Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
— from The Graduate (1967), screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry
In one week, I was sent by our editor to see two totally different comedies about Adam and Eve: One, The Journals of Adam and Eve, is a lighthearted, life-affirming, work about the first couple on earth, written and interpreted by artists over 70 years old. The other, The Trash Garden, is about the last couple on earth. Written and interpreted by very young artists, it poses existential questions about our future, showing us the atrocious results of Climate Change. Together, both plays made a perfect depiction of our society where hope is a luxury for people over 50.
The Trash Garden is one of two stories from The Climate Fables, a duo of plays (the other a retelling of Rapunzel called Debating Extinction) by the Torch Ensemble that had a good run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and here at NY’s Fringe. I caught The Trash Garden at Playhouse 46, where it played in rep for one weekend, July 13 & 14. It takes places, as stated in the title, on a garbage-filled stage where Luis Feliciano and Kristen Hoffman, both excellent Gaulier trained clowns, are Atlas and Evely, the last human beings on Earth. They play imaginative, funny games all day long and eat plastic bags under the scorching sun, wondering how long they can survive the ecological collapse and, more important, why?
Writer-Director Padraig Bond – who also plays some sort of ghost or mischievous angel who transforms into different characters to mess with Atlas and Evelyn – wants us to feel Climate Grief deeply. The message is honorable and even too clear with a script full of unexplainable choices: Even though society has long disappeared, their dialogue is more in tune with a quick catastrophe that had just happened; they have no water and eat only plastic but look very healthy; they ludicrously wear black plastic bags as if they were trying to sweat off some weight or increase the torture; and they have a wild imagination but they don’t make a shaded, clean refuge and yard as they complain about the heat and garbage continuously. These are only some of the strange decisions Bond made when he wrote this piece.
Sounds like Beckett, but it’s not absurdist enough, neither clown play nor traditional fable. The Trash Garden is an experiment purely based on very amusing sketches by Feliciano and Hoffman, both very talented, and a few meaningful sentences to remind us of the significance of the work. It’s not a bad play but it needs a stronger script to connect the skits. At this point, Bonds is more effective as a director than a playwright. There is no hiding or denying Climate Change any longer, especially in these torrid temperatures, so there is a need for plays dedicated to this issue made by younger artists, certainly something Baby Boomers like myself should be forced to watch so we can understand, or be reminded of, what we have done and how the younger generations feel about it.
Climate Fables: The Trash Garden
Torch Ensemble
Playhouse 46 at St. Luke’s, 308 W 46th St.
played July 13 and 14, 2024
for more info, visit Torch Ensemble
