hands with <i>The Aliens</i>. The company’s careful linking of script, cast and director has ensured that each of its plays, no matter how elusive, is presented in the best possible light. Baker takes enormous risks in this play, but Cushman and his cast make them pay off. At the end you are reluctant to leave the theatre behind where, contrary to what the first act suggested, you have felt so much raw emotion. In leaving you can’t help but recall the words that Jasper says KJ’s mother told him: “The state of just having lost something is like the most enlightened state in the world”.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Will Greenblatt as KJ, Maxwell Haynes as Evan and Noah Reid as Jasper; Will Greenblatt as KJ, Maxwell Haynes as Evan and Noah Reid as Jasper; Maxwell Haynes as Evan and Noah Reid as Jasper. ©2017 Tim Leyes.
For tickets, visit <a href="http://www.coalminetheatre.com">www.coalminetheatre.com</a>.
<b>2017-09-22</b>
<b>The Aliens</b>