Got a problem? Who you gonna call?
Assuming you don’t reply “Ghostbusters” while that movie’s theme song bounces into your brain, these two questions point to a serious epistemological issue that can only be answered with increasingly dark humor. At least that’s the idea behind “Dear Alien,” a new play by Liz Duffy Adams now running at Houston’s Alley Theatre where it abounds with the kind of high energy only desperation can produce. But don’t worry. The desperation is not that of the cast, crew, or playwright; rather it is the state of the play’s central character.
Dear Alien is his only name, and he’s a newspaper advice columnist who for seven years has been receiving and answering pleas for help from anxious and despairing readers whom he tellingly refers to as “darlings.” And he’s exhausted by his correspondents’ distress, banality, and inability to see their situations intelligently. Not surprisingly, he lies sleeping , sprawled and motionless, on a daybed as the audience trickles into their seats, a visual metaphor for how the play seeks to break its theatrical bounds, with the play proper getting underway only when a screaming telephone drags Dear Alien to consciousness.
Grounded in a brilliant performance from Dylan Godwin as Dear Alien, the next ninety minutes of the show follow the often comic, sometimes tragic attempt to return to an unconscious state, to escape his pathetic correspondents and their evasion of obvious reality: “Repeat your question to yourself,” he imagines telling his petitioners, “and if you still don’t know the answer, you’re hopeless.” Nevertheless, he is unable to pass along such blunt insights: “It’s my job to offer hope of a sort.” But as in this play’s literary predecessor, Nathanael West’s novella “Miss Lonelyhearts,” the advice giver can’t give or take direct advice. He can only anesthetize himself with alcohol and condescension. When he opines, “This is what I’ve noticed: that the humans, they never change,” he not only lets himself off the hook for helping the drowning souls reaching out to him, but he also justifies not changing his own life and outlook.
If this description makes the play sound depressing, it escapes that sink hole in a way “Miss Lonelyhearts” does not. “Dear Alien” lives in the postmodern age where no ending is inevitable or set. And while the play’s final word is a simple active verb that I won’t give away here, it leaves possibilities open—possibilities in harmony with the work’s comic tone.
More importantly, it works as a stage production, creating depth without sinking into intellectual or ideological complexity. Instead, it leaves audiences free to interpret what they experience for themselves.
Such a clear end point is developed not just by the text but by the superb, stripped-down production. As Dear Alien, Dylan Godwin plays a person intellectually and emotionally at sea but also a seeker. His long monologues that form much of the script never devolve into glib, memorized speeches but seem to spring freshly from Dear Alien’s frustration and pain. Even when he offends us, Godwin makes us root for and understand his character, whether he’s strewing the stage with letters or struggling to put his arms into the sleeves of his bathrobe which, like his soul, have turned inside out. It’s a dance that makes the stage seem to swirl around him.
His top-like spinning is balanced by the timid steps of Melissa Molano and Brandon Hearnsberger as a series of Dear Alien’s supplicants: people who emerge from the ether of the stage’s borders to speak their letters to their hoped-for oracle. They are every person who reaches out for help with human problems: a woman whose lover is “great” but abusive, a man who finds himself demeaned by his job. The specifics don’t matter much; they are ghosts, with Molano and Hearnsberger restraining themselves from too much corporality. They use small physical changes—putting on sweaters or removing their “Clark-Kent” eyeglasses—to morph from one suffering soul to another, and they melt away beneath Dear Alien’s anger and sarcasm. In other words, they create personalities as fragile as the paper they write on, further highlighting Godwin’s hurricane reality.
Director Shelley Butler keeps the cast on track and moving onto and off the stage in a way that never lets this drama of the mind fade into vague whisps of thought. She uses the simple furnishings of Michael Locher’s set design to allow the actors to rise up, plop down, and, most of all, enact exhaustion without ever making movement seem mechanical or predictable. Indeed, as the play progresses, she moves the letter writers deeper into Dear Alien’s space even as she encourages Godwin to reach over them and into the eyes of the near-by audience in the Alley’s intimate Neuhaus Theatre.
The amazing feat overall is that with so many simple ingredients, “Dear Alien” explodes into orbits that seem stranger than anything encountered on movie Sci-Fi screens. In doing so, it reveals how isolated living in a tribe defined by our texting thumbs can feel and what hope there is for connection, which is theatre’s great promise.
With just a boost of luck from this world premiere at the Alley, “Dear Alien” will find its place in the stars.
“Dear Alien” plays in the Alley Theatre’s Neuhaus stage through May 31.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes review for The Courier.