In Dear Alien, a world premiere existential comedy by Liz Duffy Adams, a queer, reclusive, and hilariously eroding advice columnist faces a cosmic deadline. The play opens with “Dear Alien” (the pen name of the mysterious columnist) spiraling toward eviction, financial ruin, and a full-blown existential crisis. With no finished manuscript and no emotional bandwidth left for the usual shallow parade of reader dilemmas, they pick seven unread letters at random and answer them in a last-ditch effort to find the question of all questions.
The letters present a diverse array of personal challenges. Love. Friendship. Domestic abuse. Mother-in-laws. Political burnout. That strange hollowness you feel even when your life is technically fine. The aching guilt that comes with choosing to look away from the weight of human suffering perpetually playing on your phone screen. Dear Alien doesn’t offer tidy answers, because that’s not really the point. The play is more interested in the act of asking: what it reveals about us, how it connects us, and how absurd and beautiful it is that we keep asking, even now, in a world that feels louder, faster, and more fractured than ever.
Advice columns, it turns out, are almost as old as modern society itself. Though their exact origin is fuzzy, historians trace them back to 17th-century London, where The Athenian Mercury became the first known publication to respond publicly to readers’ personal questions. The column’s founder, John Dunton, created a “society of experts” and invited readers to send in questions for expert advice. The kinds of questions submitted ranged from courtship to religion to politics to supernatural subjects. Some real reader-submitted questions include: Were there any men before Adam? Is there an impartial and true history of the world? How can a man know when he dreams or when he is really awake?
Over time, advice columns evolved from philosophical treatises and practical guides into deeply personal, often emotionally raw letters. By the late 19th century, advice columns had entered the domestic realm of American women’s magazines, offering guidance on relationships, social obligations, and motherhood. One pivotal figure in this transition was Marie Manning, who wrote under the pseudonym “Beatrice Fairfax.” An ardent suffragist all her life, Manning often spoke pointedly about the inequities women faced, giving such advice as, “Avail yourself of the glorious privilege of your sex, and ask for what you want.… Never think of adopting the silent methods of woman, who is speechless in great affairs, not because she wants to be but because she has to be.” Her clear-eyed responses to thousands of intimate questions helped establish the format as a space for public vulnerability.
In the 20th century, advice columns blossomed into cultural institutions, with Dear Abby and Ann Landers becoming household names in the 1950s. Behind these iconic advice columns were twin sisters Pauline Phillips and Esther Lederer, whose famous sibling rivalry and signature blend of wit, sarcasm, and heartfelt insight captivated a combined audience of 200 million readers. Their columns didn’t just entertain. They expanded the boundaries of public conversation, tackling once-taboo topics like sex, homosexuality, addiction, and mental health. In a 1993 Psychology Today article, Esther Lederer, aka “Ann Landers,” is credited as “having a greater effect on the way people deal with their problems than any other living individual.”
Today, advice columns live on, perhaps more alive than ever, in podcasts, comment sections, online forums, and blogs. We’re living in what The New Yorker calls the “Age of Peak Advice.” And why does advice still captivate us? In a 2019 Time Magazine article, psychologist and advice columnist Lori Gottlieb suggests that it’s because we see pieces of ourselves in every letter: “Readers might say, ‘I’m reading it because it’s voyeuristic and fun,’ but I think people are really reading it the same way they’re ‘asking for a friend.’” Advice columns remind us that our private worries are often shared, and that we’re not nearly as alone as we think.
What Dear Alien captures so brilliantly is the theatricality of advice itself. Though advice columns appear to be private exchanges between the desperate letter-writer and the all-knowing columnist, they are, at heart, a performance for an unseen audience. Every letter is written for others to read. Every response is crafted with rhetorical flair and emotional resonance. A 2025 New York Times article entitled The History of Advice Columns Is a History of Eavesdropping and Judging reflects on this publicizing of the deeply personal through a more critical lens: “Spectators evaluate the adviser and advisees on the basis of their rhetoric and their displays of emotion—in short, the styles by which they transform one person’s secret betrayal or broken promise into an impersonal theatre of moral education.”
In Adams’s play, this theatre becomes literal. With each letter, Dear Alien is consumed by an intensifying, desperate longing for a question that might reveal meaning beyond the limits of earthly human concerns. They’re not just answering to meet a deadline. They’re fighting to uncover some transcendent truth that just might justify continuing on. Or else they must resolve to surrender to absolute despair. And somehow, it’s funny. Wildly funny. It’s the kind of laughter that comes when you recognize something too true to ignore. Dear Alien is a play for anyone who’s ever screamed into the void and hoped something might echo back.
