Killing My Neighbor

As a subject for the stage, blogging must be handled delicately, since most blogs, like most frozen foods, are worthless. Are you really going to put your character in pajamas? Are you going to have him write words like “4ever,” a chestnut that Nancy Franklin, a New Yorker reporter with a presumably full keyboard, recently used on her fancy publication’s blog? A new local play about blogging, however, has a secret weapon: playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, the same Nachtrieb who burst onto the national scene with what at first seemed to be a small potato, Killing My Lobster’s first full-length play, Hunter Gatherers. By the time the dust had settled, he had a clutch of awards and the ear of every theater group in town. So he did what he wanted: He wrote a play about blogging, T.I.C. Trenchcoat in Common. Encore Theatre Company jumped. To Nachtrieb’s credit, T.I.C. doesn’t involve a newsroom or a gossip-cave. It’s about a sullen teenage girl who starts blogging about her tenants-in-common neighbors (an excellent use of a blog if there ever were one). Someone starts reading, and scary things happen. We like it when scary things happen to bloggers.
Jan. 2-Feb. 1, 2009