Issue/Publication: San Francisco Arts Monthly

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Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, whose new play, T.I.C. Trenchcoat in Common, world-premieres here this month, should be easily identifiable among the java-drinkers at a Mission District café—after all, he’s 6’6”. But he’s sitting down, so he identifies me by my searching gaze. A lanky thirtysomething, he’s casual in a plaid shirt, with a shy, eager smile, a laptop and empty coffee mug. Apparently he’s been here for a while, writing. Lisa Steindler, the artistic director of Encore Theatre Company, which commissioned T.I.C., says, “I bump into him in cafes all the time, in the corner with his computer. He lets the world bump into him, so there’s something alive and vital in his work, so of-the-minute. That’s exciting.”

            The traditional idea of public versus private is the theme weaving through T.I.C. The mordant comedy of contemporary San Francisco life, which morphs into a murder mystery, begins as a teenage girl’s blog, cleverly dramatized. The Kid, as she’s called, is spending the summer in the backyard cottage of a tenancy-in-common building, with the father she barely knows. Lonely and miserable, she amuses herself by blogging about the oddball neighbors she observes through their rear windows—an emotionally volatile, dying musician; a lonely and possibly deranged woman; a pot-smoking hippie; a flasher in the eponymous trenchcoat; and even her own gay, cyber-sex-addicted father. Unlike in the Alfred Hitchcock film, which was one of Nachtrieb’s inspirations, the Kid’s Peeping Tomism is aided by various computer-age recording devices. “They’re all trying to have their public persona and their private persona,” explains Nachtrieb of the characters. None are exactly whom they appear to be.

“With modern technology, the threshold is really lowered,” observes Nachtrieb. It’s easy for people to expose themselves and to get information about others, and for the government to listen in on phones. He wanted to explore that. He also loved the classic image of the trenchcoated exhibitionist, and the idea of strangers living close together, sharing a home loan. And he wanted to write from the Kid’s perspective. “She’s trapped in this weird, almost cartoonish world,” he says. “She’s somehow scared of the real world, can only process it through technology. She’d rather capture and comment than experience, but she gets more and more involved as the play goes on.” Her fraught relationship with her father is the play’s through-line.

            Nachtrieb’s satirical comedy about the animal nature of humans, Hunter Gatherers, was a huge hit when Killing My Lobster premiered it here in 2006. Nachtrieb has previously acted with KLM and also written sketch comedy for the troupe. H G won a local Glickman Award followed by the prestigious Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. Shortly thereafter he signed with a New York literary agency and, thanks to a host of grants, settled in as a fulltime playwright. Productions of his various plays have been staged at Seattle Repertory Theatre, Woolly Mammoth in Washington, D.C, Chicago’s Bailiwick Repertory Theatre and Dad’s Garage in Atlanta, plus many more nationwide and here at home. Currently he is a resident playwright at San Francisco’s Playwrights Foundation.

But his rise to national prominence has not been sudden. Nachtrieb was involved in theater from his high school days at Marin Academy, majored in theater and biology at Brown University, followed by an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State.

            “I still feel like I’m learning things with every play I write,” he confesses. T.I.C. provided many challenges for him, including the intricacy of the murder-mystery plot that must keep the audience guessing and yet have an internal logic of its own. In that regard, Nachtrieb might have fallen back on his acting experience: he performs in interactive murder mysteries staged by Murder on the Menu.

            And his acting informs his writing. “I try to write characters that I’d want to play—rich, challenging roles,” he says. He adds, “The questions you ask as an actor are the same ones a writer should be asking: What does the character want? What are the characters’ objectives—what are they trying to get in each scene and in the whole play?” He learns from watching actors work on the roles in development workshops and rehearsals and rewrites copiously. “When I hear actors read it,” he says, “I think, oh my God, I’ve put in way too many words!”

“What’s so much fun about working with Peter,” remarks Steindler, “is he’s such a dedicated and hard-working writer. Many playwrights hand me the script after commission and it’s done and they don’t want to work on it much more. With Peter it’s so exciting because the actors and the designers are so integral to the process.” The cast includes such popular local actors as Arwen Anderson, Liam Vincent and Anne Darragh. Yale School of Drama playwriting professor Ken Prestininzi, formerly a  Bay Arean, directed Nachtrieb’s most recent play, boom, which premiered in New York, and is director/dramaturg for T.I.C.

Steindler doesn’t so much pick new plays for the 22-year-old Encore—which produces only once or twice per season--as pick the playwrights she wants to work with, which have included such prominent artists as Adam Bock, Mark Jackson and Leigh Fondakowski. “Peter’s a humble, sweet person,” Steindler says. “His themes and ideas are very dark yet he has a wonderful dry sense of humor and he’s highly theatrical.”

            Although he researched tenancies-in-common for T.I.C., Nachtrieb needed no special research for other elements of the play. He lives in a Mission District apartment building (with his “wonderful, more-than-a-boyfriend, Mark,” as he writes on his tongue-in-cheek website, which includes a witty, tell-all blog) and is very aware of his neighbors, who sometimes appear in their windows in various states of undress. One neighbor practices singing on her porch, which is right outside Nachtrieb’s window. “One time the entire lyric was ‘You’re full of shit.’ She sang it over and over for an hour!” says Nachtrieb. From that experience came the angry musician in T.I.C.

T.I.C.’s central character also feels familiar to Nachtrieb—“my inner teenage precocious girl!” he says, laughing. “I’ve been drawn to that character a couple of times in my plays, I’m not sure why.” Writing her, he tapped into how he felt in his senior year of high school—confident but scared.

            And he also tapped into how the internet has affected his own life, how it has shifted the way people interact. “I’m currently addicted to Facebook,” he admits. “I have 450 ‘friends’! People write these one-sentence updates: ‘Peter is talking to Jean at a café today.’ You feel you’re checked in with people even though you’re not. . . It’s this other world, and everyone in this play is struggling with that connection thing. . . . Everyone in this play is very isolated and lonely. That’s something I keep coming back to in my plays. I’m not sure what that’s about either!” He adds, “I think there’s a lot of San Francisco in the play, in the characters and the weirdness of it.”

            Now he’s off to write—he’s on a commission for South Coast Repertory and also for the Humana Festival in Louisville, Kentucky--at Z Space Studio, one of his offices-away-from-home. No doubt bumping into people, metaphorically speaking, along the way.

Jan. 2-Feb. 1, Encore Theatre Company at the Magic Theatre, Bldg. D, Fort Mason. 800-838-3006. www.encoretheatrecompany.org