The Aliens
by Annie Baker

"Gentle and extraordinarily beautiful… inordinately delicate… Ms. Baker may just have the subtlest way with exposition of anyone writing for the theater today... there is something distinctly Chekhovian in the way her writing accrues weight and meaning simply through compassionate, truthful observation."

— Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

"As a writer, Baker has many virtues. She neither sentimentalizes her characters nor moralizes about them: she simply presents them as they are. And, as Fourth of July fireworks explode offstage, she evokes an America that exists outside the familiar ties of patriotism, family and work."

— The Guardian

"The talented young playwright Annie Baker sets her new play behind a Vermont café, in a break area dotted with dead plants and milk crates that’s accessible only by hopping a fence. Baker’s gift is for humor and empathy – we’d roll our eyes at KJ and Jasper in real life, but she shows us their absurdity and makes us love them."

— The New Yorker

"[Baker] again employs nakedly humanist sympathies and carefully cloaked formal rigor, this time to illustrate the twin solaces of friendship and art. Without losing her keen ear for the humor in modern language, Baker turns to classicism – the Aristotelian unities are here, but so are the symbolically loaded entrances and the final act messenger speech. With such Grecian clarity in its bones, The Aliens can afford incredible layers of detail without ever seeming muddled."

— Time Out NY