The Lindsay Joelle buddy comedy about two New York sanitation workers runs June 11-28 at the Ent Center.

Theatreworks caps its 50th anniversary season in Colorado Springs with The Garbologists, Lindsay Joelle’s two-hander about a pair of mismatched New York City sanitation workers. The production runs June 11-28 at the Dusty Loo Bon Vivant Theater inside the Ent Center for the Arts at UCCS.

Directed by GerRee Hinshaw, the 90-minute comedy follows two trash collectors thrown together on an early morning route: a career sanitation worker and an Ivy-educated newcomer with an MFA and a story she’s not ready to tell. What begins as friction between two people from very different worlds slowly turns into something closer to connection. The production calls for a garbage truck onstage, complete with a working trash compactor, in the company’s black-box-style Dusty Loo space.

Joelle’s play premiered in 2021 in a co-production between Philadelphia Theatre Company and Pittsburgh’s City Theatre and has since made the rounds of regional theatres around the country. For Colorado Springs audiences, though, it’s the kind of newer, not-yet-ubiquitous work that Theatreworks says it built its reputation on.

“Fifty seasons of Theatreworks has always been about finding the plays that surprise people,” said Artistic Director Max Shulman. “The Garbologists is exactly that kind of play. It’s funny. It’s modern. It’s a little irreverent. And underneath all of that, it’s about two people discovering each other across a divide.”

Hinshaw framed the appeal in terms of how quickly the two characters size each other up — and how wrong they turn out to be.

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“What I love about this play is that, in 90 minutes, we get to watch two people clock one another right away, make a clear determination about the kind of person the other is, and then realize there’s way more about the other than they expected,” she said. “It’s like a meet-cute and a buddy movie, all wrapped into one.”

The company is pitching the production as a showcase for emerging work rather than the established classics that often anchor a season, calling it one of the earliest major regional stagings of Joelle’s writing. Shulman said the choice of closer was deliberate for a milestone year, describing it as a play “that makes you laugh until it makes you feel.”

The run includes several free events tied to the production: a World of the Play talk at 6:15 p.m. Thursday, June 11; an opening night toast with the artists after the Friday, June 12 show; a Community Convo at 5 p.m. Saturday, June 13; and an actor talkback at 7 p.m. Sunday, June 21.

The play is recommended for ages 16 and older.