Laughs follow facts in UFO exploration
We Are Not Alone
(out of 4) Written by Damien Atkins. Co-directed by Christian Barry and Chris Abraham. Until Jan. 26 at Streetcar Crowsnest, 345 Carlaw Ave. CrowsTheatre.com or 647-341-7390 Actor Damien Atkins spent last summer as the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, in the Shaw Festival production of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The stalklike, sly actor nailed the part, likely due in no small part to the fact that he’s been an amateur investigator in his personal life for the past few years.
Like Sherlock, Atkins is driven by an innate desire to know; to know, specifically, if we are alone in the universe. The premise of his solo show
We Are Not Alone is born out of a mixture of self-consciousness from Atkins and pretension from others: a project about UFOs and alien visitations is surely beneath an artist of his stature (he’s an accomplished writer and a winner of multiple Dora Awards), as others have told him.
He even articulated my own puzzlement around his chosen topic with the world “juvenile,” a preconception I hadn’t realized I had until he said it out loud. On the contrary, Atkins’ curiosity about sci-fi creatures and space may have germinated in childhood, but his descent into the world of abductions, believers, vortexes and human/ alien hybrids began as he neared 40.
Driven by an instinct to defend the believers of the world, Atkins begins his play by playing to the crowd.
First, what we don’t have to believe: that we are anywhere but here, on this date, in a room together.
Then, what we want: evidence. Three “experiences” with inexplicable evidence to back them up: military reports, audio, 10,000 witnesses.
As Atkins brings us through the history of alien sightings, from Kenneth Arnold in1947 to the Phoenix Lights in the ’90s, we have Kimberley Purtell’s lighting and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design to give us pop-cultural markers.
We see an eerie green out of 1980s sci-fi movies, the theremin sounds of 1960s cinema and the theme song from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
With a topic that’s so dependent on images — seeing is believing, after all — We Are Not Alone is extremely low-tech. Still, there are some effective atmospheric moments, like recreating a film noir smoke curl, reflecting light off of Atkins’ stool so that it looks like an otherworldly spotlight on his face, and using a simple spotlight to suggest the iconic beam of light that’s about to draw the actor up to an alien spacecraft, hovering patiently above the Streetcar Crowsnest.
After the history lesson, Atkins confronts authors, “experiencers” (the term used by people who claim to have interacted with UFOs) and extraterrestrial theorists at a conference in Phoenix — and he discovers that it’s much harder to defend the testimonies he hears that can’t be so easily documented.
It turns out that Atkins doesn’t find the people who would attend such a conference to be as charming as he expected, and the more far-fetched their claims are the more uncomfortable he becomes in their proximity.
The irony of this reaction isn’t lost on Atkins and he seems just as disappointed in himself as he is with his interview subjects — and lucky for us, this makes for a rich trove of comedy. A very funny moment comes from talking to an older female experiencer at a cocktail party whom Atkins finds odd and unrelatable, but she equally can’t seem to comprehend the world of theatre and keeps calling his play a movie.
As his anxiety increases in the story, Atkins’ performance reaches new heights as well. His comedic exaggerations help create unique mannerisms for every person he inhabits (including a puppylike energy for his own director, Barry, who joins him at the conference) that keep the narrative clear and extremely enjoyable — to the point where my friend, accurately, called him a one-man Christopher Guest film.
As Atkins reckons with his simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the people he meets in Arizona (Phoenix is followed by a surprisingly poignant vortex tour in Sedona with an alleged alien/ human hybrid named Maria and her husband Ted), he becomes incredibly soft and empathetic. Atkins’ delicacy with one particular moment, in which a woman appears to use an alien encounter to mourn the deaths of her two infant children, is a powerful, refreshing moment of peace amid the chaos.
Atkins clearly feels conflicted about his investigation into UFOs and alien visitations and the people who claim to have experienced them — you can tell with the play’s ending, which fades out instead of stopping with a bang.
There’s no explicit learning (other than that Atkins feels that a relationship to UFOs is more about accepting your place in the world) or evidence that this research has changed him in any concrete way. Do I wish there was more? Yes, as Atkins himself can attest, humans have a desire for evidence, for facts, for perspectives we can believe in. But I guess we’ll have to make do with not knowing for now.