The people throwing the trash at construction workers in Stokley Towless new docu-play are CANADIANS. Can you imagine what we Americans are throwing at our own construction workers?
The people throwing the trash at construction workers in Stokley Towles's new "docu-play" are Canadians. I can't believe it. Steve Davis

Cigarette butts. Full cans of soup. Chairs. And, in one instance, a lamp. These are the kinds of things people are throwing at construction workers while they're busy trying to fix the water pipes of Calgary, Alberta, according to Stokley Towles in his latest documentary-style play, Surfing Underground.

Towles is a Seattle storyteller known for digging into the way municipal systems work. In Behind the Wheel: Life on the Metro Bus, which he performed in 2016 on an actual bus, he conducted several interviews with bus drivers and told their stories from their point of view. The idea was to expose, elevate, and draw wisdom from the lives of workers who people largely ignore as they go about their day.

Towles is more or less doing the same thing with Surfing Underground, but this time he's offering a look at the lives of Canadian construction workers who spend long hours dodging random trash while trying to fix pipes underground. (And this time he's not on a bus. He's producing the show in the little brick theater inside 18th & Union.)

Towles spent months conducting interviews with dozens of construction workers for his play, which ultimately takes the form of a TedTalk mixed with an episode of the Moth Podcast mixed with a puppet show. As he tells a heartwarming story of a particularly tough job on a particularly tough day—fixing multiple leaks in a water pipe on Christmas Eve—he lays out facts that you didn't know you always wanted to know about digging holes in the ground. It's probably not for everybody, but I very much enjoyed geeking out on illustrations of hole structures and maps of web-like water pipe networks.

He also weaves in vignettes about the dangers of working underground, which can be especially challenging in freezing cold Canadian winters. One worker said his hands once froze to a ladder while he was trying to climb out of a hole. He had to continue holding onto the ladder until his fingers warmed up enough, or else he risked ripping off the flesh from his hands. Several years ago, a hole collapsed on another worker, completely covering him in dirt. The foreman had to dig the guy out with a shovel before the pressure of the dirt and mud collapsed the worker's lungs.

And then, of course, there are the interactions with the public. Apparently, people are assholes to construction workers. Workers claim people are constantly asking them when they'll be finished working. They also occasionally run over them with their cars. And when working on a site below apartment buildings, the workers told Towles that people would occasionally throw stuff at them. And these were CANADIAN people throwing this stuff. Can you imagine what we Americans are throwing at our own construction workers?

As he did in Behind the Wheel, Towles deploys little koans he mined from his interviews with the construction workers, revealing philosophical depths the culture doesn't always associate with laborers. One of the construction workers, for instance, told Towles about his mental strategy for dealing with the cold. "You gotta relax and let the blood flow" when dealing with extreme weather, he said. If you tense up, you'll freeze. Sounded like good advice in general.

Like anyone who glorifies the lives of the volk (c.f. Romantic poets, W.B. Yeats, Studs Terkel), Towles comes close, at times, to overlooking some issues on his quest to humanize/valorize the workers. He touches on some messed up gender dynamics at play in the industry, but he doesn't really investigate them. His tone of wonder and genuine curiosity can almost veer into condescension. Something like, can you believe these construction workers are actually smart people with full lives??

But these problems plague all journalistic endeavors, and on the whole Towles is totally respectful of his subjects, allowing their stories and their voices to drive his presentation. They were his first audience, after all, and if they thought he flattened or mischaracterized their lives in any way, I bet they wouldn't have hesitated to let him know.

Anyhow, the play continues its run through April 19 and 20 (that's today and tomorrow!), and the 45-minute show is certainly worth your time.