Eighty year-old Elaine is sitting on a beach and is obsessed with protecting a nest of unhatched sea turtle eggs. She is visited by Darling, who is the spirit of her trauma. The beach is a place of opposites - water to sand, ocean to sky, stillness to turbulence. Elaine can imbue the beach, therefore, and the hatching of the sea turtles, with all of her unresolved feelings towards childbirth and child loss. Over the course of three days, Elaine relives the loss of her child, the birth of her second, and her subsequent psychotic break. The play follows Elaine as she struggles to subdue the unrelenting ghosts of her past, maintain a loose grip on the present, and run away from the ever-escaping and utterly terrifying "future". At the peak of her traumatic reliving of her life, the sea turtles hatch and Elaine, despite all her efforts, fails to get them safely to sea. After she mourns their death, the cycle begins again.

Alien(e) explores the polarity between life and death, and the magnetic connection between mourning and love. Elaine is obsessed with irreconcilable opposites that pervade our existence: the unknown v.s. the known, the uncontrollable v.s. the controlled, and the dead v.s. the living. There is not a single character in the play that understands Elaine, and there is not a single entity on this earth Elaine can control, her intense alienation and anxiety is what leads to her madness.