Evan, a loner high school senior working in a rundown Vermont coffee shack, comes of age under the influence of two slackers who hang out in back. Both KJ, a psychotic druggie dropout from college and life, and Jasper, a chain-smoking aspiring novelist, are consummate outsiders. They once had a garage band but broke up after not being able to agree on what to call it. (They’d favored, though, Aliens, after a work by Jasper’s favorite Charles Bukowski, the antisocial writer.)
A bit to alleviate a pretentious, long lack of beginning dialogue, two prominent dumpsters provide a visually metaphorical introduction to the misfits. They also mean Evan must cross their paths as he empties cafe waste, a job he’ll use later to get to know them and be known -- and eventually tutored -- by them.
In supposedly profound lapses from author-dictated silences (for which author Bates typically has won great acclaim), KJ releases snitches of song and self-choreographed leaps and un-bounds to express his freedom. But is such lack of direction for his talents and aspirations, along with addiction and hatred of people and circumstances he considered obstructive, what keeps him returning to his present confines? (Benjamin Williamson gives such a marvelous multi-leveled performance as KJ that the character seems more dimensional than he is.)
Jasper obsesses over his recent break-up with his girl, who’s begun dating another. Jasper doesn’t want to talk about it yet does, continually, also with phone checks. (Tears welling up in Brian Nemiroff’s eyes aren’t just from cigarette smoke.) Some strumming on a guitar and reading of his latest “inspired” addition to his novel allow judgment of Jasper’s artistic ability. (Or is it more truly Nemiroff’s?)
The fork in the road to where everyone is going, if anywhere, is a 4th of July celebration. When Evan (Zlatomir Moldovanski, nicely catching the inhibited, shy boy’s re-direction of nerves, curiosity, social shortcomings but on his way to young adulthood) returns from a week at a music camp, everything might look the same. But all is changed, mandating new directions.
Though the director overindulges the playwright’s demands for silences and pauses, Brendon Fox gets from his cast outstanding acting. This must have been particularly difficult from Moldovanski, who’s obviously enough older than Evan to initially confuse. An attention to detail, elicited especially from designer Chris McVicker and costumer Whitley Stevens Floyd, deserves commendation.
As for the play, it brought me back to the Green Room of my university at end of the ‘60s, start of the ‘70s with students looking like the bearded, disheveled characters in The Aliens in old clothes and mumbling or crackling improvised scenarios. Supposed profundities were half articulated. Most of all this turned out to be an act, fashionable except to some “alternate” students and professors. The exceptions mainly moved on to form musical groups -- something in tune with the ending of Annie Baker’s play.
