The Aliens is just part-time work

“This is important,” playwright Annie Baker writes in a note for The Aliens, “at least a third – if not half – of this play is silence. Pauses should be at least three full seconds long. Silences should last from five to ten seconds.” And long pauses even longer.

In other words, take all the pauses in Pinter, Chekhov, and Beckett and stretch them into gulfs of emptiness. The technique, like a spinning coin with one side blank, works for Baker’s other plays about Shirley, Vermont — Body Awareness and Circle Mirror Transformation — but only works part-time in Ion Theatre’s uneven production.

The Aliens takes place in the back patio of the Green Sheep, a coffee shop. The scruffy yard, the trash bins, and their rotting odors keep customers inside. Although the boss says it’s off limits to outsiders, KJ and Jasper have made it their hang out.

Depending on one’s perspective, or the time of day, they are either 30-year-old geniuses, or slackers, or in an “in-between state.” They once had a band. Jasper, “a living piece of trailer trash” working on a novel, wanted to call it The Aliens. KJ, a stoner who drinks “’shroom tea” and composes lyrics, thought the name was too boring.

They could have been talented. Now it’s hard to tell. KJ’s improvised lyrics are more spacey than substantial, and an excerpt from Jasper’s novel doesn’t show much promise.

Maybe they can pass the ball to the next generation — in the form of 17-year-old Dean. He works at the shop and becomes drawn to the “alien” world outside. He learns some things from Jasper and KJ, and starts to come of age.

The plot’s sketchy. It’s more a scene piece than a play. The presentation’s even sketchier. What gives it interest — or could — is the playwright’s technique. Like weeding a garden she cuts out the superfluous. What gets said, and the way they say it, matters. Also, that so much gets said without words illustrates how communication these days has become increasingly non-verbal.

It’s as if Baker’s fighting a counter-attack against the frantic pace of contemporary theater. Instead cramming as much as possible into 90 minutes, filling every frame at breakneck speed, she slows things way down. The audience has time to stop and reflect — without reaching for a smartphone. What a radical — nay, wonderful — idea!

But things need to happen in the un-weeded spaces. Too often in the Ion production the pauses are just that. The play merely stops…then starts up again. There are few subtexts, unseen connections, or the intrusion of nothingness.

The cast, co-directed by Claudio Raygoza, scratches the surface but misses the layers. Brian Butler gets KJ’s humor but not his on and off, lighthouse effect: possibly brilliant one second, zonked goofy the next, rarely in-between. Reed Willard’s somber Jasper needs more nuance and more a suggestion of where he’s headed. Tyler Oakley fares best as young, fumbling Evan, whose dialogue rarely ventures beyond two word exclamations (“Oh wow!”; “Okay”).

The design work serves the play. Raygoza’s grungy set and moody lights make it clear why patrons stay indoors.