About the Play:

The Aliens has become a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Male/Male Scenes.

The Aliens is a full-length comedic drama by Annie Baker. Two thirtyish friends spend their days hanging out behind a coffee shop and a lonely teenage staffer becomes enamoured with their laid-back lifestyle and homespun philosophies. The Aliens is a funny and heartening look at friendship, ritual, and life at the margins.

The Aliens is a story about the humour and heartbreak of growing up. KJ and Jasper are professional slackers and best friends in their early 30s. In the past, they hoped to form a band to be known as "The Aliens". Now they spend their days outside the back of a small coffee shop in the fictional college town of Shirley, Vermont, talking music, the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and ex-girlfriends. And sing songs. When an impressionable 17 year old Evan, who works in the coffee shop, asks them to relocate on the insistence of his manager, KJ and Jasper find the disciple they've been waiting for. The shy young man becomes enamoured with the pair, and the two 30-somethings set out to teach him "everything they know." Described as a play with music about friendship, art, love and death, The Aliens is part of a rich tradition of stories told from the point of view of the outsider, in this case the drop out or slacker who avoids commitment to a nine to five routine. One of the freshest voices to come out of America in recent years, Annie Baker's gentle, engaging and deeply funny play introduces two new cult heroes in the shape of KJ and Jasper, and puts modern day America under the microscope to ask what happened to the generation who never grew up.

The Aliens premiered in 2010 Off-Broadway at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York City, and won the Obie Award for Best New American Play. It premiered in the UK in 2010 at the Bush Theatre in London. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 3 male

What people say:

"The Aliens is a beautifully structured and executed early career gem. Baker knows how little a person must say or do to reveal their true colours, and in this 2010 play of coffee-shop banter and bro-talk we are exposed, almost by accident it seems, to the depth of its characters' integrity, the softness of their hearts." — The Globe and Mail

"Gentle and extraordinarily beautiful…inordinately delicate…Ms. Baker may just have the subtlest way with exposition of anyone writing for the theater today…there is something distinctly Chekhovian in the way her writing accrues weight and meaning simply through compassionate, truthful observation." — The New York Times

"[Baker] again employs nakedly humanist sympathies and carefully cloaked formal rigor, this time to illustrate the twin solaces of friendship and art…Without losing her keen ear for the humor in modern language, Baker turns to classicism – the Aristotelian unities are here, but so are the symbolically loaded entrances and the final act messenger speech. With such Grecian clarity in its bones, The Aliens can afford incredible layers of detail without ever seeming muddled." — TimeOut NY

"The talented young playwright Annie Baker sets her new play behind a Vermont café, in a break area dotted with dead plants and milk crates that's accessible only by hopping a fence…Baker's gift is for humor and empathy – we'd roll our eyes at KJ and Jasper in real life, but she shows us their absurdity and makes us love them." — New York Magazine

About the Playwright:

Annie Baker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries. Recent honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She is a resident playwright at Signature Theatre.