In 1977, NASA sent the Voyager Golden Records into space: two phonographic records carrying images of human anatomy, Solar System diagrams, and architectural designs, alongside music by Beethoven, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and more. The discs functioned as a kind of time capsule for the sounds and sights that made up planet Earth—something for the aliens to find and use to figure us out.

Carolina Đỗ’s theatrical version of such a record includes Wu-Tang Clan songs, JFK speeches, advertisements, and other predominantly American sounds of the last quarter century. Her play, ExtraO1dinary Aliens!—directed by Vas Eli—begins with a stunning theatrical lip-sync of this new time capsule. In it, a tightly assembled ensemble crouches before a screen projecting a spinning golden record, each actor holding a rectangular magnifying glass in front of their mouth, deftly articulating in such absolute lockstep with each other that they may as well be sharing one brain between their six bodies. Together, they share snippets of this found sound collage that blends into a meditation on America.

That beginning primed me for something intergalactic and experimental to unfold. And indeed, a Plutonian alien named Xerxes (a delightfully quirky Maria Müller) does visit Earth. She tries in earnest to understand America and humanity. She discovers pizza and smoking with equivalent, innocent wonder. But the focus of this play is not science fiction. Rather, it centers on people whose lives and loves are controlled by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Solo vignettes of four individual lives make way for pairings between them until eventually all four characters are at the same dinner table. An American citizen born to Vietnamese refugees, a Vietnamese immigrant on a student visa that may have accidentally expired, a Romanian immigrant on an O1 visa for acting, and a Mexican immigrant with no visa at all. The two women work at a Vietnamese restaurant. The two men work at a Sunday brunch spot. Kay, the Vietnamese-American, and Corneliu, the Romanian, are in love and headed for marriage. Linh, the Vietnamese immigrant and David, the undocumented Mexican, are flirting and falling for each other.

The relationships are sweet, tender; friendships you want to see endure, loves you want to see grow. Then, of course, there is that third relationship between Xerxes and an immigration officer (Matthew Zimmerman), a man tasked with judging so-called “aliens” who finds himself smitten with an actually extraterrestrial being. The play seems to ask if maybe an alien might finally be able to teach such a person something about humanity. The play also seems to answer this question: no.

Between scenes grounded in reality—the brunch rush, a hospital waiting room, a first date, a celebratory dinner—is an absurd series of tests and games that take us through the immigration and naturalization process. The omnipotent USCIS officer runs this gamified immigration process, wearing a suit, red tie, and an absolute sense of superiority. I say absurd and gamified, but those hyper-theatrical choices may be the most realistic depiction of U.S. immigration processes possible. Corneliu (played by the director, Eli, not-so-incidentally the playwright’s real life husband) appears for his first interview in nothing but flashy golden boxer shorts, made naked by and still performing for the American adjudicator who will decide his fate. A flashing, difficult-to-follow set of numbers are projected behind him, determining his potential worth or chances as a visa-holder. The various officials he encounters on his journey to citizenship are allowed to make life-altering mistakes and ignore procedures, but Corneliu simply must be perfect throughout.

“Just play the game,” Kay (Julie Tran) says to Corneliu as they practice for an interview to prove their marriage is legitimate, bouncing questions and an invisible ping pong ball back and forth. Later, she fails to play it herself, trying to reason with an agent and getting frustrated when he won’t listen, as if logic has anything to do with it. I found myself groaning at the obvious missteps she took, jeopardizing Corneliu’s case. It’s clear that Kay doesn’t fully grasp the privilege of her American passport, something the play tries to grapple with throughout. They do play the games though and Kay largely knows how—documenting their engagement for evidence, memorizing details of Corneliu’s life, deciding what his favorite color is even if he doesn’t really have one. Đỗ’s script takes some liberties with the exact rules, but the point is well made. I could feel Eli’s despair in my own chest when he said, as Corneliu, “I played the game. You rigged it.” Both actor and character’s ache merging into one.

Linh and David’s challenges are entirely different. Linh (Belle Le) worries about going to the hospital for a surgery not because of the procedure but because of her newly precarious immigration status. David (Marlon Xavier) hasn’t gone home or seen his family since he was seventeen. Getting serious for them would make their immigration worries worse and Kay asks, “What if you have kids? What if they deport you both?”

ExtraO1dinary Aliens! does a comprehensive job of pointing to the myriad ways our immigration system impacts everyday life. How a simple miscommunication with a customer can quickly escalate into fear of deportation. How a visa for a particular type of work can condemn a person to financial struggle, unable to take any other work above the table. How the joy of getting married can be tainted by needing to prove its worth. How everyone is nameless in the system, dehumanized in life and in death. I’m struck by just how much of the toll our policies take is made legible by the play’s four human characters alone (the USCIS officer is less human than the alien from Pluto).

This team clearly understands the diverse syntaxes of English—American vs. European vs. the English language learner, etc. I was reminded often of some person or other in my own life in the way these characters spoke English and the way they switched to their mother tongues. I was reminded of people I know in the visa stories these characters told too, but those I am reluctant to put in print. I want to tell you about a coworker’s sister, a student’s mother’s friend, a cousin in London, a… it’ll get too close to home. But this play hit there.

The timeline, however, is sometimes confusing. I thought Kay and Corneliu were already engaged when they started a wrenching argument about whether or not to get engaged before Corneliu could get a green card on his own merits. And when they all mourned an offstage character’s death, I thought we had mourned him already. If Đỗ’s timeline was intentionally non-linear, then I didn’t catch her setup.

Overlapping moments, so effective at the beginning of the play as an introduction to the characters and the world, were harder to follow later on. And in the end, I think I was missing the connective tissue between the immigrant aliens, the aliens from Pluto, and the alienating system that determines our worth to/in America.

I found ExtraO1dinary Aliens! to be very funny, but my fellow audience members seemed reluctant to laugh. Perhaps audiences putting away phones filled with endless news of war in Iran and ICE on our streets to look up at a stage that so baldly confronts our present reality may be somewhat reluctant to laugh at the absurdity of the immigration game. But this is a play filled with comedic gems. (Đỗ uses the word “whelmed” as Mean Girls intended and it totally lands).

Struggling through immigration is dreadful, but it is also hilarious if you stop to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. And I think if we all laughed together more, we could see the serious parts all the more clearly.

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ExtraO1dinary Aliens! is now playing at JACK through March 14.