Orange County Register

Jeremy Gable’s Twitter play, “140: A Twitter Performance,”  is now in its second day, and so far nothing much has happened — hey, what can you expect when four characters talk to each other in bursts of no more than 140 characters?

But let’s give the playwright some slack. This is a 60-day narrative, after all. A certain amount of scene setting is in order.

Check it out here.

The initial assessment of this seasoned critic:

Dane’s an arrested-development type. Most 16 year olds I know wouldn’t admit to watching “Transformers,” let alone liking it. Perhaps that’s because he’s a somewhat naive small-town kid (the action is set in Hayden Lake, Idaho, population 560).

Dane’s best friend Nik is a live wire. For years I’ve been wanting to do the same thing to Shia LaBeouf that he so merrily suggests. But what’s a hip-talking 18-year-old doing hanging out with a “Transformer”-loving nerd two years his junior?

Leslie, Dane’s 26-year-old stepmom, desperately wants to communicate with him, hence her presence in the Twitter universe of the play. “No one told me talking was obsolete,” she grouses. I sense tension here, and a blowup looming. Also, given the brief span of years separating her from the kids, I predict all sorts of boundaries will be recklessly crossed. Just a hunch.

Among the four characters, Nik’s girlfriend Courtney is most convincingly plugged in to the zeitgeist. Her initial tweet sounds like the clarion call of our benighted times:

“Anybody know a non-crap job that doesn’t pay minimum wage?”

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