Review: Trash Planet by Bottle Alley Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs

Bottle Alley Theatre Company has been doing "DIY Punk Theatre" since I first encountered them twelve years ago, thanks to an invite from founder Chris Fontanes. He and like-minded young theatre artists have remained true to that slogan ever since, scheming and dreaming tales that often deal with the dark, the dreaded, and the fantastic.

 

Early on, they grubbed up free spaces, often outdoors, but as Fontanes' determination was recognized by the Austin arts world, they were able to perform under roofs more and more often. Trash Planet by Marian Kansas, directed by the playwright, is tucked away in the Rude Mechs' Crashbox, a high-roofed cement-block cube at the far end (#12) of a row of blind blockhouse-like structures off Bolm Street, east of Airport Road. 

 

Even here, Bottle Alley puts a spin on the venue. Cody Arn's set, a dense tangle of trash and discards, occupies the solid risers upon which one assumes audience members would ordinarily be perched. Folding chairs, perhaps forty of them, are set in two rows along three walls at the other, open end of the space, creating a thrust performance space in the middle of the flat area.

 

Why, one speculates, does this company brood on the dark and dreary? (Note the poster credit to Satan!) One clue is offered by the ages of almost all actors and audience, virtually all of them millenials or only slightly younger. There's plenty of angst in their everyday, whether from cable news, social media, protests, climate change, or (God help us all) politics. Bottle Alley captures those preoccupations, encapsulates them in metaphor, and serves them up in stories with or without a sweetening at the ends of the stories. The house was full on last Friday's opening night.

 

The company deserves to have full houses for the rest of its two-weekend run. Playwright Kansas sets a situation reminiscent both of the shipwrecked-on-a-desert-island trope and of the trash compactor scenes in the first Star Wars film (1977). The ragtag band we discover is composed of humans flushed away down a galactic wormhole by Earth authorities. Pitifully few of the condemned have survived: initally only six appear amid the detritus. The unnamed refuse planet is littered both with litter and with junk, and the survivors must seek and hoard water and scrounge ceaselessly for food. A large curtained circle positioned at the top of the heat marks the wormhole.

 

Within this morbidly static scene of desolation, Kansas creates a series of vignettes to illustrate the characters' hardships, provide backstories from their earthly existences, and convey their despairing deterination to try to take that wormhole back to the apparently fascistic hell that Earth has become. Their offenses are various, ranging from criminal activity to drug use to same-sex affection. Administration of penalties appears arbitrary and corrupt. The playwright gives characters full and credible backstories  related in vivid language. Dialogue, argument, conflict, and sentiment bring all of them to life. Gavin Kenter's lighting changes deftly mark shifts between vignettes and the emotional tone of presented action

 

 

Ma, the veteran portrayed by Meredith O'Brien, is sharp and practiced in self-defense; it's hinted that she was probably a brothel keeper in her former life, but in this wasteland she took in Teeny (baby-faced Madi Luebbers) who tumbled out of transport while still an infant fifteen years earlier.

 

Cam, the frustrated scientist and tinkerer (Brennan Patrick), continues trying to engineer reverse access to the wormhole, but each object thrown through that menacing electronic circle is regurgitated, emerging burned and wrecked by the connection.

 

 

 

 

Any story benefits from a perceptive, imaginative jester figure, and N.R. Oglesby's "Critter" is just that. Critter spins stories out of the literal nothing that surrounds these people and moves with energetic stride. Oglesby's eyes peer with hawk-like attention and an intensity that captivates.

 

Others are Julia and Jasmine (note to authors: audiences are easily confused if two characters' names begin with the same letter). Jasmine (Madison Laird), the stubborn optmist, insists on trying to teach a reluctant Teeny to read; Julia (Katy Matz) becomes a guide to new arrival Maribel (Joanna Gunaraj) when she turns up in the latest trash.

 

Inevitably, this story of survival and desired return is going to impel the characters toward the unknown beyond the electronic circle that gapes high above them. Playwright Kansas makes no effort to attach symbolic significance, but it's easy to understand that wormhole as the unknown future that confronts us all. Scientist Cam will make a flickering connection that offers hope of return. Though he stresses that the portal will be open for only thirty seconds at a time, Kansas provides much longer than that for farewells.

 

One question unresolved until the closing moments is who will depart and who will stay; another, unresolvable, is what happens when each of them—and each of us—steps through the veil of the present moment into the unknowable future.

 

EXTRA - Performance Scenes

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Trash Planet
by Marian Kansas
Bottle Alley Theatre Company

Performances will be Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings August 16 - 18 and 23 - 25, 2024 in the evenings.

Performances will take place at CRASHBOX, 5305 Bolm Road Unit 12, Austin, TX 78721. NO LATE ARRIVALS. There are NO REFUNDS for ticket purchases but we will try to honor exchanges.

Drinks and concessions will be available for purchase. There is a parking lot and street parking available.

 

[graphic: S.J. Ande]