The Tank Unveils Programming for Eco-Forward Festivals TRASHFEST and DARKFEST

The Tank has revealed programming for their eco-forward festivals, TrashFest and DarkFest, from Monday July 21 – Sunday July 27, 2025. Both festivals will take place at The Tank.
 
For 12 years, The Tank has hosted DarkFest - a week of shows that do not use conventional theatrical lighting in an effort to reexamine how we can make theater more sustainable. With the pandemic forcing their physical theater to close, they challenged that idea further with the first annual TrashFest in 2020. It is often difficult to wrestle with the environmental impact our daily lives and our work can have - especially in theater, where so many resources are needed to develop sets, props, and costumes that are only used for a short amount of time. TrashFest centers work that not only produces no waste, but reuses materials discarded as garbage while DarkFest celebrates innovative performance that utilizes self-sufficient and alternative energy sources.
 

SYLVIA, BEGINNING TO END AND ONWARD

DarkFest
Created by Jake Banasiewicz, Emilia Harrison Daniel, Val Ramirez, Adriana Sorrentini, & Ethan Williams
Monday July 21 at 7pm
 
Returning to The Tank for DarkFest after its premiere at IHRAF in 2024, sylvia, beginning to end and onward is bigger and better (read: longer) than before. Told through movement, projection, and the musical stylings of Val Ramirez, Sylvia tells the tale of a dinosaur turned bird turned ??? surviving in spite of it all.
 

AGORAPHOBIC/CLAUSTROPHOBIC

TrashFest / DarkFest

By Olivia Ray
Directed by Dilara Naska
Monday July 21 at 9:30pm
 
Agoraphobic/Claustrophobic is a femme/non-men retelling of the myth of Icarus that explores the most basic and important relationships in our lives: familial, romantic/sexual, and personal. Told through heightened dialogue, Icarus feels both suffocated by the vast (agoraphobic) and the small (claustrophobic) as they question: who am I and how did I become this?
 

THE END OF THE WORLD RADIO HOUR

TrashFest / DarkFest

By Thea Flanzer
Directed by Doug Gallo
Tuesday July 22 at 9:30pm
 
The first installment in Thea Belle Flanzer's Greek Myths for Our Troubled Times play cycle, The End of The World Radio Hour is about two theater geeks and a mad scientist bunkering down in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese for the apocalypse. This is a show ABOUT artists FOR artists navigating our troubled times, playing with the Greek myths of Prometheus and Icarus.
 

WAILSONG

TrashFest

By Julia Smith
Directed by Molly Greenwald
Wednesday July 23 at 7pm
 
The crew of a whaling ship hurtling through a polluted ocean finds themselves hunted by something they don’t fully understand. As the days wear on, the crew’s tenuous loyalties (and sanities) dissolve while the beast grows steadily hungrier. Wailsong is a surreal short eco-horror play, a comedic mini-musical, and a faint cry in an unfathomably large ocean.
 

IN THE DARK TIMES

TrashFest / DarkFest

By Michael Fracentese & Kayla Schwab
Wednesday July 23 at 7pm
 
In his “Motto,” written while in exile from Nazi Germany, Bertolt Brecht memorably asks “In the dark times, will there also be singing?” Part poetry reading / part immersive theater, In The Dark Times invites performers and audiences alike to a post-apocalyptic gathering to investigate and inhabit this question. Together, we’ll transform the space into an intimate setting to tell stories, preserve memories, and establish a collective oral history to carry through the dark times now and the dark times to come.
 

CHUCK AND TRONK IN: OPEN TO WORK

TrashFest

By Mark Melton
Directed by Spencer Giles
Wednesday July 23 at 9:30pm
 
Join two puppet roommates in a sitcom-style romp through the New York job market! Featuring whacky characters both human and puppet and taking inspiration from shows like Seinfeld, Mulaney, New Girl, The Simpsons, and many more classic television shows, you're sure to laugh- and maybe even care!- in this joke-packed half-hour comedy!
 

18 WEST 11TH STREET

DarkFest

By Cory Diaz
Directed by Adrian Costa
Thursday July 24 at 7pm
 
18 West 11th Street is a straight play about the real-life members of the anti-racist, anti-Vietnam war student activism group, The Weathermen (later renamed The Weather Underground.) Formed in the 60s, they were a militant organization consisting exclusively of rich white college students who felt powerless in the midst of all the violence in the world. Five of them hunkered down in an apartment in Greenwich Village and decided to build a bomb to plant at Fort Dix, a military base, in an act of protest against the world. However, since they were all academics who didn’t know what they were doing, the bomb accidentally detonated in the apartment, killing three of them. 18 West 11th Street takes us through the days leading up to the accidental detonation as these five twenty-somethings cluelessly build bombs.

