Save Your Formica Furniture For The Alien Archaeologists

Save Your Formica Furniture For The Alien Archaeologists

What: Tales of the Lost Formicans
Where: NDSU, Askanase Auditorium
When: April 14-17 and 28-30
Info: 701.231.7969

Constance Congdon wrote Tales of the Lost Formicans in the late 80’s, but the play’s focus on suburban alienation and misery is just right for our times. Director Paul Lifton brings us a play with characters on the road to nowhere in modern America. Families fall apart, parents lose jobs, affairs occur, teenagers rebel, a paranoid conspiracy theorist has masturbatory fantasies, and no one falls in love. It doesn’t sound like an extraterrestrial comedy blast, but it is.

Aliens provide an outsider’s look at human civilization, which passed away ages ago. The aliens have difficulty understanding much of human behavior because frankly much of it doesn’t make sense. The play captures a mood of darkness and despair that manages to be ridiculous and comical, not to mention thought provoking. It is a great commentary on a world gone out of control. People have lost their sense of hope and joy, and perhaps the aliens enjoy watching humans spinning their wheels and accomplishing little.
We identify with the aliens, even if we feel sorry for the humans. Watching this play might give you some alien perspective and help you to prevent the end of humanity. This dark comedy is indebted to absurdist playwrights like Beckett, Stoppard, and Albee, but Congdon has created her own farcical world that gets uncomfortably tangled with our own.

The aliens are playful tricksters messing with humans, playing small jokes on them, rearranging their belongings. Perhaps the aliens are trying to shake humans up and get them to realize that they take themselves too seriously. If they lightened up and took their troubles in stride, they might not have become extinct.

Some of the aliens’ questions are wonderful. Do humans polish the surfaces of their chair’s seats with their buttocks? And why do common kitchen chairs frequently have an open space at the bottom of the backrest? Do humans worship formica tables and devote themselves to clocks? The aliens, a caricature of some academics, try to provide explanations for subjects that most humans do not even notice. This outside perspective gives the play much of its charm and wit.

Two divorced, middle-aged women, Cathy and Judy, played by Lori Boucher and Margaret Latterelle respectively, capture a compelling style of female angst. Cathy’s husband has impregnated a teenager, dragging his marriage into the toilet, which causes Cathy to get a divorce and move in with her parents. Cathy’s selfish, smart-mouthed, rebellious son cannot stand the new living situation and cusses like a sailor. Judy wants to vandalize her ex-husband’s brand-new Corvette and curse his new and young girlfriend. Judy’s divorce leads her to a mid-life crisis. She now has desperate sex with strange men, and even confesses to loving these men who just don’t feel the same way about her. This is rough stuff.

Cathy’s father, Jim, suffers from dementia, and we see the pain this causes his wife, Evelyn, played by Tacie Pearson. The play shows how disease is never an isolated affair, even if people consider themselves to be lost and alienated. This is a society heading for the grave, and we have the comfort of gallows humor.

By Staff Writer,
Roland Finger