E-Mail This Article to a Friend The waste land Garbage Boy is a trip worth taking BY LIZA WEISSTUCH
	Garbage Boy Written and performed by Christopher Millis. Directed and designed by Ashley Lieberman. Lighting by Shane McDonough. Sound by Conor Fitzgerald and Pat Cable. At the Gallery at 38 Cameron, 38 Cameron Street, North Cambridge, though August 14.

Christopher Millis has a steely gaze, arms as thick as fire logs, and a father who was a garbage man. How Millis is like his father and how he’s not are details he muses over in Garbage Boy, a one-man autobiographical monologue that at once evokes Eric Bogosian’s driving velocity and David Sedaris’s humor. As Millis connects the thematic dots of his life to fashion a sepia portrait of his father, that image supplies him with keener insight into his own motivations and neuroses.

This ancestral investigation arises mainly from a single question that’s nagged the performer since in his youth he read stories about pioneer families traversing the Great Prairies: "Why is it that — once upon a time — you could be destitute and dignified, but not now?" The simple answer is that Laura Ingalls’s novels weren’t set in 20th-century Connecticut, where Millis’s father collected trash until he quit to buy a gas station, a business that suffered a long, slow demise.

Millis, a poet, playwright, and art critic (and a regular Phoenix contributor), positions himself within the long literary tradition of outsiders that stretches from Virginia Woolf’s protagonists to Holden Caulfield and all those whose sideline status affords them the clear eye of the observer. Millis may have seven brothers and sisters, but he never fit in with them. Moreover, his family didn’t really fit in — or come from — anywhere. On the rare occasion when they did shuttle up to the greener pastures of Saratoga Springs, Millis voyeuristically stole a peek into "the far away world where I came from but never belonged." In his analytical hindsight, this gave rise to a pursuit of "what matters." In other words, a hunt for a confirmation of existence, a hunt that propels him toward the written word.

The narrative begins in a smart-aleck tone as Millis explains that his push to marginal realms was triggered by his childhood impulse to learn, to make progress — not something his family valued. His parents aimed to avoid the blind ambitiousness fueled by money, so to them, he was "a cruel slap in the face." As he relates a chronology of seemingly random events, there’s a gratifyingly suspenseful tug of something awful lurking just ahead.

The anecdotes about his siblings’ injuries and his accounts of his parents’ courting are related in a concentrated manner infused with nostalgia, but then, like the flick of a light switch, Millis snaps from strenuous brooding into an Andy Kaufman–like maniacal mode. His experience at a Saratoga Springs artists’ colony tumbles out with a satirical bite and deadpan sarcasm. There’s also a third gear of controlled despair that he reserves for the pivotal tragic event of the story.

What remains constant throughout the piece is the performer’s fanatical enthusiasm for whatever situation he communicates, regardless of how humdrum. At times, you might wish he would modulate his intensity. For the most part, though, you can appreciate his tone for the way it blends childlike wonder with jaded cynicism. He inventories the mannerisms of estranged family members with the same fascination with which he catalogues the belongings he unloads upon arriving at the artists’ colony. But such focus is the tendency of a poet, and it’s easy to assume that actual circumstance interests Millis less than finding elegiac prose with which to give dimension to the prosaic. Metal beads of mercury are "smooth, speedy amoebas"; dinner at the colony is like "an Edith Wharton novel set in a thrift store."

Unless a show is about a tap dancer or a magician, it’s rare for a one-person performance to be very action-oriented. The challenge, then, is for the actor to avoid the static delivery that would result in either classroom-like speechifying or brute tedium. Millis is a concentrated but not particularly lively performer (though the dynamic furrows in his forehead can animate his entire expression). He overcomes this hurdle in two ways. First, he fluidly navigates the loaded but not distracting set of rubber tires, metal trashcans, and seemingly random assortment of junk and vintage detritus designed by Ashley Lieberman, who also directs. Second, he handles language in a manner well suited to retrospective storytelling. The crystalline prose he employs to relate an action sequence is the auditory equivalent of a series of photographic snapshots.

Millis tells us, "I think about trash a lot." But as the saying goes, one person’s trash is another’s treasure.