Review: "ExtraO1dinary Aliens!": Out of this World and into the Streets!

ExtraO1dinary Aliens!

Written by Carolina Ðỗ

Directed by Vas Eli

Presented by BETTERFLY Productions, Leviathan Lab, and JACK in association with The Hearth Supported Productions and The Sống Collective at JACK

20 Putnam Ave, Brooklyn, NYC

March 7-14, 2026

Be it a design flaw or feature, immigration systems have a peculiar talent for turning human lives into scorecards. Carolina Đỗ’s ExtraO1dinary Aliens!, now running at JACK in Brooklyn, seizes that bureaucratic absurdity and stages it as something akin to a cosmic game show. Written as what the playwright calls an “absurd romantic comedy,” the play refracts the contemporary immigration process through satire, sf-fueled defamiliarization, and flashes of real emotional intimacy. Yet in this spirited production, directed by Vas Eli, some of the evening’s most vivid achievements emerge not from the script’s deft conceits, but from the remarkable vitality of the ensemble of performers.

From the outset, the production frames immigration bureaucracy as both spectacle and ordeal. A looming video display gamifies the visa process with scores, fonts, and metrics that transform the evaluation of human worth into something disturbingly playful; the visual language simultaneously evokes both administrative coldness and televised competition. If the American immigration system already asks applicants to prove themselves “extraordinary,” here that demand is elevated, yielding something even more performative, a public system in which lives are assessed, ranked, and narrated in real time.

Again, while these design elements establish the theatrical body, the actors provide the evening’s pulse. Each of the six performers commits fully to the physical demands of the staging, which frequently moves beyond realism into highly stylized ensemble work. At one point the cast assembles itself into a human pyramid; elsewhere the stage fills with sudden bursts of movement and elevated theatrical gesture. Such moments of bodily commitment anchor the play’s more abstract or satirical impulses in something palpably human: immediate and grounded.

The Romanian immigrant Corneliu, portrayed with soulful restraint by actor/director Vas Eli, provides the production’s emotional ballast, often fixing the audience with a middle-distance stare suggesting a man caught between institutional duty and private struggle. The weight the role demands could easily tip a performance toward melodrama or even parody, yet Eli remains profoundly grounded throughout, allowing Corneliu’s quiet moral tension to accumulate discomfortingly rather than erupt.

His wife (Julie Tran’s Kay) arrives with a wholly different energy. Tran delivers the play’s sharpest comic and rhetorically pointed moments with impressive stamina, balancing wit with (very) righteous indignation. Kay frequently serves as the story’s emotional center, though Tran skillfully shades the performance with a nuanced awareness of the character’s relative privilege within the play’s spectrum of immigration experiences.

The cast. Image from https://carolinado.com/playwright.

Maria Müller is first introduced to the audience as a needy patron at Corneliu’s restaurant of employment, deftly skewering the entitled brunch class to well-deserved knowing chuckles from the audience. However, Müller spends the lion’s share of her time on stage as Xerxes – an alien observer of human bureaucratic rituals, and a cool counterpoint to Kay’s fire. In both roles, Müller leans into measured physical comedy and understated wit; with Xerxes in particular, she conjures a presence that feels both otherworldly and quietly stabilizing. In one of the evening’s most memorable visual moments, Xerxes appears in a gold lamé alien costume before calmly unzipping the headpiece and letting a cascade of hair spill free, puncturing the spectacle and challenging the boundaries of realism that an audience might expect in a contemporary immigration narrative.

Belle Le’s Linh contributes an ease and lightness that the production wisely preserves. Linh fully understands her lot yet refuses to submit to the crushing forces of the system, whether that means letting her visa lapse or charging head-on into a new relationship that will only further complicate any plans for long-term residential stability. The character’s trappings are realistically complex – Kay at one point cackles at realizing that Linh’s parents are “rich!” – but Le’s performance masterfully avoids any easy outs of stridency, flippancy or entitledness via her singular command of self-awareness, effortless humor and easygoing world savviness. She establishes an especially affecting rapport with Marlon Xavier’s David: a sequence recounting the origins of their relationship, beginning in a hospital waiting room, unfolds with striking naturalism. The chemistry between the two actors feels fully lived in, allowing the scene’s emotional stakes to resonate, and again reminding the audience of how deeply human these characters caught up in the gears of immigration bureaucracy really are.

David proves particularly notable for the extraordinary expressiveness of Xavier’s face, which carries much of the character’s interior life, handling the role’s emotional obligations with quiet grace. Meanwhile Matthew Zimmerman’s Voice, clad in a sharply authoritative (and cheekily, menacingly familiar) red tie, embodies the looming machinery of institutional judgment. Zimmerman wisely avoids easy comic beats, sustaining instead a tone of bureaucratic threat that grows steadily more unsettling, underscored by the actor’s tour de force physical performance, which uncannily melds physical elements of a ringleader, a floor gymnast, and an authoritarian.

The production’s staging choices reinforce the sense that the immigration process extends beyond any single room. At several points the theater door itself becomes part of the playing space, blurring the boundary between audience and action within JACK’s intimate configuration, subtly implicating passive spectatorship in the system being depicted. Thoughtful lighting and blocking decisions throughout similarly underscore the theme of defamiliarization, as audience and players alike are often thrust into an array of dizzying and diverse spaces both institutional (airport, hospital) and personal (restaurant, bedroom) in which the character’s struggles inevitably must ensue.

Late in the evening, the introduction of an otherworldly space provokes the production’s departure from realism altogether, as a sequence invoking Major Tom (complete with pitch-perfect space helmet) lifts the action far away from nation states. The shift could feel abrupt, yet it works curiously well, reframing the story at a wider scale. It is a triumph. Seen from far enough away, the production suggests, the bureaucratic lines dividing nations begin to look strangely small….

Đỗ’s script explicitly challenges the American theatre’s tendency to treat immigrant narratives as safely historical, ossified tales of pluck and bootstrap. ExtraO1dinary Aliens! insists instead on the urgency of the present moment, portraying immigration not as inherited memory but as ongoing ordeal. That immediacy is carried above all, by the performers whose humor, physical commitment, and emotional generosity transform the play’s rich satirical framework into something unmistakably alive, current and contemporary.

-Noah Simon Jampol