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The Plastic Bag Store (Excerpt)

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00642

1537-9477

Robin Frohardt,

Crafts, Textile, and Design

The Plastic Bag Store began as a joke. One day, I was watching someone in a store triple-bag all of my groceries that were already in bags, inside of boxes, inside of bags. It occurred to me how over-the-top and ridiculous it is how much packaging we are using every day. I thought a grocery store that only sold packaging, a Plastic Bag Store, would be hilarious, but sadly not that far from reality. I would design satirical labels and sculpt fruits and meats from bags, caps, lids, and wrappers that I collected from the trash. I would open the store in Times Square hidden among other stores. People would encounter it by accident and without much explanation. That was the idea I had in 2012. It really was kind of a joke idea—a silly thing I would tell others for a laugh.At that time, I was working on my first full-length play called The Pigeoning, a bunraku-style puppet play about a man obsessed with office safety protocol who starts to believe the pigeons are plotting against him. Myself, a team of puppeteers, and our composer Freddi Price honed a visual style and a sense of humor that seemed uniquely ours. I was eager to create another show like this and thought there was maybe more to the Plastic Bag Store idea after all.I read somewhere that all the plastic ever made still exists. It made me think that perhaps the red plastic straw I used at a Pizza Hut in 1985 is still somewhere in the world right now. I imagined someone finding it in the far distant future wondering what it was and who I was. More interestingly, I thought they might get it all completely wrong. That seemed like great fodder for a puppet show. Like The Gods Must Be Crazy. But less racist. And so, I began to “write” the play. I put write in quotes here because I don’t really write. I hot glue, dream, and sketch. I think in images and not words. I had a vision of a guy in a frozen future unearthing a plastic bag of trash and made the puppet before I really knew who he was, before I knew who the bag he had found belonged to. I tend to work backwards like this. It turns out that the plastic bag belonged to a woman named HELEN who lives in the present day. She is a middle-aged woman and a custodian at a museum that houses amazing objects of antiquity. She cares for them deeply, admiring, in particular, the Greek vases. So I made the HELEN puppet and the vases. While painting the black figures on tiny puppet vases, I realized that they looked like shadow puppets, and besides the future and the present, my show was missing the past—maybe this was more of a Cloud Atlas than a The Gods Must Be Crazy kind of story.After several years of grant writing and workshopping, our immersive puppet show idea was fully conceived. The audience would enter The Plastic Bag Store like any other store and have time to explore the installation before the store magically transformed into a theatre around them. Shelves pull out into seating, a shadow puppet screen is revealed, a puppet stage unfolds. Act One, presented as shadow puppetry in the style of Back-Figure pottery, is a satirical tale of a young lad who invents single-use disposable vases and sells them as “Knowledge Water” bottles, which causes catastrophic environmental problems in his village. They soon realize the error of their ways and paint their story onto their vases as a warning to future generations.In Act Two, we meet HELEN, a bunraku-style puppet who works at the museum in the present where some of the vases from Act One are on display. However, their message has been completely misinterpreted and lost to time. HELEN takes great care of the objects while constantly cleaning up various plastic “Knowledge Water” bottles and other trash left in the museum on the subway on her way home. While watching a news program about the foreverness of plastic, it occurs to her that her plastic “Knowledge Water” bottle might last longer than a Greek vase and could be found by a future archaeologist. She scrawls a letter to the future and puts it in the bottle, tying it up in a plastic bag and dropping it in the trash, sending it into the future. Through a cardboard animation projected onto a stack of boxes, we watch HELEN’s bag journey through time from her trash can to the far-off flooded future.After the animation ends, the freezer doors of the store illuminate and open. The audience crawls inside onto an ice cave made of plastic bags where Act Three is performed. Here we meet KIRKTD, a lone fisherman who finds HELEN’s bag and misinterprets its contents as her message to the future is also lost to time. The performance ends when TYLER, a real human tour guide, leads the audience though a museum that has been hidden to them until now. On display is a range of single-use plastic trash of our day, preserved as artifacts and completely misinterpreted.That was how the show was supposed to work. I began working with the Times Square Arts Alliance and Pomegranate Arts to secure an incredible storefront in the heart of Times Square. We built the store, the sets, and the puppets, and we were ready to open on March 18, 2020. We did our dress rehearsal and the next day the city and the world shut down. We left The Plastic Bag Store (and HELEN and KIRKTD) sitting in Times Square in an empty city. Six months later, we returned with cameras and