Coal Mine's season has opened strong with Annie Baker's The Aliens. This play was supposed to be produced by a different company and then the Toronto rights sort of bounced around and now here we are. I liked it quite a lot, and in fact I think overall I enjoyed it more than John (which certainly had its moments -- and an awesome set!) and definitely more than The Flick (which really dragged in parts). This play has the realistic dialogue and the long reaction shots and silences that mark Baker's work, but it is compressed into 2 hours.
One thing that was a little odd (off?) is that the main characters are supposed to be 30+ and just hanging around, on pretty much a daily basis, at the back of a coffee shop in Vermont. I don't know the age of the actors but they looked a lot closer to mid to late 20s, which then made it a bit more palatable that they were still lost and that they were so hapless that they decide to befriend the 17 year old trainee at the coffee shop. That surely wasn't Baker's intent, however, and maybe they should have recruited two actors that looked older. This is only a relatively minor miscue, however.
An avenue that is somewhat unexplored is whether one of these lost souls, Jasper, really has writing talent. I thought the section that he read was not bad, though whether it would hold up at novel length is another story. Certainly, he could use a more discriminating audience to get to the next level, and he isn't likely to get that hanging out at the back of the coffee shop. (While it has a very different set-up, George Walker's recent play The Damage Done has one of his struggling characters decide to become a playwright and perhaps is actually not too bad at it, but again it's hard to judge since the audience (his ex-girlfriend) is a biased one.) Back to The Aliens, it's tragic one way if he is just deluding himself about his talent, but it is tragic in a different way if he has talent but will never find a proper audience, since he has no connections or any ideas of how to get out of the small town hell he is trapped in. Of course, they are only a 3 hour drive from Boston (as the 17 year old points out at some point), but that can sometimes feel like the Continental Divide for people whose horizons have shrunk. Anyway, I will try to sit down and read the play, but I'm glad I saw it live first. I wouldn't have wanted to know the ending going in. It is playing for two more weeks, and the reviews are coming in strong,* so don't dawdle. This may be one of those cases where being right up next to the action (along the walls) is better than being in the standard seating arrangement at the end. It is worth noting, however, that lots and lots of herbal cigarettes are smoked, so if this is going to be a major irritant, you should take a pass and go see something else instead.
Speaking of upcoming events, I see that Walker has another play (probably a premiere) called The Chance opening in mid-October. The cast is stunning (including Fiona Reid and Claire Burns), so maybe I don't want to promote it too much until I have my own tickets... I've also more or less decided to try to catch Will Eno's Title and Deed up at Tarragon, and I also have to book my ticket for The Fish Eyes Trilogy at Factory. So quite a bit of theatre in Sept. and Oct. (after a short lull), and of course Toronto Cold Read and SFYS are starting back up again as well. So a lot to look forward to and to figure out how to fit into my calendar.
* I don't want to list all the reviews, but I thought Slotkin's review and the Stage Door review were particularly insightful.
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