Mass MoCA is an excellent venue for artists to engage in world building. Robin Frohardt’s “The Plastic Bag Store,” tucked away in the recesses of Building 1, is no exception. Resembling more of a bodega than a grocery store (or art gallery), this faux-mart doesn’t actually sell anything. Instead, visitors will find fruits and vegetables, baguettes, cupcakes, sausage links, deli meat, junk food, flowers, cereal, soda—even cigarettes and magazines—made from or containing plastic trash. The objects, which visitors are encouraged to touch, aren’t breathtakingly transformative. Instead, many dry goods house single-use plastic garbage inside sleek and seemingly new packaging.
I should clarify: Visitors are ticket holders. After 10 minutes of browsing the store’s inventory, a pleasant intercom voice announces the start of the performance and apron-wearing museum staff roll away shelves and Gaylord boxes, unfold the produce display, and transform the store into a theater.
What follows is a one-hour immersive and singular theatrical experience involving film, puppetry, and live performance. A film plays first. Act One introduces us to Thaddeaus, an ancient European who invents a “single-use disposable vase” that contains “Knowledge Water,” meant to be thrown away once consumed.
“What is ‘away’?” asks his mother. “Where’s that?”
“I dunno—somewhere outside of town,” Thaddeaus replies.
Set in modern times, Act Two follows a character named Helen, a janitor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she collects various pieces of plastic detritus she encounters throughout the day—a water bottle, a cup lid with straw, and a six-pack ring. Once home, and after learning from a television program that plastics live forever, she pens a tender and, at times, wry letter to “Far-Off Future Person.” The letter becomes a message in a bottle, found by said
Far-Off Future Person in Act Three.
Frohardt’s storytelling, puppet design, and intricate sets—coupled with moving puppetry performances, a mesmerizing score by Freddi Price, and skillful photography and sound design by Robert Kolodny and Chad Raines—elevate the film from dramatized advocacy to a poetic fable.
The show is also chock full of brand symbolism, tongue-in-cheek references to consumer culture, and other jabs at American capitalism. “I’m more interested in calling out the corporations that are creating the problem,” says Frohardt. “I don’t want to shame people…but we definitely can’t recycle our way out of this.”
The exhibition’s activity guide spells out the problem in no uncertain terms: “Imagining a world without plastics is nearly impossible [but] plastic doesn’t decompose; it only breaks down into microplastics which have been found in the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe, the soil below us, and even inside of our bodies.” The guide offers information, poses questions, makes suggestions, and presents challenges, such as inventorying a week’s waste, avoiding plastic-wrapped consumables, and finding alternatives to single-use plastic products.
Start with a small change to begin with, it says, and then challenge yourself more over time.
But we have been at this for a long time, haven’t we? We watched An Inconvenient Truth, former Vice President Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning 2006 climate change documentary. The 2015 video of a plastic straw being removed from the nostril of a sea turtle has been viewed over 86 million times on YouTube. We bring our fabric bags to the supermarket, purchase reusable coffee filters for our Keurig machines, religiously refill our BPA-free Nalgene water bottles and stainless-steel Stanley tumblers, and buy expensive bamboo cutlery for our Fourth of July picnics.
What else can we do? Frohardt doesn’t have any answers. But her message lingers, but not because of the punny products or the bag-themed playlist. The film in particular is a gentle, touching, sincere reminder of what is happening to the Earth, and asks us to, at the very least, acknowledge it.
“I wish I could do more,” writes Helen. “But I am but a humble custodian.”
“The Plastic Bag Store” is presented in association with Williamstown Theatre Festival and is on view through September 2. Reservations required.
