A moment worth witnessing
The Aliens ★★★ 1/2 (out of 4) Written by Annie Baker. Directed by Mitchell Cushman. Until Oct. 8 at Coal Mine Theatre, 1454 Danforth Ave. CoalMineTheatre.com
This summer, the Shaw Festival’s gorgeous production of Will Eno’s Middletown depicted the divine minutiae of small-town America, drawing parallels to another famous fictional town: Grover’s Corners from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.
A worthy addition to this duo is undoubtedly Shirley, Vt., the fictional setting of Annie Baker’s Vermont Plays, four works that tighten the humanistic lens of Eno and Wilder, with each play taking place almost entirely in a single location. In The Aliens — which launched the Coal Mine Theatre’s fourth season last week — it’s a derelict alley behind a coffee shop.
But while Middletown and Our Town make small moments grandiose by physically transporting the audience into the skies, Baker literally grounds such celestial gravitas. In The Aliens, her embrace of silence, pauses and naturalistic dialogue is punctured by moments of genius.
Baker often allows her characters to be quietly brilliant. In The Aliens, Jasper is a musical and literary genius, and KJ has studied propositional calculus. To café employee Evan Shelmerdine, unexpectedly encountering genius feels as marvellous as, say, meeting an extraterrestrial.
But Jasper (Noah Reid) and KJ (William Greenblatt) are entirely human, drawn with heartbreaking clarity and unknowable mystery through Baker’s ability to hint at full, tumultuous pasts without feeling pressured to overexplain.
Jasper, a Charles Bukowski fan, is a high school dropout and fledgling novelist from New Hampshire. KJ lives with his hippie mother after a breakdown from an unspecified mental illness.
These two friends discuss girls and people they used to know, the quintessential picture of two wayward men with unfulfilled potential. But in Evan (Maxwell Haynes), a shy, relentlessly normal 17-year-old, they find an adoring audience member.
A play that revolves around the existential pain of three white men in America may not feel like the most politically relevant story today, but it paints a moving portrait of codependency, insecurity and toxic masculinity in a late capitalist society.
The slight manipulation that cycles between KJ and Jasper, and from them toward Evan, forms the bulk of the action until a catastrophe sends them reeling into uncharted emotional territory. Suddenly, these characters don’t feel grown-up because of inflated impressions of genius; they actually grow up through a guttural shock to the system.
This all comes across in director Mitchell Cushman’s production and the chemistry between Reid and Greenblatt, two friends who jam together in real life. Intellectually, they tackle Baker’s ideas and connect with their 30-something creative counterparts. At the same time, there is a self-aware slickness to the production, which feels contrary to a world that requires fumbling, quiet and honesty.
Haynes has arguably a much easier job than Reid and Greenblatt, since Evan’s verbal skills are charmingly less practised, but he’s also the production’s major discovery. Fresh out of theatre school, Haynes’ goes from frightened teen to closing the show with a gutting vocal performance, and is the play’s source of hope.
While undoubtedly changed by his friendship with Jasper and KJ, one gets the impression Evan is not meant to follow in their footsteps. It’s easy to imagine him going to university, getting a good job, getting married and living a contented life. But the gravity of this moment in his life is worth witnessing.