Review: Humanity Comes Full Circle in "The Trash Garden"

Climate Fables: The Trash Garden

Written and directed by Padraig Bond

Presented by Torch Ensemble at Playhouse 46 at St. Luke's

308 W 46th St., Manhattan, NYC

July 13-14, 2024

L to R: Kristen Hoffman, Padraig Bond, Luis Feliciano, Penelope Deen
As heat records continue to fall and extreme weather proliferates (if only anyone could have predicted this!), the timeliness of Padraig Bond's Climate Fables project seems, one might say, scorchingly obvious. One of these Fables, The Trash Garden, imagines the post-climate-apocalypse world as a kind of anti-Eden populated by what may well be the last two people on Earth, presenting funny, touching snapshots of the pair as they negotiate and contemplate their existence and one another. The Trash Garden was most recently presented as part of Playhouse 46's Turn The Lights On! Festival, which presents, in collaboration with FRIGID New York and the New York City Fringe Festival, 11 shows from this year's Fringe Festival to raise funds to help the venue purchase its own lighting package (donations can also be made at this link). At the festival, The Trash Garden was performed in rep with a second Climate Fables play, Debating Extinction (you can read our review of an earlier production here), with which, beyond a focus on human-caused climate destruction, The Trash Garden shares thematic concerns around familial and romantic relationships, individual independence, and whether and how to go on living amidst ecological catastrophe. Bond has also written further plays in the series - the entire story will ultimately span a millennium - and he and Torch Ensemble plan to perform a new Climate Fable each month from August to December.

In The Trash Garden, the suggestively named Atlas (Luis Feliciano) and Evelyn (Kristen Hoffman) are, to their knowledge, the last humans alive, turning to the imperishable garbage inescapably blanketing the landscape for clothing, food, and entertainment in an unforgiving environment (their complaints about heat and air quality should sound pretty relatable). Their fairly quick shift in the opening scenes from game-playing to talking about "God's plan" establishes early on the philosophical bent that the play interweaves with its comedy and that comes to the fore in scenes such as when Evelyn is tempted by radical solipsism and self-disgust (her not being allowed to talk to God herself will also become significant). This temptation can be connected to the play's considerations of imagination and storytelling as defining human features, as part of which playwright Bond appears as a succession of figures who may be 'ghosts' or may be internal manifestations or even a type of shared stories. Atlas and Evelyn not only pass the time but also process their world through play - much like theater itself - and imagination is positioned as fundamental to human ingenuity and problem solving; but at the same time, imagination can threaten negative consequences - as with Evelyn's temptation - can justify the unjustifiable, and can delude and distract - for example, what conflicting stories, individually and collectively, are being told about about climate crisis right now?

The garbage bag-clad protagonists play with cultural as well as physical detritus, as in a very funny scene in which they play-act a stereotypically embittered married couple in a stereotypical American Family Drama. Even here, though, Evelyn's monologue touches on real aspects of her relationship with Atlas, and the two later decide that this particular game was a little too emotionally intense to revisit. In another scene, they impersonate residents of a place called New York City that had long since become regarded by many as a myth, yet this myth preserves the reality of injurious inequality as Evelyn insists that they play as banker and debtor. As partners, Atlas and Evelyn are still caught up in some of our social norms, but, admirably, the play depicts their romantic love as not solely oriented around sex. The Trash Garden inverts some of its Biblical parallels (this garden is inescapable, Eveyln's temptation goes a bit differently than Eve's, and so on), most fundamentally that Atlas and Evelyn mark the end rather than the progenitors of humankind: if the ethics of reproduction was at central to Debating Extinction, there is no debate here because the only thing that Atlas and Evelyn can propagate is more stories.

Feliciano and Hoffman are both Gaulier-trained clowns, and they bring magnificent physicality and playfulness to their roles, but are equally adept at embodying their characters' rage, grief, and tenderness, while Bond ranges from hilarious to menacing to touching in his protean appearances. Their performances are scored by the ever-present susurration of the trash that litters the set as they move around the stage, including from the plastic refuse that will probably outlast the species that made it. As the show progresses, it cleverly integrates the audience as well, gesturing again, though not only, to the importance of shared storytelling. One ghost (or/and aspect of himself) tells Atlas that he wouldn't have appreciated what he had if he lived in our times, but also that he couldn't have been any other way since he would have been a different person in that different context - maybe we, however, with the help of shows like The Trash Garden, can still resist what seems inevitable.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

Review of The Climate Fables: Debating Extinction
Review of The Climate Fables: The Collapse of the Hubbard Glacier

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