ALIEN and the Question of Belonging

ALIEN: The Musical brought Gregg Garner’s songwriting into a larger dramatic form. Developed from a song on UnNamed Servant’s 2010 album Invitation to Exile, the musical premiered at The Arts at Center Street in December 2014. Its subsequent history included a July 2015 run at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center and a performance connected with Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor’s Lecture Series in 2016.

The move from recording to theatre changed what the material could do. A song could introduce an experience of exclusion through a single voice. A musical could place that voice among other people, with different interests, responsibilities, and accounts of the same circumstances. Belonging became something the characters had to negotiate with one another.

The production’s 2015 announcement described the Dolan family’s arrival in New York from Ireland in the late nineteenth century. Their story intersected with that of another family. Class, race, and power shaped the world in which the characters tried to make a life. The setting gave the musical a historical distance through which to consider questions that remained recognizable to a contemporary audience.

Garner has connected the work to a recurring concern in his writing: how easily a society forgets the circumstances through which its own members arrived. In the archive’s account, immigration history becomes a way to examine the distinction between people treated as established members of a community and those still required to justify their presence there.

Theatre made those distinctions visible through relationships. A character could be welcomed in one setting and excluded in another. An audience could encounter the consequences of a decision before settling on an explanation for it. Music added a further means of following a person’s experience beyond the position that person occupied in the plot.

The production also extended the work of a local company. Performers and collaborators drawn from the Institute and the surrounding community helped carry an original musical beyond its first theatre. That movement required the practical work of rehearsal, musical preparation, and production. The writing’s public life depended on the people able to perform it together.

ALIEN received First Night’s Outstanding Original Work recognition for 2015, presented in January 2016, according to the archive. Its place in Garner’s creative history is also apparent without treating an award as a complete measure of the work. The musical connected the concerns of a touring songwriter with the sustained relationships and competing perspectives of an ensemble drama. A theme first carried by a song had acquired a cast, a setting, and a larger public conversation.

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