Stokely Towles looks into the abyss.

Stokely Towles looks into the abyss. MCKENZIE TAPLIN

Of all the solo performers in the world, Stokley Towles might be the most civic-minded. That doesn’t sound like firecracker praise, but while his colleagues use the tragedies of others as raw material—Spalding Gray on Cambodia’s grotesque wartime history, Mike Daisey railing about Scientology and iPhone factories in China—Towles manages the unusual feat of finding the transcendent within superficially boring stuff.

For the past 15 years, his shows have focused on public infrastructure—waterlines, libraries, garbage, police work, a 10,000-year history of a single city block in Burien—to unearth what actually, materially connects us. By combining light anecdotes with slides and props, his work is the grown-up, performance-art equivalent of a Richard Scarry book…

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....