TrashFest

THE GARBAGE PATCH DOLLS
Written and Co-Directed by Julie Gester
Co-directed by Grace Walker
Thursday July 24 at 9:30pm
 
A family of four escapes environmental disaster by shipping out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where they learn to survive off of humanity’s most abundant creation: trash. For seven years they've remained here, picking through food waste, reading water damaged books, and making art out of plastic bags. Life is actually just fine out on the garbage patch... Or is it? Are we actually happy… or are we just telling ourselves the things we need to hear to get through the day? At times funny, at other times dark, The Garbage Patch Dolls is about a family surviving off of ingenuity, delusions, and waste until ultimately they are forced to face what is real and what is plastic.

TWIG!

TrashFest

By Sage Molaskey
Directed by Arseniy Fariatiev
Friday July 25 at 7pm
 
TWIG! is a story about a twig. Well, not really a twig, but like a branch. A branch from a tree from my kingdom. From my father, to you. TWIG! is a story about duty - not friendship, but love. TWIG! is a story about boyfriends, betrothals, and telephone wires. TWIG! is a story about being the best at sucking off the people we love - or, actually, wait… Do we really love them? How can we ever know? 
 

FIREFLIES TAUGHT US PYROMANIA

DarkFest

By Josh Piper
Directed by Mary Morgan Collier
Friday July 25 at 9:30pm
 
Two siblings sit next to a fire pit outside of their childhood home. They’ve spent their whole life here as they try to figure out whether or not a house can hold anger or if God loves them through the fireflies in their backyard. Tobias and Emma, Toby and Em to each other, try to keep themselves warm and keep the fire going.
 

CARDBOARD: A MUSICAL FABLE

TrashFest

By Matthew Wray-Martinez & Jessica Kelly
Directed by Ethan Fox
Saturday July 26 at 3pm
 
Cardboard tells the story of Ama, a sentient box who was recently emptied into a recycling bin that hasn’t been picked up in years. The leaders of the bin promise Ama they'll all be recycled soon, so she mustn't leave because the outside world could “soil” her, preventing her rebirth by recycling. After failing to play along, Ama decides to escape with her moving box friend Oz, accidentally inciting a revolution in the process. Will Ama and Oz escape, or will their treason land them in the dreaded bottom bin?
 

A THOUSAND RAINY MORNINGS

DarkFest

By Matthew Schott
Directed by Laura Brown
Saturday July 26 at 7pm
 
Donald Wiltsong is going blind, and no doctor can help him. To make matters worse, his wife and daughter are about to make a horrible discovery which will shake their family to the core. With all hope lost, Donald is ready to do whatever it takes to save his family...even if it costs him his own life. Every family has a skeleton in their closet.... this family has an entire graveyard. This is a normal staged reading. Everything is fine.

BLACKOUT

DarkFest

By Zoe Fernanda Wilson
Directed by Christine Cirker
Saturday July 26 at 9:30pm
 
A power outage threatens the mundane lives of four employees in the neighborhood D'Agostino. Anxieties rise and already strained relationships are tested. Will they rally together, minimize food spoilage, insure customer safety and become the true definition of community resilience? Or will darkness shed light on something far more sinister?
 

WATCH PARTY

TrashFest

By Elena Messinger, Ibby O'Carroll & Kate O'Carroll
Directed by Elena Messinger
Sunday July 27 at 3pm
 
In this darkly comedic farce set on Hollywood’s Biggest Night in 2018, irreverent and deranged hosts Talia and Erin will stop at nothing to execute the perfect Oscars watch party.
 

BRETT, AGE 26

DarkFest

By Hannah Z. Morley & Gina Pletschet
Directed by M.L. Redstone
Sunday July 27 at 7pm
 
POV you're about to watch “Mad About It”— Damn, this pre-show announcement is loooooong. This stage manager sure has a lot of opinions. Is that a guitar? Wait, what’s going on?
 

THE MUSHROOM GOD OF LEAFCUTTER ANTS

TrashFest / DarkFest