filmed the whole show. Mostly, I wanted to film the show as a record that we pulled off this crazy idea, but also to share online during Covid times. But I didn’t anticipate how beautiful the film would turn out. It captured the detail and the feelings I had been trying to communicate with the live show. We realized that under the Covid restrictions of the time, if we showed the films inside the store and did all the set changes and the freezer room and secret museum, we could technically, legally, open the show for small audiences. We did just that in November 2020, and it worked! It still had the magic of a live show with all the surprises of the hidden rooms, but now the project was light on its feet, only needing a cast of three, and could be done several times a day. And so that’s how the project lives now—as a unique immersive-theatre-film-puppet-show-hybrid-thing that I never would have thought of before but somehow is better than my original vision.What follows is the script as well as some stills from Act Three, “The Far-Off Future,” in which KIRKTD discovers HELEN’s bag.The audience is seated inside the Plastic Bag Store installation. They have just seen stories from the ancient past and the present day play out inside the store, followed by a cardboard animation that follows HELEN’s plastic bag journey through centuries of time. There is a drastic shift in music and lighting, and the frozen food section lights up. The doors open and reveal an “ice cave” made of plastic bags. The audience is ushered inside.The puppeteers enter stage right in all-white suits. There is the sound of cold wind; they are fighting the wind with a bunraku puppet named KIRKTD who is bundled up in a survival suit and covered in snow and ice. All we see of him is his mustache sticking out. He is wearing goggles and carrying a bucket and a fishing pole. He struggles against weather and old age as he crosses stage left and approaches a hole in the ice. He sets up a fishing rig. Dropping a line into the hole, he sits down on the bucket, pulls out a journal, and begins to write:KIRKTD: (Voiceover.) Signal Tender Log: Journal Entry 702. Performed routine maintenance on all signal beacons, as expected, still no contact from Planet B recon mission. (He is interrupted by the bell on the fishing rig. He stands, pulls up the line, takes off the lone sad jellyfish, and tucks it into his pocket. He resets the line, sits back down, picks up the notebook, and begins to write again.)KIRKTD: (Voiceover.) Where was I? Still no contact from Planet B recon mission, not that I expected any different. Nothing exciting ever happens at this outpost. Also, the jellyfish are quite small here, which is odd, being this close to the equator. Fortunately, I have plenty of cockroach rations to sustain me. (He taps the bucket he is sitting on, which we now see is a tin of rations evident by the cockroach stenciled on the side. A bell rings on fishing rig again, and he gets up and reels it in. This time it’s HELEN’s bag of trash from Act Two. He doesn’t know what it is and handles it with intense curiosity, removing his goggles. Several notes from Helen’s theme are heard on the wind. He looks around. We hear the wind howling and get a sense of how alone he is out there. Baffled by his discovery, he slowly packs up the bag and his gear and moves to leave, looking back at the fishing hole in confusion before exiting stage right.)The sound of a large door opening is heard offstage and the wind and snow blow into the room. The door slams shut and we can hear KIRKTD unzipping, unsnapping, and unvelcroing his elaborate snowsuit. He enters the room and places the bucket with the bag on the table. He stands by the fire warming his hands, gazing at the bag over his shoulder. Once he is warm, he sits at the table to begin investigating the bag with two sets of long tweezers. He handles it with great curiosity and care as if it were a delicate artifact from long ago, because it is. As he is dissecting, we hear the voiceover from his logbook.KIRKTD: (Voiceover.) I found the most curious object stuck on the end of my fishing line today. At first, I assumed it was an unfamiliar jellyfish species. But I think it might be human made. It’s like nothing I have ever seen before. I brought it back to camp to investigate further and I will do my best to describe it here: It’s made of a soft, supple, white, delicate, yet strong material. There is a long seam on one end and two loops at the other. I could feel something, or some “things,” inside. To my delight, I realized the loops terminated in a simple Yurgenson knot … which I was able to untie quite easily. Inside, I found four of the most baffling objects. (Pulls out a soda straw and lid.) Item one: A perfectly circular disk pierced in the center with an impossibly thin pipe. The disk is embossed with the words “co-ke,” “die-yet,” and “other.” Most fascinating! Perhaps some sort of compass? (Pulls out the toothbrush.) Item two: Long, slender, armless figure with whiskers protruding from the face. (Strokes his mustache.) I am drawn to him. (Pulls out six-pack rings.) Item three: A delicate pattern of circles made of a clear non-ice material. Quite beautiful. Perhaps some sort of decorative weaving. (Pulls out a plastic bottle.) And item four: A cylindrical tube terminating in a small disk. I could hear and see something rattling around inside. Seeing no logical way to open it, I made an incision. (He pulls out some kind of laser, lowers his