Playwright Annie Baker recently told an interviewer that she was interested in exploring the idea of boredom.
She seems to have followed through in “The Aliens,” now getting its world premiere at the Rattlestick. But Baker, who wrote the buzzed-about “Body Awareness” and “Circle Mirror Transformation,” has fallen into the trap that’s snared writers treading similar ground: “The Aliens,” about three losers hanging out behind a Vermont coffee shop, is simply tedious.
At least one of them, 17-year-old Evan (Dane DeHaan), is supposed to be there, since he works at the cafe. Less understandable is why 30-somethings KJ (Michael Chernus) and Jasper (Erin Gann) choose to spend so much time hanging beside the garbage, chain-smoking and discussing the poems of Charles Bukowski and the pleasures of ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms.
“I am a living piece of trailer trash,” says Jasper, though his artistic ambitions indicate otherwise. But KJ, a college dropout who likes to lie on his back, endlessly repeating the word “ladder” for no apparent reason, seems to qualify.
A friendship of sorts develops among the three, with the socially repressed Evan getting some dubious life lessons from his older but hardly wiser cohorts.
Virtually nothing happens during the two-hour proceedings, although there’s a dramatic if underwhelming revelation in the second act.
Under the direction of Sam Gold, the three actors deliver fully lived-in performances. DeHaan is particularly affecting as the struggling youth, while the heavyset, unkempt Chernus, a Rattlestick veteran, virtually personifies this company’s grunge aesthetic.