Tales of the Lost Formicans, by award-winning Massachusetts playwright Constance Congdon, is a dark comedy about contemporary American angst and yearning. Part dream play, part sci-fi farce, Congdon’s imaginative, highly theatrical piece rests on the premise that space aliens are observing and interpreting suburban life through the lens of their own culture. The focus of their study is a middle-American family in crisis, coping with three generations’ worth of stress simultaneously. As the aliens puzzle over the artifacts they discover, their human/subjects struggle with problems ranging from Alzheimer’s disease and divorce to sexual frustration and the lack of communication between parents and children.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Tony Kushner, Congdon’s friend and fellow playwright, considers her “a genuine pioneer, a truly original writer, who first arrived at a new theatrical space, from whence a number of plays and playwrights” — himself included — “have emerged.” In the late 1980s, he asserts, Congdon was the first to see theatre’s potential as a “particularly resonant” place in which to explore the “kind of postmodem, collective nervous breakdown American society” was experiencing. What made her an intrepid voyager was not simply her willingness to depart from the tradition of narrative dramatic realism in which she had been working. It was her intuitive understanding of the theatricality of theatre, of the tension that exists between “the script as literature” and the script in performance as a “kinetic event.”