By David Greenham

It is entertaining, but Lindsay Joelle’s script supplies only a tiny, sometimes contrived glimpse at a profession that deserves to be treated with more nuance and understanding.

The Garbologists by Lindsay Joelle. Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw. Scenic design by Kristin Loeffler. Costume design by Jen Greeke. Lighting design by Anshuman Bhatia. Sound design by Julian Crocamo. Produced by Gloucester Stage at the Natti-Willsky Performance Center. Gloucester, though July 26.

A scene in The Garbologists with Thomika Marie Bridwell and Paul Melendy. Photo; Shawn G. Henry

If you’ve been involved in the theater for a long time, you’ve noticed that plays you wouldn’t have expected to become relevant do so over time. Such is the case with Gloucester Stage’s The Garbologists, which opened during the early days of the ongoing strike of sanitation workers against Republic Services. Lindsay Joelle’s 2021 buddy comedy revolves around a relationship between two New York City sanitation workers: nine-year veteran Danny (Paul Melendy), and Ivy League graduate Marlow (Thomika Marie Bridwell), who is on her first day on the job.

Through a series of vignettes (and trash collection tips), we are given a glimpse into the lives of all-too-invisible workers who are essential to keeping our communities running smoothly. These are members of the working class most of us take for granted.

Paul Melendy (Danny) has been making a career of creating nuanced and quirky characters on area stages; here, he plays a mansplaining teacher who has a passion for trying to “read” into the trash bags, to speculate about what they reveal about the people who put them out into the street.

He’s charged with teaching newbie Marlow (Bridwell) how to stay safe on the route and follow the rules of the profession. In addition to the usual “lift with your legs” advice, he offers some surprising guidance, such as making sure not to let the bags touch your body because they might contain sharp objects that could cut or stab you. There is also the necessity to step away from the truck when it’s crushing bags of garbage, so you can avoid being sprayed with flying fluids of unknown nature.

All of this is informative, but it’s the interaction and developing friendship between the sanitation odd couple that makes The Garbologists tick.

Danny’s steamroller of a monologue, filled with snappy comments, never lets up. Whether he’s teaching Marlow the standards of the job or waxing poetic about the types of trash they’re going to encounter, he slowly wins her trust. “Do people ever tell you that they want to strangle you?” she asks. “All the time,” he responds without hesitation. “I’m an acquired taste,” he quips, “like blue cheese.” Danny’s emotional depth is revealed when he shares his fear over a custody battle with his ex-wife Tiffany. He adores his seven-year-old son, Max, and wants to make sure he spends as much time as possible with him, despite Danny’s need to earn money through long hours, including lots of overtime.

But there are surprises, too. Marlow is shocked when Danny tells her, “Time is how we spend our love”; she knows that it’s a quotation from novelist Zadie Smith. (In fact, the line is from a poem by Smith’s husband, Nick Laird. It can be found in her 2005 Boston-based novel, On Beauty.) Perhaps the most powerful lesson that Danny shares is when he focuses on our society’s demeaning classism, a dehumanization that is rarely acknowledged: “Just because we pick up trash, that doesn’t make us garbage.”

With a run time of about 90 minutes without an intermission, The Garbologists is a nifty two-hander that, understandably, has been making the rounds of regional theaters. Its treatment of its characters and issues is conventional: the script is funny, sometimes a little silly, tossing in a risqué moment. Psychological layers are peeled as we discover more about Danny’s and Marlow’s circumstances. On the one hand, heartbreak and honest-to-goodness tragedy are uncovered. But when it comes to the harm done by the class system — the flagrant economic injustices routinely perpetrated on those whom society “throws away” — the script balks, fearful of confronting thorny political issues.

The loquacious Danny dominates, so the ever-reliable Melendy carries the evening’s dramatic load. Bridwell’s Marlow has the most emotional weight to bear, supplying a complicated backstory that doesn’t really quite add up. Nevertheless, Bridwell has the skill to be both funny and stoic.

Set Designer Kristin Loeffler has created a functional set made up of two ends of a truck that are wheeled in by costumed technicians. Director Rebecca Bradshaw paces the proceedings well, providing some smooth transitions.

Jen Greeke’s costumes and Anshuman Bhatia’s lighting are effective. As for Julian Crocamo’s sound design, it can be jarring at times. It is more effective in reflecting the chaos of trash collection than in platforming the intimate exchanges that nurture the improbable friendship between Marlow and Danny.

Although there’s no credit given, kudos to the folks who gathered and piled up the various elements in the dozens of trash piles that line the stage. They are convincing, but thankfully, unlike the real trash bags we encounter on the streets, these bags don’t stink, leak, or show signs of hungry pigeon and/or raccoon attacks.

Entertaining as Joelle’s script is, it supplies a tiny, sometimes contrived glimpse at a profession that deserves to be treated with more nuance and understanding. And now, more than ever, it needs to be seen in a much larger political context. Given the myopia of the mainstream news media, blue-collar workers have rarely been less appreciated or fairly acknowledged. Those on the lowest tier of our class system — the people who pick our fruits and vegetables, prepare our meat and dairy products, package nearly every product, and make our trash disappear to places unknown — are under attack: disrespected and ignored, in some cases vanished by ICE.

But we, and our theater, should take a good look at the thousands of tons of trash we collectively produce each day. The Republic Services strike is giving Boston area residents a firsthand glimpse at our mountains of waste. (Perhaps an enterprising dramatist could write a script about the labor action?) Alarmed community boards and councils across New England are declaring the strike a “public crisis.” But no one has suggested that we, consuming-crazed Americans, reduce the amount of garbage we generate — just as towns are instituting water bans to encourage the use of less water. Maybe our trash — and what we do with it — is a prophecy of our future. We might want to pay closer attention to the mess we’ve been making.

David Greenham is an arts and culture consultant, adjunct lecturer on Drama at the University of Maine at Augusta, and is the former executive director of the Maine Arts Commission. He can be found at https://davidgreenham.com/