“You know, I thought The Aliens was a good title until people started saying, “Hey, I’m really looking forward to seeing Alien” or “How’s Aliens going?” and then I realized people think I’ve named my play after a Hollywood movie.” —Annie Baker
It’s almost too easy to imagine The Aliens as the name of an action-packed outer space thriller, but Baker’s indelible ode to music, art, and unlikely friendship draws its title from a different kind of extraterrestrial: poet Charles Bukowski.
Called the “laureate of American lowlife” by Time Magazine, Bukowski wrote over forty books of poetry, prose, and fiction in his lifetime . “The Aliens”, in which an incredulous narrator marvels at the carefree existence of others, appears in The Last Night Of The Earth Poems, Bukowski’s last published collection before his death in 1994. When Baker’s play premiered at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in 2010, she considered including a copy of the poem in the program, but decided “it would be kind of insufferable.”
Beyond its title, the ethos of the poem and poet permeates the play. It is also one of the many proposed names of the laid-back protagonists KJ and Jasper’s loosely defined band (Beat-inspired writer Jasper, who titles his sprawling novel after another Bukowski poem, lobbies hard for The Aliens over Nefarious Hookah or Joseph Yoseph, but KJ swiftly rejects his suggestion as “boring”). As the two take hapless barista Evan Shelmerdine under their wing, one of Jasper’s first bits of advice to the impressionable seventeen-year-old is, “You gotta read Bukowski. He cuts away all the bullshit.”
The Bukowski canon is indeed stripped of conventional techniques and themes. Ken Tucker, former Village Voice book critic, characterized Bukowski’s style as “a crisp, hard voice; an excellent ear and eye for measuring out the lengths of lines; and an avoidance of metaphor where a lively anecdote will do the same dramatic work.” His raw, emotional work drew from his own hard-living lifestyle in Los Angeles, confronting isolation, recklessness, and the plight of the down-trodden. “Bukowski’s poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal artifacts,” explains Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker, “but as ongoing installments in the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book. They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof.”
For a man who made his reputation in fringe journals and newspapers, Bukowski’s legacy endures in millions of books sold worldwide. Still, his commercial success never fully propelled him into mainstream consciousness; he remains the patron saint of the underground. As Stephen Kessler in the San Francisco Review of Books notes, "Firmly in the American tradition of the maverick, Bukowski writes with no apologies from the frayed edge of society.” From their own frayed edge, these outsiders still look to this cult hero—and his bullshit-free vision of life in all its dangers and idiosyncracy—to speak to, and for, them.
—Lauren Halvorsen