Five Minutes with Craig Baldwin, Director of The Aliens

Out back of a coffee shop in small town Vermont, USA, two 30-something slackers, KJ and Jasper, talk about the women they’ve lost, their rock band that never was, and the novel they’ll never finish. And also shrooms. In walks 17-year-old Evan Shelmerdine, working a summer job between his days at Jewish Music Camp, and somehow they accidentally teach him everything they know. America’s most celebrated new playwright, Annie Baker, has written an extraordinarily detailed hypernaturalistic exploration of the profound awkwardness of friendship, rock’n’roll, and the road less travelled.

Is the influence of the two lead characters on their younger disciple a positive or negative one?

No mentor is perfect! And I guess these guys are probably the furthest from perfect you could imagine. But if you think about the person that first introduced you to your favourite rock band, or to clips of that hilarious bad-taste comic, or in this case the profane poems of Charles Bukowski, they might have been a somewhat unsavoury character… but didn’t they enrich your life anyway?

What makes the setting of the play relevant to a Sydney audience today?

This little forgotten corner of America could just as easily be a forgotten corner of Sydney. In a culture where one’s worth can often be measured by the number of zeros on the end of your salary, or the suburb you live in, or the car you drive, The Aliens shines its light onto the characters that have fallen through the cracks of that culture. They hold alternative things dear. They have other ideas about how to measure a person’s worth.

How intensive were the cast’s preparations for the production?

The cast have been spending many weeks now drinking beer, playing guitar and spouting philosophy out the back of the Old Fitz. I think they’re ready.

Do you reckon the aliens are out there somewhere?

Yes. And I’ll tell you exactly where they are, right after I take this shroom…

[The Aliens photo by John Marmaras]