The New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) is the world’s largest municipal waste services organization, serving more than 8.5 million residents across five boroughs.

And in playwright Lindsay Joelle’s “The Garbologists,” we meet two of its sanitation workers: Danny, male, White, blue-collar, native New Yorker, nine-year veteran of DSNY; and Marlowe, female, Black, Ivy League grad, brand new DSNY crew member.

Theatreworks will mount the buddy comedy Thursday through June 28 at Ent Center for the Arts.

“It’s a seemingly simple story — two people make quick assumptions about one another and spend the rest of the play learning what they didn’t really know,” said director GerRee Hinshaw.

“The playwright has written a love letter to the hidden work that keeps a city running. It’s a great backdrop, and it’s a great opportunity to spend time with two people doing something a lot of us have lost the ability to do — find out about someone who at first feels like they’re not our people.”

Script snippet

Marlowe: “What’s Mongo?”

Danny: “​Mongo: Verb. To scavenge. Noun. Junk. Use it in a sentence: ‘Heck yeah, I’d mongo this mongo.'”

Marlowe: “Stealing: Verb. Taking something that’s not yours.”

Danny: “Where do you think we get half the stuff in the garage? The TV. The microwave. The foosball table…”

Finding the plot

The idea sparked in Joelle during a weekend getaway with friends, when she met a friend’s husband who was a sanitation worker.

“I noticed I had brought certain expectations into who I thought what kind of a person would be drawn to a career in sanitation,” Joelle said in an online video. “Whenever I’m working on a play, I love talking to the people who are part of that particular community. And I found the people I spoke to were really glad to have somebody asking them these questions because they all felt like when they put on the uniform, there was some sense of invisibility, that people tuned them out of their memory of day-to-day life. And what they do is actually very dangerous and very important, so they were really happy to share their experiences with me.”

Creating the show

To direct a play about sanitation workers, the cast and director must get a feel for the world of sanitation.

Hinshaw and actors Jada Dixon (Marlowe) and Josh Robinson (Danny) watched videos on how to throw big bags of trash into the trash hopper, as well as rules of the trash game like how to lift a bag safely, don’t lift more than one bag at a time, wear protective gloves, and never use a leg as leverage because there could be knives or other sharp objects in the bag.

“Very few people know the sanitation system, and all that it takes not to have us living our lives buried in our own garbage,” Hinshaw said.

The trash is real

Over the course of the 90-minute play, the two characters will toss more than 100 bags of trash into the hopper of the big truck cab they ride in.

In the real world, it wouldn’t take long before trash could accumulate to a debilitating level. DSNY collects 24 million pounds of trash, recycling and compost material every day. That’s a number equal to a year in Colorado Springs, Hinshaw says.

“If we’re not taking care of them and they decide that job is not worth doing, we’d be in a real sore place,” she said.

Fun facts about DSNY

– DSNY operates 59 district garages and manages a fleet of more than 2,000 rear-loading collection trucks, 450 mechanical brooms, 705 salt spreaders, and several dozen specialized machines to clean and plow bike lanes. – From DSNY

– DSNY is the third largest agency in NYC with about 10,000 workers, including almost 8,000 sanitation workers and supervisors. – From DSNY

– According to a 2021 DSNY demographics report, 205 of the sanitation workers were women.

– According to that same report, sanitation workers are predominantly White, followed by Hispanic and Black workers.

– From a 2018 New York Times article: “Nationwide, sanitation and recycling work remains more dangerous than policing or firefighting; in 2016, only loggers, fishermen, airplane pilots and roofers suffered a higher rate of job-related fatalities in the United States than did waste workers.”

If you go

What: “The Garbologists” by Theatreworks

When: Opens 7 p.m. Thursday, 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, 4 p.m. Sundays, through June 28

Where: Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 N. Nevada Ave.

Price: $20.75-$53; 719-255-8181, entcenterforthearts.org