‘Trashers’ Better Off in the Dump

Part of the job of theater companies is to produce plays. That may seem obvious, but it’s attached with a rider clause: Another part of the job is to know when not to produce a play. Merely putting on shows does a company no good and sometimes does harm.

Zeitgeist Theatre Company, ever active at the Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, is only harming itself with its latest play, writer-director Lisa Morton’s “Trashers.”

Ready-made for the theatrical compost heap, “Trashers” is so clearly awful from the start that it raises questions about who’s handling quality control at Zeitgeist.

This is a group that likes its plays irreverent and a little rough and hopefully funny (as with the recent “Out in the Woods”).

Morton’s three-act sci-fi work would seem to fit the profile, set in the semi-distant future when a corporate elite lives in high-security towers.

The majority exists in an anarchic urban wasteland ruled by young “trashers” bent on destroying what’s left of consumer culture.

The play tries to unite this bifurcated cyber-feudal setting through A.I., a character of artificial intelligence capable of feeling and thinking on her own, played by LT Fusaro.

Morton has the seed of an interesting idea here--that in the future, robots will be so commonplace that we will trade and exchange and dump them like so many Cuisinarts, perhaps forgetting that some can actually transcend their chip-component identities. But “Trashers” is so far from that promise, you forget the idea completely.

Nothing is believable for a moment, from the empty and contentious relationship of stockbroker Jack (Troy Harris) and his drug-addicted hacker girlfriend Jessie (Danette Mitchell) to the trashers themselves, who all look like actors trying way too hard to look like futuristic punks.

Morton, who writes mostly fiction and lacks a handle on how to write a scene for the stage, stuffs her dialogue with a combination of mile-a-minute techno-speak, aimless chatter and lame comic retorts, and she can’t find a way of making the act of downloading and erasing computer files any less boring than it sounds.

She has even less control of her actors, who look and sound clueless. Some, such as Mitchell, are more difficult to hear than a bad radio signal. In the crucial A.I. role, Fusaro can’t demonstrate the depth of humanity that’s presumably the story’s whole point.

“Trashers” is less a play, really, than a series of bad decisions, starting with Morton’s directing her own material and ending with one of the worst low-budget sets, care of Sidney Wickersham, in the history of low-budget L.A. science fiction theater. (Yes, there is a history.)

This is the kind of stuff theater companies experiment with in workshops behind closed doors. If it doesn’t work, they learn from the failure and move on to something else. You don’t actually go ahead and do it. If you do, you end up with trash.

BE THERE

“Trashers,” Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, 11006 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sunday and Nov. 21, 2 p.m. Ends Dec. 4. $12-$14. (818) 343-6967. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.