By Sherrie Rose in San Diego
Alien Girls spans decades, moving between various moments in time. Tiffany (Brittany Bradford) and Carolyn (Emma Ramos), perform fluidly across key stages of their lives as college best friends and roommates, writers, women, and individuals.
The big reveal is two friends sharing news. Tiffany is pregnant, and what should be a moment of joy instead alienates her best friend, Carolyn. Carolyn’s news of being published in a magazine feels secondary by comparison. She tries to be supportive, but her reaction is more complicated than she can admit even to herself.
The stage is a gorgeous round, blue-carpeted space with a table and stools that rise up in the center depending on the scene. A mirror ball drops in for dance sequences. The design relies on minimal props and costume changes. And there are two alien puppets.
Carolyn receives a call from Gina (Karina Curet) that the magazine is dropping her story about her mother but offering another opportunity. Her new piece, shaped by raw, unfiltered emotion, goes viral, exposing the private fault lines between the two friends and creating a serious fracture in their relationship.
A third friend, Joy (Curet) brings the gals together in the wedding dress boutique where Joy insists that Carolyn meet Milan (also played by Curet) because “she’s beautiful like me but gay.”
Beneath the surface are envy, fear, admiration, and a growing sense of displacement as their lives begin to diverge in irreversible ways. Their friendship carries both ambition and intimacy, shifting, eroding, and strained under the weight of life-altering choices and emotional closeness.
Amy Berryman’s play explores the tension between creating art and creating life, between the desire to build a legacy through work and the demands, desires, and unpredictability of motherhood and personal connection. It reveals what happens when two friends who once defined each other begin to define themselves in entirely different ways.
Alien Girls is about deep human relationships. In a pivotal scene, Milan asks Carolyn to carry their baby because she cannot, forcing Carolyn to confront her own capacity for motherhood. Identity and motherhood pull the characters in different directions, forming their sense of self and the futures they imagine.
Alien Girls runs 90-minutes with no intermission and plays through May 10th at the Old Globe.
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Sherrie Rose is an author and masterwork advisor integrating digital legacy with future vision and AI.