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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Actors Take Center Stage with ‘The Aliens’

The Aliens, a play written by Massachusetts-based playwright Annie Baker, premiered in Hepburn Zoo last Thursday and drew packed crowds during its three-night run. The show starred improv actors from both Otter Nonsense and Middlebrow: Greg Dorris ’13, Adam Benay ’14 and Tom Califra ’14, with Adam Milano ’15 as director.

The play profiled Jasper and KJ, two best friends who loiter behind a small-town Vermont coffee shop most days, contemplating Bukowski poems, wind farms and lost loves. Califra played Jasper, an aspiring novelist who never went to college, and Benay played KJ, a UVM dropout. Dorris played Evan, a timid employee of the coffee shop and high school senior. Over the course of the show, Jasper and KJ befriend Evan, welcoming him into their broken but thoughtful world.

Despite their backgrounds in comedy, Dorris, Benay and Califra tackled the seriousness of The Aliens with impressive force, demonstrating not only a subtle mastery of the material, but an intimate understanding of the complexities of the human experience.

“I think a lot of people will come expecting it to be funny,” explained Dorris. “There are funny moments … but it’s a mix. My character Evan is this high school student who is very, very nervous and always humiliated. There are moments where that’s really funny, and there are moments where that’s totally heartbreaking.”

Indeed, the mix of humor and humanity is what makes The Aliens so powerfully moving. Beneath its simple plot line, the show explored topics — death, happiness and our innate yearning for meaningful connection — that touched audience members on a visceral level.

“I was blown away,” Alex Strott ’15 said after watching Saturday’s performance.  “The acting was so convincing and moving that I cried on more than one occasion.” Her reaction certainly lives up to director Milano’s hopes.

“I hope that the audience becomes invested enough and opens themselves up enough that they can leave the theater still thinking about what [The Aliens] means to them,” Milano said before the opening night performance. “Everyone’s going to get different things out of this play.”

Because the show was not for credit, the cast was required to rehearse on their own time, in any space they could find on campus. Nevertheless, the actors took their roles very seriously, as was evident in intensity and honesty of their performances.

“It’s scary in the beginning because you like the play on the page and you want to serve that well,” Dorris noted. “I feel like we all asked a lot of each other.”
Perhaps it is because they invested so much of themselves in the show, but the cast found The Aliens just as rewarding as the audience found it moving.

“You blink and two hours have gone by and you actually feel like you spent that time doing something entirely constructive,” Benay said, describing their rehearsals. “I don’t often get to spend two or three or four hours doing something where every second of it helped who I am and what I want to do.”

“It’s just so nice to get invested in a piece that you thought you knew and find yourself surprised by new stuff,” Milano added. “It will grow every time we do it.”

The soulful, live music between scenes; the simple set; the small, cramped theater itself, which inspired a sense of closeness to the actors—each piece of the production came together to amplify the tension and tenderness the cast brought to the material. I have to agree with Phil Hughes ’14, who raved, “Hands down best piece of theater I’ve seen at this school.”


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