Following a single late-night performance played to a full house in September, a trio of actors and their director are returning to Port Townsend to present nine more showings of “The Aliens.”

“It is a gorgeous play,” said actor Andrew Perez of Annie Baker’s award-winning work. “It’s beautifully written,” he said. “It roles off the tongue so truthfully.”

Hailing from Los Angeles, Perez is in town as a 2017 Port Townsend Film Festival fellow. He first visited last year during the festival. A film he both wrote and acted in – “Bastards y Diablos” – won special jury commendation.

“We were hoping to do it again and we were waiting for the opportunity,” Perez said of “The Aliens,” which was performed at The Key City Public Theatre during the festival.

“I find it’s even more resonant now than when we did it in September.”

‘A POWERFUL PLAY’

Set behind a coffee shop in a small Vermont town, “The Aliens” centers around two men, KJ (Perez) and Jasper (Dillon Porter, also in “Bastards”), who decide to teach “everything they know” to Evan (Chuck Filipov), a young high school student who works at the coffee shop frequented by the men.

The play explores the fundamentals of friendship and the sense of alienation that has become ubiquitous at times in a culture where dreamers and oddballs often find themselves isolated.

“It’s just kind of everything – it’s universal and specific, fun and heartwarming, and there’s no other play I’d rather be doing,” Perez said.

Perez, Porter and Filipov all attended Northwestern University, and have collaborated before.

Perez met play director Tamlin Hall in the summer of 2007 at the School at Steppenwolf, where they worked together as actors. “[He’s] a really special dude,” Perez said.

Perez noted that both cast members and director are men – involved in a play penned by a woman.

“It’s been the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen any group,” Perez said.

“It feels like healing – just to be in it,” he said. “It’s such a powerful play.”

FELLOWSHIP IN PT

Perez, who also stars in “My Scientology Movie,” which hits cinemas March 10, is currently working on a screenplay set in Port Townsend.

“The fellowship has been amazing,” Perez said. “I came here with some ideas of what I would write, and I got here and it went in this whole new direction.”

His experience in Port Townsend has been heartening and life-changing, he said.

“I feel like I need to be here because I needed to remember that I love America, and this place reminded me that I love America – at a time that I really needed to remember that.”

Port Townsend’s exuberant support for artists and the arts is also reminiscent of “The Aliens,” he said, in which the two artists encourage a teenager to follow a possible future journey into becoming an artist.

“Art heals, and there’s a baton that’s passed forward to each generation – and if you can engage the young artists of tomorrow, there’s hope in this country, and this world.”