In the summer of 1973, PBS aired the documentary "An American Family". Culled from 300 hours worth of footage it created an entertaining portrait of middle-class Californians.
But it was hardly a puff piece. One child came out of the closet. Another started a rock band. The parents became estranged and divorced.
Paired alongside the drama of the Watergate hearings, this reality tv precursor made it clear that every domicile in the United States, up to and including the White House, was producing compelling theater.
Further, that it could be disfavorably recorded.
One imagines the present weight of blogs, vlogs and the like are overcompensation for the surveillance obsession of the forty-third Presidency.
It's become
this important to spin your story before someone else does.
Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's comic meditation on the intersection of privacy and technology is "T.I.C. (Trenchcoat In Common)," at the Magic Theater through February 1.
The plot centers around Kid (Rebecca White) who moves in with wine-sipping gay Dad (Michael Shipley) after Mom's death.
Kid's picture window provides a unique perspective on the comings and goings of her joint-tenancy complex, which includes a euphoric flasher and a pot-smoking anti-wheat protester. She immediately begins a blog about the neighbors and their activities - replete with live cams.
As Kid's urge to process her environment escalates, so does an intrigue of late night phone calls and confrontations.
Shortly, neither she nor her father can place themselves at a distance from the untoward happenings all around them.
Nachtrieb's dialogue is particularly well executed and woven for relevance.
"I'm an anthropologist," Kid states.
"I say 'To-mah-toe,'" Terrance (Liam Vincent) rejoins in their initial encounter.
Claudia (Anne Darragh) later aphorizes, "There is nothing more offensive than idiots that agree with you."
Laden as it is with justified paranoia, all T.I.C.'s characters wholly trust computers and The Web.
No one questions the source of a quote on Google. No one complains about the flakes on craigslist or shill auctions on eBay or gets caught in a Kenyan spam email scam.
Instead, beginning with Kid walking through the courtyard of her building, the audience is seduced to hear the music in inadvertently colliding sounds - as we might if we paused when four autoplay daughter windows popped up during our web browsing. We're encouraged to pay attention.
T.I.C. flourishes most in these flashes of experiment where it attempts to adapt Web conceits to the stage.
The set's archway is like a video screen of the play's action. There's an audio/video mash-up to Nine Inch Nails. For one blog entry, we are presented with square illustrations that reference the blog text emerging from the set's archway.
In another scene, a video is scrubbed and replayed in slow motion, a tribute to the movement skills of Arwen Anderson who also delivers one of the best theatrical exits I've seen.
The most sympathetically developed characters are the archetypal Kid and Dad.
The other co-tenants are branded as antagonists in part by the aspirational classism of their names.
When trust fund rocker Shye (Lance Gardner) and weepy princess Sabra (Anderson) tussle over wet clothing we take no sides in part because their conflict is so petty, but in part because we cannot imagine any conflict they could have that we would not dismiss as frivolous.
Only Kid and Dad who have a meaningful relationship to one another, carved as it is out of non-digital dependency and mutual loss.
Is Web 2.0 the death of privacy? Have our interior lives have died only to be replaced by voyeurism, speculation, hyperbole, fiction?
If they have, Nachtrieb's clever entertainment suggests, at least we have each other.