Serving up a 'primal' dinner-party play
PROVIDENCE -- San Francisco playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb doesn't shy away from epic themes. So when he sat down to write "Hunter Gatherers," he was pretty sure what he wanted: to juxtapose grand action, animal desire, and modern civilization in a dark absurdist comedy.
"My goal," he says, "was to get every major primal urge into a single dinner play."
Which he did, although it took some effort. The first draft had about 50 characters, including an exiled Greek blind man, German storyteller, talking dog, Roman messenger, and a yuppie with premonitions of her own death. Suspecting he was losing control of his material , he decided to scale back his aspirations a bit, confining the action to a single night in the life of two Gen X couples in a condo loft.
The formula worked. First performed last summer by a funky San Francisco sketch comedy troupe called Killing My Lobster, the play, which revolves around a dinner party going wrong, won one of the country's most prestigious playwrighting awards -- the Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, for the best new American play to premiere outside Manhattan.
"Hunter Gatherers" will have its East Coast premiere Thursday at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. Yet despite its success, Nachtrieb, 33, still hasn't quite digested the fact that the play that started out as his senior grad school thesis has quickly launched him from an emerging playwright to one who emerged.
"Maybe it won because they wanted a play at a small theater?" he speculates. "I'm trying to rationalize."
Nachtrieb is sitting in a
This is a sweet time for Nachtrieb. The Steinberg award came with a "really nice check" for $25,000 and for the first time he's able to live exclusively on playwriting money. Not so long ago he was just another aspiring California playwright with an eye for the ironic and absurd, supporting himself by doing Web design and performing in interactive murder mysteries for corporate parties. (At this point it's almost impossible not to interject -- since so many other people do when they first meet him -- that Nachtrieb is astonishingly tall. "The first thing most people notice about me is my sternum," he writes in his blog, "followed by my nosehair which, as I am 6'6" tall is readily viewable by the majority of people.")
What people don't seem to notice about him is an edgy, wicked attitude characteristic of his plays.
"He is humble and he is polite and he is really tall," says Lisa Busby, a producer for Killing My Lobster. "He is a sweetheart, a really, really nice guy. I don't think he wants anyone to not like him. I think he likes to laugh more than he means to make other people laugh. But without meaning to, he makes other people laugh all the time."
Nachtrieb seems shy, more playful on his website than over coffee. Though his material is awfully dark, his disposition is not.
"I think deep down I'm an optimist," he says. "But maybe I'm a perverse optimist. In a lot of my stuff I feel I'm battling between what I think of as distasteful human behavior and rampant selfishness among . . . people of my generation and among Americans, with my own personal sense that things could work out. I don't really trust humanity to be altruistic. But I hope they are."
He grew up in the Bay area , where his family life could be a shtick in a sketch comedy. His father, a lawyer, plays tuba in a polka band. His mother, who is German, claims she left Germany because of the music. "Some combination of the two of them led to my sense of humor," Nachtrieb says. The youngest of five children, he spent a lot of time as a kid listening to his parents' old stand - up comedy records -- George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy. He watched "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" "like 14 times," which compensated at least a little for the fact that his middle school years were traumatic.
"He still has a hard time forgiving some of the people who tormented him between 6th and 8th grades," Nachtrieb writes of himself on his website . "This trauma, in addition to (still) providing a vast quantity of material, also propelled him to seek a creative outlet in which to vent his frustration."
This was theater, and fortunately things looked up for him in his "alterna-hippy high school" where he performed in "Waiting for Godot" and joined a sketch comedy group "making announcements at assemblies and doing weird things to promote blood drives," he says.
He did more comedy at Brown, where he earned a degree in theater and biology in 1997, and joined Out of Bounds, a sketch comedy group on campus. He also wrote a solo comedy called "The Amorphous Blob" -- he's since performed it in San Francisco and Seattle -- in which all the characters are devoured by a blob in a climactic battle sequence involving a series of ever-larger black plastic bags flying in from the sides by means of a pulley.
"He wanted to try the impossible, which I think is typical of him," says Lowry Marshall, one of Nachtrieb's acting teachers at Brown, and artistic director of Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theatre. "Peter's imagination and his sense of humor are absolutely unique. He is shy and one of the nicest human beings you are ever going to meet, and it's so astonishing that the plays that come out of him come out of him."
When he moved back to San Francisco, he worked on several projects , including a low - budget indie film called "Welcome Space Brothers" with his older brother George who, he says, shares his warped sense of humor. "We shot the film in 1999," he says. "We're still almost done." He also wrote and performed sketches for Killing My Lobster, which was originally started by Brown students.
In 2002 he enrolled in the MFA playwriting program at San Francisco State University , where he began to work on his thesis play "Lamb and Jelly , " which evolved into "Hunter Gatherers." In 2005 Killing My Lobster approached him to see if they could produce it as their first full-length play.
The play revolves around two self-absorbed couples who have been best friends since high school and lead an urban , West Elm - y lifestyle. They arrange flowers with dead twigs. They scrapbook. They exfoliate. Over the span of a single dinner, they confirm Nachtrieb's theory -- inspired by his fascination with evolutionary biology -- that there is a very thin veneer between civilization and animal instinct. Chaos ensues.
"What I like about it is that it's not long before you realize there is a sort of hallucinatory gas in the room," says Gip Hoppe, who is directing the Wellfleet production. "Structurally it has all the trappings of a well-made dining room play. But it's eruptive and volcanic. It's just exciting when you get your hands on something like that."
Nachtrieb says the play was scheduled for a five-week run in San Francisco, but audiences wouldn't stop coming. At first it was the usual Killing My Lobster demographic, mainly people from the hip Mission neighborhood, says Lobster producer Busby. "And then older people came and people came from the suburbs and everyone in the audience had a big smile on their face if they weren't laughing all the way through."
Critics raved. Nachtrieb was compared to Edward Albee. The play was extended and "I had a freakout," says Nachtrieb. "After the third or fourth week, it started selling out and that's when I thought, 'This is crazy.' " They finally ended the run after three months. "The actors were exhausted," he said. "Some of them had day jobs."
Now Nachtrieb is back to work in San Francisco, where he lives in the Mission district with his "more-than-a-boyfriend" Mark Marino, a nurse originally from Boston's South Shore. His new projects include a full-length play commission for San Francisco's Encore Theater.
"So he's busy," Nachtrieb continues in what he refers to as a "slightly tongue-in-cheek biography" of himself on his website. "In addition, Mr. Nachtrieb dabbles in exercise, Web design, visiting his parents in Marin, reading non-fiction, and scratching himself."
Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com. 
