In the flickering light of the boxy old television, Álvaro lays out his case with the painstaking logic of a person who doesn’t expect to be believed: Something is deeply, strangely suspect about the Season 2 opener of “The X-Files,” the episode in which Mulder goes to Puerto Rico to investigate an alien conspiracy.
For starters, there’s the vegetation, which looks exactly nothing like Puerto Rico and a whole lot like California. And then there is the supposedly Puerto Rican character Mulder encounters, who seems distinctly Mexican.
It’s a funny monologue, ingeniously layered and shadowed with pain. In Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’s “Recent Alien Abductions” — a play that examines the many meanings of “alien” — it is a kind of show within the show, touching on cultural dominion and the caprices of memory, but also on trauma and erasure, both personal and sociopolitical.
Portrayed with a confiding bashfulness by Rafael Sardina, Álvaro is an artist and his dissection of the “X-Files” episode is a performance piece. So when his reasoning slip-slides from acute observation to something more like paranoid delusion, we don’t know how much of it is put on.
But the fragility we sense in this gentle, inquisitive soul is real enough. Álvaro’s monologue is Act I of “Recent Alien Abductions”; by Act II he is dead.
This is where Mr. Cortiñas’s production, presented by the Play Company at Walkerspace, goes awry. The action shifts to Álvaro’s childhood home, where his friend Patria (Ronete Levenson) has gone to try to persuade his family to allow a book of his plays to be published.
His mother, Olga (Mia Katigbak), is in the throes of dementia, so Patria appeals to his older brother, Néstor (Daniel Duque-Estrada), a bully with an explosive temper, zero intellectual curiosity and a deep-rooted resentment of the emotional and geographical distance that Álvaro maintained between them in adulthood.
That estrangement is central to the play, but the production hasn’t found a performance style that lets Act II breathe. On a needlessly wide set (by Adam Rigg) crammed so close to the audience, and lit so brightly (by Amith Chandrashaker), that artifice becomes impossible to ignore, the production settles on a flattening mishmash of alienation and naturalism.
The way the actors regroup between scenes has a lovely ritual feel, but the characters in this act, the longest section of the play, seem only superficially realized. (The exception is Beba, the family’s neighbor, played with a warm sensitivity by Yetta Gottesman.) So when we discover the cause of Álvaro’s disaffection — the conspiracy of silence and willful blindness that dogged him his whole wounded life — it doesn’t have nearly the impact it needs.
In its brief final act, though, “Recent Alien Abductions” finds its potency again as Álvaro reappears, this time with the versions of his family that he wrote into his plays: alien mother and alien brother, eerily masked (costumes are by Fabian Fidel Aguilar). The tone is surreal, the viciousness bracing, and Álvaro’s undiluted anguish the kind that never goes away.
