Best Theater Performance in a Secret Location

“One can imagine the play taking place anywhere.”

By Kyle Laurita, Midcoast Villager Staff Writer –Best Of 2024– Dec 26, 2024 Updated Dec 28, 2024

Link to article: Best Theater Performance in a Secret Location | Village Life | midcoastvillager.com

John Jurcheck (lying on ground) as KJ and Nate Marx as Jasper in counter/current’s production of Annie Baker’s “The Aliens” in 2024.

Annie Baker’s 2010 play “The Aliens” is set in a “desolate back patio of a coffee shop in Vermont,” according to the script. It features three characters — Jasper, KJ and Evan — and minimal props or set. One can imagine the play taking place anywhere: Behind your local coffee joint, centering around those two guys you knew in high school, the ones who kind of — well, dropped off the map. So, it sort of makes sense that Belfast’s Counter/Current:Collective would stage their production of “The Aliens” in the dingy lot behind Darby’s, between the crumbling brick wall and the garbage cans.

With 11 initial performances that stretched into 13 as each showing sold out through July and August, Counter/Current:Collective closely guarded the location of their production. In fact, they only revealed it to the audience in the moments before the show. “Theater” goers met in the park across from Downshift Coffee, and Courtney Hayes, one of the Collective’s founders, led the 20-odd audience members past Traci’s and into a lot most Belfast residents probably have never even visited: a small patch of dirt and grass, squeezed between buildings, only notable for its access to the back of Darby’s Restaurant and the occasional wandering housefly. The lot had been outfitted with lights and folding chairs, an immersive theater experience for all those willing to put aside — just for a moment — their expectations and assumptions.

The performance ran approximately two hours, with a brief intermission. In it, Jasper and KJ, played by Belfast resident Nate Marx and Counter/Current:Collective Artistic Director John Jurcheck respectively, while away behind a coffee shop, occasionally passing the odd inspiring and questionably appropriate anecdote on to the coffee shop’s employee, Evan, who is played by Belfast High School’s Drew Kulbe.

All three actors delivered intimate, raw performances that felt shockingly large and bizarre within such a confined, innocuous space. Jurcheck’s surreal take on KJ and Marx’s almost violently personal performance of Jasper were somehow reassuring to watch, the comfortableness between the two apparent and yet jarring, in a way that reminds one of the poet Cesar A. Cruz’s quote, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

Heartbreakingly heartwarming, Counter/Current:Collective’s rendition of “The Aliens” transformed a crusty patch of Belfast — a murky grotto that eyes would normally skate over and veer past — into an unforgettable experience. With two plastic chairs, some faux cigarettes and a guitar case, Marx, Jurcheck, Kulbe and a small production team managed to create something fearless. It is difficult to argue with a performance that crescendos in accordance with dusk falling; in which the denouement bleeds out into the audience to the sound of actual crickets. And besides, you can’t beat watching a play with the feel of grass between your toes.