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Trash

nytheatre.com review by Richard Hinojosa
August 15, 2005

I have an almost unavoidable attraction to trash. Not the stinky kind, but the little treasures that people kick to the curb thinking the stuff worthless. The thing that’s so great about trash is that, as playwright David M. White accurately points out, “you never know what you might find.” That said, the producers of the FringeNYC have found a little nugget of gold in White’s one-act comedy Trash.Set in southwestern Missouri, Trash is at its heart a love story. Bob is the proprietor of a junk yard who has been going steady with Melissa, a convenience store clerk, for seven years. We find out that Bob has contracted HIV in a manner that is one in a million (though exactly how was not altogether clear to me). Their relationship is pushed over the edge when Melissa announces that she is going away for about a year to help open some new stores. This sends Bob into a tailspin of depression. Meanwhile, Bob’s best friend, a kinetic artist named Winter, is building a giant trebuchet that will have the ability to launch large pieces of junk great distances for the sake of art (I suppose).What appeals to me the most about Trash is its characters. White never falls into the trappings of writing stereotypical “hick” or “white trash” characters which can be so easy to do, especially when writing comedy; instead he creates characters that are at any given moment as funny as they are vulnerable. This creates a wonderful balance. Bob spends as much time taking action to get what he wants as he does trying to take his mind off things with beer and pot. Distraction seems to be an underlying theme in Trash. Whether it’s weed, going away, or launching refrigerators they all seek a distraction from the realities of their lives (as do we all).Director Doc Love has an excellent eye for staging comedy. He keeps both a snappy pace and his actors on the same page stylistically. My favorite feature of his direction is his staging of the stage crew (Bill Kennedy and Jeff Lange) who provide not only set changes but all the homemade sound effects as well. For some reason only Winter can see the stage crew. This makes for a surreal injection into this already strange world.The cast is a power trio led by Will Manning as Bob. Manning excels at endearing his character to us without stepping across the line into sappy. Katie Gilchrist makes Melissa so likeable and yet unattainable that we feel Bob’s plight even more. Finally, Joseph Langham steps in as Winter and works comic magic with just a simple expression or gesture.So if you’re looking at a great comedy that never scoffs at its characters, then Trash is your bag.