The premise of Lindsay Joelle’s The Garbologists is so strong that the 2021 play can coast on it for almost a third of its tidy 90-minute run time. Two New York City sanitation workers are running their route, and the Vermont Stage production presents their 19-ton truck, front and rear, on a stage piled with garbage. The two characters are poles apart, but they just might prove that compassion can take root anywhere.
Danny is the seasoned vet, a hardy specimen of the working class and nonstop talker who pauses only to laugh at his own jokes. Marlowe is the fish out of water, a character created to be the least likely member of the NYC sanitation department. She’s got a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University, a withering gaze and no apparent reason to dabble in manual labor. He’s white; she’s Black. He’s experienced; she’s young. They hit the nothing-in-common jackpot.
They’re sharing a truck cab and stopping to load bag after bag of trash while dodging the perils that may lie within, including knives, needles and unknown fluids, all of which can emerge with a careless squeeze. Danny wants to teach Marlowe the fine points, but she’s sure she knows all she needs to know. The play sends them bumping up against their differences while we wait to see if they’ll overcome them.
They do, of course, because 90-minute plays tick off their milestones neatly, and these two characters don’t waste time with depth when they can be joking, slinging garbage bags and spooling out plot points to try to make up for the clichés in their personalities. Impulsively, each discloses a sad story from their past. These elicit genuine sympathy, but they are events from past times about unknown people, so the characters’ bridge is built of biography, not deep connection. For viewers, Danny’s and Marlowe’s pains aren’t part of what happens onstage, so it’s hard to be transported by their stories.
Below the surface, the play has a quiet concept that’s not fully explored. Marlowe’s decision to ace the sanitation department exam stems from a personal reason she has to contemplate what is saved and what is discarded as trash. The notion wafts like a metaphor too abstract to drive the play, but what we keep and what we throw away is a strong definition of a life. Unfortunately, the only change this reflection propels in Marlowe is an irrational unwillingness to haul away people’s trash, an impulse she has to overcome to keep her job.
The play’s sweetest moment occurs at a bar when Danny and Marlowe have something to celebrate. Suddenly they can stop guarding themselves from each other. Only when their tension dissolves do we realize how tightly they’ve maintained it.
Overall, the play’s setting is its most engaging element. Joelle captures some on-the-job details of a sanitation worker’s day, and one of the best things about the play is seeing what’s hard and dangerous about a usually invisible job. Director Tekla Stark concentrates more on the banter than the labor, though, and the actors never enact the rhythm and effort of true hard work. Marlowe will lift a bag casually and drop it in the truck, then shuffle toward Danny to toss off a line. We don’t see what the work feels like physically because the actors handle hauling garbage like stage blocking, not a job demanding muscle and energy.
Stark is keen on getting the jokes to hit, keeping the two-hander pace up. The humor in The Garbologists often strains to achieve the frothiness of a sitcom, and the effort shows. Though many jokes take too long to set up, the play has laughs, and it set last Thursday’s audience chuckling.
What we keep and what we throw away is a strong definition of a life.
Ebonie Marie portrays Marlowe’s inner strength with a cool, sardonic detachment. It’s impressive and easily withstands Danny’s mile-a-minute chatter, but one doesn’t get the sense that Marlowe is built of anything more than armor. That may suit the character’s sorrow, but it leaves her awfully hollow.
As Danny, John Davy starts out with a honking laugh too big even for a garbage truck, but he soon dials down the bluster to hint at inner needs. Danny is written as a pile of superficial working-class attributes, and Davy can’t dig much deeper, but he does make him lovable, even when mansplaining.
Danny and Marlowe give us a story to listen to, but we can’t stop watching what scenic designer Chuck Padula has wrought: the cab end and hopper end of a full-size sanitation truck. The lights work, including the revolving caution light on top of the cab, and a semi-convincing hydraulic compactor makes the trash disappear.
With both the front and back of the truck wedged on the stage, the design is heavy on the willing suspension of disbelief — scenes at the back alternate with scenes in the seats. Yet it’s truly fun to play along with the idea that a huge garbage truck is sitting in front of us. The entire stage holds trash bags and refuse, piled on what are supposed to be New York residential streets, oddly missing modern dumpsters. Sound effects are hit and miss, and the production doesn’t attempt the snowstorm the characters discuss; the play demands a lot of viewer imagination in return for the spectacle of the truck.
The Garbologists is a great idea for a play, but without full, vibrant characters and a story that transforms them, it can only stand on its comedic banter, and here your favorite workplace TV series has it beat.
Joelle makes her flashiest grab for our heartstrings by sketching Marlowe trying to heal from grief. That tender story doesn’t have time to grow inside a speedy comedy, but the simple respect Danny and Marlowe develop for each other expresses the vital social truth that our differences are far less important than our similarities.
The Garbologists, by Lindsay Joelle, directed by Tekla Stark, produced by Vermont Stage. Through October 12: Thursdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., Black Box Theater at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington. $34-54.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Keep on Truckin’ | Theater review: The Garbologists, Vermont Stage”
This article appears in Oct 1-7 2025.
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