Posters for Life Waste: A Biogas Musical are arranged on a table on Sept. 25, 2024.
Rachel McDevitt / StateImpact Pennsylvania
‘Life Waste’ is a musical tour of the potential of biogas
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Rachel McDevitt
Rachel McDevitt / StateImpact Pennsylvania
Posters for Life Waste: A Biogas Musical are arranged on a table on Sept. 25, 2024.
Rachel McDevitt / StateImpact Pennsylvania
Director Rachel Anderson-Rabern speaks to the cast during a rehearsal for Life Waste: A Biogas Musical on Sept. 25, 2024.
A new musical from a central Pennsylvania theater group proves that inspiration for art can come from anywhere.
That includes cow manure.
Valley Traction plans to perform Life Waste: A Biogas Musical this weekend on the Dickinson College Farm in Boiling Springs.
The exploration of transforming waste to renewable energy is illustrated through songs titled “Behold the Cow,” “Making Gas,” “Dirt,” and “Recycling Song.”
The musical has come together over more than a year of collaboration between the writers, community members, friends, and performers.
Life Waste is not a traditional piece of theater, with characters or a plot; it’s more like a collage of song and spoken word.
The show was sparked by the farm where the performance will happen and the people behind Dickinson’s methane digester project.
Matt Steiman plays the role of “anonymous farmer” in the show. He’s also a real farmer and the director of energy projects for Dickinson’s farm.
Since 2008, he’s been tinkering with methane digesters under the guidance of his mentor, Robert Hamburg, more affectionately known as “Biogas Bob.” Hamburg was a teacher, researcher, and biogas evangelist since the 1970s.
“For me, food waste is not garbage. It’s an energy and a nutrient source,” Steiman said. “So, the more that we can get the word out about that and get people thinking in a creative way about the potential for energy from what they would throw in the trash, it’s really just great for everyone.”
The farm now has a digester big enough to create electricity to power the farm and about 30 homes in the area.
It does that by taking in manure from more than 100 dairy cows and two tons of food waste from the college and community each day. The waste breaks down and creates methane. The digester captures the gas so it can be burned for energy.
Methane is also found in natural gas, and it’s a powerful climate pollutant.
“We’ve had enough of climate change,” the players sing in the show, detailing how a switch to biogas can lower the impact of emissions and get fuel without drilling.
Upon connection to the electric grid, Dickinson’s will be the only college farm project in the northeast U.S. to be a net exporter of clean energy.
Since 2020, the farm has received more than $1.3 million in state and federal grants to develop the digester project. Steiman also credits Biogas Bob as a driving force.
“Our most recent owner-built digester is Bob’s design and he invested time and money to get it up and running,” Steiman said. “He often prodded us to keep advancing and in that regard we have him to thank for the state of things.”
Rachel McDevitt / StateImpact Pennsylvania
Matt Steiman sings during a rehearsal for Life Waste: A Biogas Musical on Sept. 25, 2024.
Valley Traction co-artistic director Kent Barrett said Biogas Bob was charming and enthusiastic about the energy system, and would talk about it in intense detail.
“We’re constantly referencing him, we hope, in a reverent way,” Barrett said.
Hamburg died in 2020, but his philosophies – about energy, the economy, and life – are woven throughout the musical.
Between songs, cast members read “Bob Commandments,” which were pulled from his writings on his website Dragon Husbandry.
For example: “Linear thinking is based on the illusion that there are or can be objectively determined beginnings and endings to any endeavor.”
Co-artistic director M.O. Geiger said they came up with the commandments by poring over the website and highlighting what they found most evocative.
“Oddly enough, they lined up with what had already been written,” she said. “So, there was a synchronicity happening between the way that we were thinking about the dialog and the songs and Bob’s writings.”
In one tribute, Steiman shares a poem titled “Compost” that was read at Hamburg’s memorial service earlier this summer, when his ashes were committed to the digester.
“To make a good compost, it helps if you’re a warrior of love. It helps if you understand and track the movements of planets spinning through constellations above,” Steiman read from the poem by Redwood Reider.
The performance has serious moments and energizing songs, but also occasionally leans into the fact that the farm’s biogas mainly comes from cow poop, offering some lighthearted moments that poke at the absurdity of the show.
“You might call me a little demented/But my energy, it’s all fermented,” the performers sing during “Making Gas.”
Barrett said they’re careful not to present biogas as the only answer to energy and pollution challenges.
“The real dream is that we change our perception about our relationship to the land and land use and nature and waste and food and consumption and all of it,” he said.
The show is being staged as a work-in-progress. Geiger said they plan to keep developing the script and possibly tour the production to other communities.
“If this does get performed in new places, we’d like to add elements of that place, people from that place, ideas from that place into the show itself, so that it feels nested wherever we are,” Geiger said.
What will remain is the fascination with a system that takes what we throw away and transforms it into something useful.
It might start with manure, but the writers say what it creates is beautiful.
The show will be staged at the Dickinson College Farm in Boiling Springs on Oct. 4-5 at 7 p.m.
Attendees can get a tour of the farm and the digester starting at 6 p.m.
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