Dan Myers
Karl Iglesias in "Trash"
Karl Iglesias in Theater Lila's "Trash."
Last season, Theatre LILA staged Suitcase Dreams, a show about the things we take with us. This year — their second season — the company presents Trash, which is all about what we leave behind. The format is the same: loose vignettes comprised of music, text and dance that aim to illuminate key issues around loss, waste and what remains. Some things we lose through our own carelessness. Some losses stem from our arrogance. Either way, the world is swimming in post-apocalyptic garbage. Trash’s vision is bleak, yet the show is filled with dark humor and glimmers of hope.
Director Jessica Lanius and Scene Designer Mike Lawler have filled the stage with thick heaps of debris. Clothes, mattresses, pizza boxes, broken umbrellas and non-biodegradable plastic bags not only litter the floor — they consume it. Watching the actors lie down in this pile as if it’s a green, fragrant meadow makes for a powerful image. As an audience, we don’t need much more to get the picture. But the text screams out a mind-boggling run of statistics: overpopulation, resource waste, how many tons of garbage are discarded each year by each person (two, if you’re counting). We even learn of a dump so large you can see it from space.
So what are we to do with all this out-of-control filth? The best of the pieces imply that, even within the rubbish, we are human beings who, like the best trash-pickers, find value among the muck. “Sorting the Trash” by Gwendolyn Rice is a lyrical monologue delivered by a doctor from the World Health Organization fighting Ebola in Africa. The plastic boxes she brings with her are conscientiously multi-purpose. They become desks, chairs, even clinic walls, representing her efficiency and a desire to bring order. Later, they metamorphosize into a bassinette for a lost baby and finally become a coffin.
Playwright Amelia Cook Fontella also offers a portrait of beauty among the ashes. In “Salvage," a little girl, growing up in a Central American trash pile, knows nothing beyond her fetid, ugly world. But in her hands, an abandoned gallon jug transforms into a full moon. A bent box is reborn as an empty beach. The piece gives us hope that, even as we drown, imagination and art bubble up to the surface.
Trash isn’t offering a solution to our problems. By the end of the show, those statistics still remain, shouted out at the audience. But the point of theater, LILA’s strong ensemble suggests, is not to solve a problem, but to pose it. Like the refuse on the stage, it’s what remains.
Editor's note: This story was corrected to note that Amelia Cook Fontella is the playwright of "Salvage."
