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Basura!

nytheatre.com review by Matthew Trumbull
August 15, 2005

“Basura” is the Spanish word for trash, and as I write this I am surrounded by mucho basura. I have recently moved, and home life for me is currently a chaotic universe of boxes and clumps of duct tape sharing space on every open surface. So as I sat down to see Basura!, a silent FringeNYC showcase of puppets formed from garbage, and took in the rubbish-strewn stage, I felt glumly right at home. But director Colette Searls and her skillful puppeteers Erica Lauren McLaughlin, Katie Sasso, and Jessie Touart invest their creations with playfulness and inner desires, and immediately I felt a remarkable bond with ordinarily revolting matter, such as packaging tape, once it was molded into a man who cripples himself in a hell-bent effort to embrace his tape-lover.Basura! places us in a world that is quite literally a mess, being explored by three non-speaking puppeteers dressed entirely in black except for blue ribbons around their bowler hats. At first they seem tentative about the trash that is cohabiting this world with them, but loneliness and boredom drive the puppeteers to create friends from whatever flotsam is at hand. The puppets they bring to life grow increasingly complex as the show moves along, some requiring all three puppeteers to operate. They do an excellent job of giving lifelike movements to what might seem uninspiring material—curtain cloth is transformed into a bag lady pushing a shopping cart, scrutinizing garbage on the floor, picking only the best to put in the cart. Even more oddly touching is the previously-mentioned packaging tape man stuck to a box, struggling mightily to free himself and be with his packaging tape woman, stuck on another box a distance away. When he finally resorted to amputating his one stuck leg, there was an audible gasp from the audience. Though the packaging tape man is little more than a foot high, the puppeteers seem to be invisible behind him and his fellow puppets as they expertly keep focus on their fascinating creations.Once we perceive even the simplest narrative, our human attention will rivet onto anything struggling to achieve a goal, and often the simpler the creature involved, the more profound this struggle becomes. If we watched an actor in a play see a woman across a stage, fall in love with her, risk a dangerous journey to be with her, lose his leg, continue on, finally reach her and live happily ever after, never once uttering a word, we might find it quite hokey. We would imprint that story with our own prejudices about human nature, and judge its authenticity based thereupon. But in Basura!, we watch tape puppets embark on the exact same story, and we tear up, because we have simply let the silent and beautiful journey unfold and affect us, without reading anything into it. In this complex and distracting age, we still love a parable with simple archetypes, and seeing Basura! now has me investing my surrounding rubbish with a magical inner life that makes me hate it a little less. How could I hate these darling wads of duct tape as I pick them up and turn them into sailors, piloting my laptop across the rough seas of my desk?