Towles is a Seattle storyteller known for digging into the way municipal systems work. In Behind the Wheel: Life on the Metro Bus, which he performed in 2016 on an actual bus, he conducted several interviews with bus drivers and told their stories from their point of view. The idea was to expose, elevate, and draw wisdom from the lives of workers who people largely ignore as they go about their day. Towles is more or less doing the same thing with Surfing Underground, but this time he's offering a look at the lives of Canadian construction workers who spend long hours dodging random trash while trying to fix pipes underground. (And this time he's not on a bus.) Towles spent months conducting interviews with dozens of construction workers for his play, which ultimately takes the form of a TedTalk mixed with an episode of the Moth Podcast mixed with a puppet show. As he tells a heartwarming story of a particularly tough job on a particularly tough day—fixing multiple leaks in a water pipe on Christmas Eve—he lays out facts that you didn't know you always wanted to know about digging holes in the ground. It's probably not for everybody, but I very much enjoyed geeking out on illustrations of hole structures and maps of web-like water pipe networks. by Rich Smith