The Young and The Listless

Genius is a burden. Few geniuses are going to be the life of the party or even get invited to the party. They find it hard to hold down jobs and make friends. Famous geniuses, it’s often said, have collapsed under the weight of their own brilliance. We tell ourselves that that’s what happened to people like Jack Kerouac and Emily Dickinson but the truth is that their burden was not from within. They fell apart because of us. Society is created and maintained to accommodate people at their most average. The more “normal” you are the better you fit in. It’s just not in our nature to nurture those with bizarre ideas and strange theories. They are told to cut their hair and get a job when the ironic thing is that they would do just that if someone could just give them a good reason. The geniuses ask too many questions and we don’t like people who poke holes in how we perceive things so we ignore them and relegate them to an existence on the edge of society.

The edge of society, in the case of The Rattlestick Theater’s production of “The Aliens”, takes place next to a dumpster in an alley behind a greasy diner in rural Vermont where Jasper and K.J., two self-described geniuses, languish away their lives. Jasper is a chain smoking would-be novelist and K.J. was, until his mental breakdown and subsequent departure from college, was studying theoretical calculus and now spends his days testing the effects psychedelic mushrooms have when combined with various food groups. The two strike up a friendship with a high school kid named Evan who is working in the diner for the summer. Evan is the physical embodiment of everyone’s most awkward teenage years and, until he meets these two, he’s on his way to growing up to be what everyone else wants him to be. He too is unique; maybe not a genius, but unlike Jasper and K.J. Evan has the backbone to keep the world from defeating him. Together they sit, they smoke, they talk, they quote Bukowski, they sing the occasional song, and that’s basically the extent of what happens over the course of two hours.

Though the themes in “The Aliens” are unique the play is far from perfect. It feels as though, with a little cutting of the fat, they could have gotten it down to a lean hour and fifteen minute production and not lost any of the impact. The dialogue is well written but there are pauses between words and sentences that you could drive a Mack truck through. At points the audience was left squirming during long silences between one person talking and another. Although I believe they were doing this to make a point, to try to make us feel as uncomfortable in out own skin as people like Jasper and K.J. must be, but you can get that point across with ten seconds of silence instead of sixty. There are a few other bothersome moments; on three separate occasions the actors express their anger by knocking something over which I always find to be a cheap and easy way to show emotion in any kind of acting. In a play about such emotional complexity it feels like someone banging on a trash can lid in the middle of a violin solo.

“The Aliens” teeters dangerously on the edge of pretentious and boring (truth be told it falls of the edge once or twice), but it succeeds in its most basic aim to make you feel sympathy for the weirdos and to question yourself as to why you find these characters weird at all. Is it because their ideas are absurd or is it because they show us that ours are more absurd?


© 2010 Dan Howard.
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