TheaterWorks Hartford spotlights sanitation workers in ‘The Garbologists’
“The Garbologists,” a play about trash collectors, will run at TheaterWorks Hartford through Feb. 25.
Playwright Lindsay Joelle’s “ode to san men” has been around for a few years now, conceived during the pandemic. She said the goal was to honor essential workers and “san men” is slang for sanitation workers. There’s more slang where that came from like “mongo,” and the title itself. The two people that make up the two-person show aren’t men, so it’s garbage collectors or “garbologists” as opposed to “garbage men.”
Originally conceived as a potential sitcom, its structure certainly reeks of one. Two sanitation workers, each with a chip on their shoulder, have conversations about anything and everything during the wee hours of the morning, as they dump people’s trash into the back of a garbage truck.
Interestingly, that back of the truck is one of only two things you’ll see on the TheaterWorks stage while watching “The Garbologists.” The other is the front of said truck. The stage is covered with huge black garbage bags and scattered trash that throughout the course of the 90-minute show will be tossed into the truck by the chatty protagonists.
Marlowe (Bebe Nicole Simpson) and Danny (Jeff Brooks) would appear to only have one thing in common: garbology. She is Black and the degreed child of college professors and he’s a working-class man from Staten Island. The more experienced Danny tries to mentor newbie Marlowe, and beyond the confines of the job he wants to impart life lessons. She is mostly resistant to the kind of advice he has to offer.
“While researching this play, I spoke to sanitation workers from New York to Colorado to Pennsylvania. A theme that came up repeatedly was invisibility,” Joelle said. “From the jump, both Danny and Marlowe have very specific opinions about how they want to be seen; at the same time, they’re unable to see each other clearly. Listen… this world gets weirder by the day. Learning to see someone else on their own terms—and summoning the grace to see ourselves in the other—feels more essential now than ever.”
Joelle, an Arizona native, is a writer by nature so “The Garbologists” as a potential-sitcom notion didn’t last long. She said it begged to be staged, and has run successfully across the country these past few years.
“The sitcom conversation has been an on-again/offagain one and right now it’s off again,” Joelle said. “But I think it’s a great idea, and maybe
Hartford will plant another seed.”
One question that looms over the show is why is a college-educated woman a trash collector-in-training? Danny wants to know and, ostensibly, so will the audience. The answer will come by the time the curtain falls.
As is often the case at TheaterWorks, some performances take place in tandem with what they call “The Living Room Series.” These are intimate concerts curated by Erica Tracy Sullivan that bring local musicians and visiting artists in to perform, and are supported by the Greater Hartford Arts Council.
For October’s musical “Lizzie,” the star herself, Sydney Shepherd, performed as part of the series, with her trio. For “The Garbologists” they tapped New Haven’s own Johnathan Moore. He took first place in the Yale School of Music Solo Competition his junior year of high school, and with an original work, no less. Described in his bio, and the TheaterWorks website, as “an unorthodox cellist,” he has played the area for close to 20 years, and now is a New York club mainstay.
“I’m doing a few shows,” he said. “One of my friends hit me up and said, ‘We need you for this series’. I said I was down as long as I was free. It’s all about who you know. It’s straight cello. Original pieces of mine. No covers. All originals.”