PORT TOWNSEND — After September’s one-night-only performance played to a full house, the cast of “The Aliens” was invited to bring the production of Annie Baker’s 2010 Obie Award-winning play back to Key City Public Theatre for a special offseason winter bonus show run.
“The Aliens” opens tonight and runs through Feb. 10 on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings at 7:30 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m.
Tickets are $20 for Thursday and Sunday, and $24 for Friday and Saturday performances.
To purchase tickets, go to www.keycitypublictheatre.org or call the box office at 360-385-5278.
Set behind a coffee shop in a small Vermont town, “The Aliens” features two men, KJ and Jasper, who decide to teach Evan, a young high school student who works at the coffee shop they frequent, everything they know.
Setting belies weight
The gentle domestic setting belies the weight of the topics being explored, the fundamentals of friendship and the sense of alienation that has become ubiquitous at times in a culture where dreamers and oddballs often find themselves isolated.
“The Aliens” originally opened at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in New York City in 2010 in a production that Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called “a gentle and extraordinary new play” and Patrick Lee of Theatermania said was “another offbeat, slyly intriguing drama with comedy.”
Andrew Perez plays KJ and Dillon Porter plays Jasper. The pair previously visited Port Townsend as part of the 2016 Port Townsend Film Festival, when “Bastards y Diablos,” which Perez both wrote and acted in, won the Special Jury Commendation.
Perez is currently staying in Port Townsend as a 2017 Fellow with the Port Townsend Film Festival while he writes a screenplay set in Port Townsend.
Chuck Filipov rounds out the cast as Evan. All three men attended Northwestern University together, and have collaborated many times in the past, creating close friendships that enhance the quality of their performance together in “The Aliens.”
Tamlin Hall directs and Denise Winter is the KCPT artistic director.