goggles, and slices off the bottom of the bottle. He uses the tweezers to extract several scraps of paper.) I carefully extracted two rolled-up scrolls. Each one covered with faded script. None of which was legible … except on the very bottom … of the longer of the two. (He grabs a large magnifying glass from within the glass to read the writing.) I was able to make out the words: … MOST … VALUED … CUSTOMER. Unsure what this meant, I had to refer to my Meaning Manual, (Pulls out book.) which defines MOST VALUED CUSTOMER as “the most valued practitioner of the ancient customs” or “spiritual leader of the ancient customers.” I have a vague memory of reading something about the ancient customers in school. If memory serves me, they existed for a very brief period of time between the castle people and the robot wars. That would make these objects incredibly old … (Paces the room.) Is it possible that I have found a message to or from the MOST VALUED CUSTOMER? Was this her compass? Could there possibly be more beneath the ice? (He leans on the stove in contemplation—so deep in thought that he doesn’t realize until his glove begins to sizzle. He blows it out comically. Audience. Laughs. Hysterically.)This scene has the feel of a movie montage as we see a long period of time summarized in a couple of minutes with no dialogue and high-energy music. KIRKTD eagerly enters stage right, returning to the fishing hole where he had made his discovery. He is visibly excited and sets up his rod hoping to catch another artifact. He walks around the hole staring, waiting, rubbing his hands together, tapping his toes, checking his watch. We see him transition through several “waiting positions,” each one bringing him lower to the ground, from leaning to kneeling to sitting to lying down. He is eventually sprawled out on the ice, bored and doodling absently in the snow with his finger when the bell on his rod rings. He is shaken out of his stupor and pulls up the line excitedly. There is a flip-flop and a jellyfish on the line. He throws the jellyfish away and focuses on his exciting new catch. As soon as he drops the line back in, the bell rings again, and he pulls up some twisted plastic bag that just keeps coming. He is pulling and pulling, and more and more plastic trash is emerging from the hole. He is rich! Delightedly, he tries to gather up his haul in his arms. Struggling to get the rod as well, he hobbles off stage left, happy as a clam.We can see that time has passed as his house is now filled with artifacts. His desk is covered and old cockroach ration buckets are overflowing with bottles, lids, razors, and pens. As KIRKTD is surveying his bounty, we can hear his voiceover once again.KIRKTD: (Voiceover.) Who would have guessed that my humble outpost would become a hotbed of such exciting discoveries! Amongst the myriad of objects pulled from the fishing hole, I have found several more of these letter carriers. (Picks up plastic bottle from a pile of them.) All of them are empty, unfortunately. But I am also learning more about their ingenious design. (While examining it, the lid twists in his hands! He unscrews it realizing that’s how it opens. Duh!) I have been doing my best to carefully identify each unique object to the best of my abilities though there is not much written in my books about the customers. Apparently, they digitized everything, so most of their historical record was lost in the first great Blackout. They must have been highly skilled craftsmen. (Picks up a green Starbucks lid-hole-plug-thing.) Take for example this beautiful green talisman. So delicate and slender with a figure carved into the top. This must have been an incredibly significant and most treasured item to the ancient ones. Clearly, it served such a vital purpose in their lives. (He places it down on the table and picks up the Meaning Manual and begins to pace and read.) It is unclear whether the robot wars or the great melt caused the collapse of the customers. But several theoreticists speculate that it is possible that remains of their civilization exist below the ice: vast and sprawling temples that served as reliquaries, aisles and aisles of shelves stocked full of special offerings to the MOST VALUED CUSTOMER. It is now my greatest desire to see something like this with my own eyes. So I am making preparations for an expedition below the ice to see what I can find. (He strikes pose with his foot up on a stool, looking very much like the great explorers of the past.)We hear underwater sounds and the sound of someone breathing through a scuba mask. KIRKTD swims into view wearing a tank, mask, and flippers. He is swimming under the ice and random plastic trash is floating by. He is searching for something bigger. He pikes down and sinks and sinks to the bottom where he finds several grocery shelves from the past stocked with bottles and cans. He has found the source! THE TEMPLE OF THE MOST VALUED CUSTOMER! As he slow-motion-underwater jumps for joy, we hear his voice.KIRKTD: (Voiceover.) Dear most valued customer, finding your possessions has brought warmth to my cold little corner of the world. How lucky you were to live in such a time, for modern man is greedy and short sighted. I have collected a vast catalog of your artifacts, and when I return, triumphant from my quest in search of your temple, I will build a museum in your honor. Wish me luck and, as it is inscribed on your beautiful satchels … THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.