A close encounter with Damien Atkins has potential

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'When you tell someone that you are going to write a play about UFOS, usually there will be a little silence – and then a little laugh," playwright and performer Damien Atkins tells the audience at the start of We Are Not Alone.

Despite the skeptic Scullys of the world warning him away, however, Atkins plunged ahead with this project, a 90-minute personal Mulderian monologue about his fascination with unidentified flying objects and his desire to believe in the existence of extraterrestrial tourists.

Has the acclaimed Toronto-based actor (three Dora Mavor Moore Awards and counting) succeeded in applying the theatrical techniques of Spalding Gray to the subject of Alien Greys? The result is a close, but not cigar, encounter of the third kind in its world-premiere presentation in Montreal.

We Are Not Alone's first-person narrative is split into three sections. To begin, Atkins delivers a theatrical lecture – revisiting three famous sightings from 1947, 1980 and 1997 and making a strong, evidence-based case that the question is not whether UFOs exist, but whether they contain visitors from another planet.

There have been so many unexplained hovering vessels spotted by reliable witnesses that, as investigative journalist Leslie Kean tells him, you might as well ask, "Do you believe the sky is blue?"

In the second part of his show, Atkins takes a trip to the International UFO Congress in Phoenix to meet fellow enthusiasts. Here, however, his beliefs come up against actual believers – an eccentric group of Sasquatch experts, crop-circle crazies and "experiencers" – individuals who say they've encountered or been abducted by aliens. Atkins impersonates their bizarre personalities and physical appearances with great glee, switching roles from the ridiculed to the ridiculer.

To conclude the show, Atkins and his director Christian Barry (equally amusingly impersonated by the actor) head out to the Arizona desert north of Phoenix with a pair of New Age hippies in an effort to get experienced – and, more importantly, find a resolution to the play.

Throughout We Are Not Alone – co-directed by Crow's Theatre artistic director Chris Abraham with Barry – designers Julie Fox and Kimberly Purtell create an ominous environment with lights bouncing off of a giant black mirror that ascends and descends behind Atkins. Thomas Ryder Payne's sound, meanwhile, takes us through sonic atmospheres that reference classic alien stories, from the old-timey hysteria of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds to the eerie echo effects of The X-Files.

In this first iteration at the Segal Centre, however, We Are Not Alone feels like a "This Extraterrestrial Life" podcast that is still finding its focus. Atkins is intermittently entertaining – and always charming – but his monologue meanders and is too much about itself.

There is an intriguing set of ideas introduced very late in the game when the playwright lets the voice of Stephen Hawking explain two competing theories about the existence of life outside our planet.

The Rare Earth theory posits that life on Earth is a result of an improbable set of circumstances and is most likely to be unique in the universe. The Mediocrity Principle, on the other hand, assumes that if complex life exists here, it most likely does on Earth-like planets elsewhere in a universe that may be infinite.

Are we special or a dime a dozen? Looking back on We Are Not Alone through this frame, Atkins has discovered interesting contradictions about experiencers: They subscribe to the mediocrity principle – that humanity is unexceptional – and yet see themselves as exceptional. Unlike our playwright-lecturer, experiencers don't want everyone to believe – proof of ET life would make them no longer one of the "chosen."

At the same time, however, experiencers go to conferences to feel part of a community – and be validated. It's what we feel going to the theatre, too – a desire to belong, a desire to be special in our arts and entertainment choices. As for Atkins, he is an alien invader – uncertain whether he wants to slice and dice his subjects or simply spend time with them, and perhaps the same goes for his relationship with the audience. There's a lot of potential here, but Atkins is still testing hypotheses.

We Are Not Alone continues to March 15 at the Segal Centre in Montreal.