There’s a new company in Belfast dedicated to giving audiences “an immersive theater” experience — and it delivers on that promise in spades with its first production performed outside on a small patch of grass behind a downtown storefront.
The site is the perfect spot for Annie Baker’s “The Aliens,” a three-character play that takes place behind a Shirley, Vermont, coffee shop where Jasper (Nate Marx) and KJ (John Jurcheck) spend their time hanging out, and where new employee Evan (Drew Kulbe) spends his breaks.
Just 21 theatergoers can fit in the intimate space so it feels like the audience is leaning into a door frame on the backside of a nearby business listening to these three guys’ lives unfold.
The play premiered off-Broadway in 2010. Baker won an Obie Award that year for Best New America Play and for her “Circle Mirror Transformation” script, which was produced last year in Orono by True North Theatre. Baker is known for her slow, deliberate pacing, long pauses, and silences that seem more natural in the outdoor setting than they would in a traditional theater.
Baker “wants life onstage to be so vivid, natural, and emotionally precise that it bleeds into the audience’s visceral experience of time and space,” Nathan Heller wrote in the New Yorker in 2013.
“Drawing on the immediacy of overheard conversation, she has pioneered a style of [theater] made to seem as untheatrical as possible, while using the tools of the stage to focus audience attention,” he said.
Co-directors John Jurcheck and Courtney Hayes-Jurcheck capture all of that in this languid, perfect production. Somehow, the husband/wife team and co-founders of Counter/Current: Collective make mundane conversation riveting.
The story opens with KJ trying to sneeze and aspiring novelist Jasper trying to decide if his breakup with a girlfriend is a good thing or not. Seventeen-year-old Evan encounters the duo, who may or may not have permission to be there, when he takes out the coffee shop trash. It is through his naive, inexperienced eyes that the audience experiences the other characters.
Kulbe, who is 17 and a senior this fall at Belfast Area High School, may be the first actor to play Evan who is the same age as the character. He took over the role after the actor originally cast dropped out, but Kulbe is perfect in the part.
The teenager is a natural as the awkward, shy, unsure coffee shop worker who is at times fascinated, charmed and repulsed by the two slackers who hang out behind it. Kulbe’s Evan is a perfect conduit through whom theatergoers see KJ and Jasper’s foibles and quirks, of which there are many.
Marx gives Jasper a searing intensity that is a fine counterpoint to Jurcheck’s laid-back KJ. Jasper appears to be the anchor keeping his friend from drifting off into a fog of pot smoke but theirs proves to be a more complex friendship than that thanks to these actors’ performances. Marx makes the audience feel Jasper’s presence even when the character is off stage.
As KJ, Jurcheck is the stoner/philosopher every theatergoer recognizes from their high school or college days. He lives with his mom, is on medication, drinks ’shroom tea and lights up a joint early and often but doesn’t seem to have a job. Jurcheck beautifully and simply reveals KJ’s fragility and resilience with an incandescent humanity.
The Jurcheck family left Denver, where they’d lived and worked in professional theater along with running an event center, in 2020 as the pandemic hit. They traveled the country the next three years before landing in Belfast and founding Counter Current: Collective. The couple said they’ve found the community welcoming and supportive of their vision.
They took the organization’s name from the countercurrent that occurs where the Passagassawakeag River flows into Belfast Bay, according to Jurcheck. Next up is a ghost tour of a Belfast cemetery this fall. The company would like to produce Baker’s “The Flick” and “Circle Mirror Transformation” next year if they can find the right spaces.
“The Aliens” is challenging, insightful theater that is delightfully immersive in nearly every way. Don’t miss it.
Counter Current: Collective’s production of “The Aliens” will be presented Friday and Saturday through Aug. 17, but could be extended. For ticket and location information, visit becountercurrent.com.
