Liz Duffy Adams’ new play Dear Alien is quite unique. It follows an advice columnist, known only as Dear Alien, as he reads incoming letters requesting his advice, which he is compiling for a book of columns he needs to finish in order to make rent.
There are just two other characters: the series of women, known collectively as Scrittora and all played by the same actress, and men, known collectively as Écrivain and all played by the same actor, who write the letters. The play also takes place in just one location: Dear Alien’s apartment, which he hasn’t left in years. And there’s hardly much traditional dialogue in the play; most of the show is Dear Alien speaking directly to the audience.
It is perhaps becoming clear that defining this complex, wholly singular show by a familiar genre like “comedy” or “tragedy” isn’t a very straightforward task. Dear Alien is funny, it’s moving, it’s thought-provoking, but we can’t put it into any of the usual boxes without losing something along the way.
But one aspect of the play offers a helpful clue as to how we might better define it: Dear Alien, it turns out, isn’t just reading the letters for his book. As he sifts through them, he explains that the answers to most of the questions he gets are easy to come up with. It’s all just common knowledge to him. But he wants desperately to be stumped by a letter. He’s dying for one question about love or life that he hasn’t heard before and doesn’t know the answer to so that he knows there is something more out there. If he doesn’t find one in this final batch of letters, he tells us, he may as well die right there on the spot.
So perhaps the key to unlocking it all is the existentialist genre. This relatively niche sliver of theatre deals with existentialism, which searches to negotiate with death, to understand the human condition, and to find and build meaning in life in the face of apparent meaninglessness. This is precisely what Dear Alien is doing: he needs to find that one unanswerable question because he needs to know that life has more to give him, that he can pick himself up and keep on living with the knowledge that he still hasn’t done everything there is to do and still doesn’t know everything there is to know.
Dear Alien is also strikingly similar to one of the most important existentialist plays around: Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Written in 1944, No Exit similarly follows three characters trapped in a room together. They have newly arrived in the afterlife, and they soon realize that their torment for eternity will not be classic torture. It will be each other.
The progression of Sartre’s characters is perhaps what connects the show most tightly to Dear Alien. In No Exit, all three characters start out criticizing each other relentlessly, but this soon turns inward as they are forced to reveal their true nature and the lies they have been telling about themselves along the way. Garcin acts like a perfectly moral and upstanding man, Estelle presents herself as an innocent and faithful woman, and Inez prides herself on having brutal honesty and clarity. The moment they reveal that none of these things are really true, they lash out at one another. But they soon must reckon with the truth and lay bare their mistakes and insecurities: they are cowards, adulterers, and liars, and there is no choice but to acknowledge this truth and see where it takes them.
This, really, is the heart of Dear Alien too. Dear Alien spends so much time purporting to know all the answers to others’ questions, critiquing them ruthlessly for their lack of insight and failure to solve their own problems. But as he reads, as he talks, as he reveals more about himself, he is forced to reckon with his shortcomings more deeply than he ever has before, confronting at long last (just as Garcin, Estelle, and Inez do) the unbelievably daunting reality that in fact life might simply go on, and perhaps he has no choice but to find a way to make something of it, just like the rest of us have to do.
