In Keith Huff’s new play, two friends head to the Jan. 6 insurrection, but this production substitutes unfunny cartoonishness for the characters’ humanity.
The title of Keith Huff’s new play, “Garbageman,” shouldn’t be taken at face value, even though Huff pretty much asks you to.
The garbageman in question isn’t Buddy Maple, a 30-something white guy who has spent his career in sanitation: first right out of high school, working for his unnamed American city; then, hooked on OxyContin, managing a recycling plant where he found — and kept — a preserved human head that seems to speak to him. After that, he started driving a garbage truck in another town, where he, oops, ran over someone.
Nor is the garbageman Dan Bandana, Buddy’s poisonous, well-armed old pal — also addicted to OxyContin, by the way — to whom he relates this series of events the way a person might to a stranger in a bar. Still, Dan is such an obnoxious creep that the surprise in his back story isn’t that his wife has left him. It’s that he was able to persuade anyone to be with him in the first place.
The true title character in this dark, meandering sociopolitical comedy is both unseen and unnamed, at least formally. Dan and Buddy call him “The Guy.” They voted for him. And when “Garbageman” takes them on a road trip with Dan’s guns, it’s to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The leathery human head, its mouth permanently agape, is stashed in the trunk.
Over the top though the play is, it wants to get at something urgent about a spreading rot in American culture, fed by festering resentments around class, race and gender. But Greg Cicchino’s world premiere production for the Chain Theater in Manhattan has mostly omitted the characters’ human elements in favor of aggressively unfunny cartoonishness that makes “Garbageman” easy to dismiss.
The tone isn’t quite one-note, but maybe one and a half. Kirk Gostkowski, the theater’s artistic director, is so relentlessly belligerent as Dan, and Deven Anderson is so blandly flat as Buddy, that it’s hard to believe in them as people, let alone swallow the idea of these two guys as friends. Even when they make a murder pact, nothing seems at stake.
Huff, best known as the author of the Broadway play “A Steady Rain,” a box-office hit in 2009 that starred Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman as Chicago cops, has spent his stage career telling Chicago stories. He deliberately leaves the city in “Garbageman” unspecified, but the nearby town where Buddy works is called Gurnee — which in real-world Illinois is home to a Six Flags amusement park called Great America. Huff doesn’t mention that detail, but there’s mordancy in it; this is a play about the state of the nation.
The desire to make a broader statement may be why he doesn’t call Dan and Buddy’s hometown Chicago, but it’s a mistake to blur the geography. It leaves productions free not to bother being rooted in particularity, accents and all. The rhythms of Huff’s dialogue are the rhythms of Chicago. Take them away and three dimensions collapse into two, as they have in this production.
I could not tell, after seeing it, whether the play might work as written. So I read it in a Chicago accent — with Bill Murray, circa “Stripes,” playing Dan in my head, and John Candy (Canadian, true, but he did Chicago movies, and his accent passed easily for Upper Midwestern) as Buddy. Fantasy casting did the trick: Outrageous comedy suddenly coexisted with pathos. These two extreme screw-ups were still dangerous, even more so now because they had personal appeal.
Dan and Buddy are broken American Everymen, but they’re broken Chicago-style.
Garbageman
Through April 16 at the Chain Theater, Manhattan; chaintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
