THE ALIENS
Te Whaea - Basement Theatre, 11 Hutchison Rd, Newtown, Wellington
04/07/2019 - 13/07/2019
Production Details
Acclaimed American Playwright Finally Produced in NZ With Star Cast
Annie Baker has won a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Genius Grant and countless Off-Broadway Theatre Awards but her original work has never been staged in New Zealand. That all changes this year with The Aliens, produced by Red Scare Theatre Company.
Director Cassandra Tse has long been a fan of Annie Baker’s work. “Annie Baker is one of the most exciting contemporary playwrights in the world.” Tse, who interned at Off-Broadway’s Signature Theatre where Baker is a resident playwright, knew she had to bring her work over. “Baker’s ability to draw from life in creating complicated, messy, wholly human characters is unparalleled. She sees comedy and pathos in the smallest interactions.” For New Zealand’s first Annie Baker production, Tse selected Baker’s breakout 2010 play, The Aliens.
Jasper (Jonny Potts) and KJ (Jack Sergent-Shadbolt) sit outside the back of a café. They’re musicians, or used to be; misfits, artists, social dropouts – and perhaps geniuses. To 17-year-old Evan (Dryw McArthur) they seem incredible. The two vagrants take him under their wing, introducing him to music, shrooms and Bukowski.
Being friends themselves, Jack Sergent-Shadbolt (The Intricate Art of Actually Caring, Ellen is Leaving) and Jonny Potts (Loose, The Bacchanals) had an immediate connection in the rehearsal room. After touring New Zealand with acclaimed shows (Intricate Art, Once We Built a Tower), lately the two have chosen to work in other forms, film and stand up respectively. But The Aliens was able to draw these two beloved performers back onto the stage.
“It’s a subtle rewarding script,” says Potts who plays the musician turned novelist Jasper, determined on writing the Great American Novel, “there’s aspects of masculinity which we guys sometimes need help seeing”. Sergent-Shadbolt plays KJ, an impulsive singer with a bad back and a predilection for shrooms. “The Aliens is great yarn for those who like their storytelling to be both subtle and confronting… [Baker] has a real gift for creating original characters”. Potts has found that “one real challenge for us may be presenting characters we know too well. Or perhaps, in some ways, still are.”
Rounding out the cast is Dryw McArthur who plays seventeen-year-old Evan. A relative newcomer to Wellington, McArthur is already making a name for himself in the Capital, performing in Next to Normal and King Lear all while completing his degree at Victoria University. McArthur found the script “funny, unexpectedly moving, and an exciting challenge” for his first Red Scare show.
“I’m lucky to be working with the perfect cast and supported by an incredibly talented crew” says director Tse, “New Zealand is going to have an incredible introduction to Annie Baker’s work.”
The Aliens
Te Whaea National Dance and Drama Centre – Basement Theatre in Newtown, Wellington
4th – 13th July 2019
Tickets are $25/$22
Available at Eventfinda.
CAST
KJ - Jack Sergent-Shadbolt
Jasper - Jonny Potts
Evan - Dryw McArthur
CREW
Playwright - Annie Baker
Director - Cassandra Tse
Set Designer - Isadora Lao
Lighting Designer - Rowan McShane
Stage Manager - Sam Tippet
Production Manager - Beth Taylor
Sound Designer & Composer - Maxwell Apse
Marketing & Publicity - James Cain
Directing Intern - Patrick McTague
Lighting Consultant - Jennifer Lal
Sound & Lighting Operator - Ruby Kemp
Photography - Roc+ Photography
Graphic Designer - Hadley Donaldson
Bar Manager - Aaron Blackledge
Theatre ,
Taut and powerful production
Review by Marcus Stickley 06th Jul 2019
When tears fell from the face of actor Dryw McArthur, playing a 17 year old who’d just been told of his friend’s death, the basement theatre at Te Whaea was consumed by his sudden grief.
McArthur plays Evan, a lonely nervous boy in small town Vermont who one summer falls in with two wayward souls, Jasper (Jonny Potts) and KJ (Jack Sergent-Shadbolt), both about a decade older, in The Aliens.
The entire play is set out the back of a cafe where Evan works. He comes out to put rubbish in the bin and finds Jasper smoking cigarettes and KJ concocting mushroom tea (yes, the psychedelic kind) in a Starbucks coffee cup. [More]
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Brilliant writing, directing and acting
Review by Margaret Austin 05th Jul 2019
Access to the basement space at Te Whaea takes you from a spacious, well-lit foyer lined with elegantly costumed mannequins to a quite different level of reality. It’s an apt choice of venue for Wellington-based Red Scare Theatre Company’s performance of The Aliens.
We, the audience, seated at both ends of the space, are confronted by a set that represents the back yard of a down at heel café, complete with rubbish bins and a dilapidated fence with a large hole in it (set designed by Isadora Lao). The feeling of desultoriness is further established by the lounging presence of KJ, played by Jack Sergent-Shadbolt, and Jasper (Jonny Potts): the eponymous ‘aliens’.
Annie Baker, author of The Aliens and acclaimed American writer, specialises in exploring the complexities of human behaviour, often setting her plays in small town America. This one is no exception.
That said, are we in America? Or could we be any place in the world where the ensuing action might take place? Though decidedly American in flavour due to the actors’ accents, various cultural references and the strident nature of the music, the play makes us uncomfortably aware of the universality of its theme.
KJ and Jasper, though distinguished by different talents and concerns, are alike in their aimlessness and disaffectedness. Jasper is writing a novel though, and that fact coupled with his animated reading of it lights them both up.
But when their essential boredom is interrupted by Evan (Dryw McArthur), a young worker at the café who emerges to put out rubbish, he falls easy prey to an insolence disguised as curiosity. “You could join us,” isn’t an invitation so much as an order.
As the play progresses, our sympathy, at first directed at the innocent Evan, widens to encompass an understanding of all the characters and their circumstances.
In the second half, this understanding is further enhanced by a developing intimacy between two of the characters and the mysterious absence of the third. The denouement is as moving as it is surprising.
The Aliens combines brilliant writing with brilliant directing by Cassandra Tse, and brilliant acting. Effective lighting (Rowan McShane), evocative music (Maxwell Apse), and references to the likes of Bukowski and Henry Miller serve to add to the pleasure of watching consummate skills at work.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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