“FriendAndy.com,” and then tell everyone about my blog.

Last night, a friend and I saw a great show at the Fringe Festival called FriendAndy.com. I’ll tell you about it in a few minutes, but first I have to check my Twitter feed – I really want to see if one of the people I follow said something I can reply to and retweet. I had this nice forward momentum where I was getting ten new followers a week, and I’d like to keep that up. And while I’m at it, I need to check out the blog of one of my followers who reblogged me that one time, because if she was kind enough to comment on my work, it’s only fair to return the favor. That reminds me – I really ought to set up a Facebook page just for my blog so I can get more people to “like” it. It’s better to hit all those fronts because not everyone wants an email subscription every time I write a new post, and more people are on Facebook anyway. My Gravatar really should change, too – this picture’s getting out of date, and everyone always wants new, new, new things!

That, dear readers, is the inner monologue that ran through my mind after watching FriendAndy.com, an innovative, challenging, uncomfortably accurate show in the Fringe Festival about a comic blogger named Andy (Hayes Dunlap). Andy’s main goal in life is to make people laugh and make money off of doing so (yeah, good luck with that), and he creates over a dozen different blogs to help him accomplish that goal. Each blog centers on a different character he created (usually some kind of stereotype) and a pun on his name (Handy Andy, Andyquette, to name a few). Andy is a blogger for a company called Boman that makes various products, including Beef in a Can and a cyber sex suit (among other things). FriendAndy.com chronicles Andy’s rise and fall in the blogosphere – how he achieves fame, loses it, and becomes slowly unhinged and isolated along the way.

Technology is used to great effect in the staging of FriendAndy.com. Director and writer Wesley Fruge uses the back of the stage throughout the play, projecting screenshots of Andy’s blogs, Skype conversations between Andy and the other characters in the show, clips of Andy’s different characters, and popular YouTube videos. As a result, the audience feels overwhelmed, bombarded, and sometimes seduced by the bright shiny screen at the back of the stage. The constant projection creates an alienating effect, forcefully reminding us of the way we replace human contact with Internet “friends.”

Yet there are also times where the projection at the back of the stage enhances human emotions. Andy has several Skype conversations with his girlfriend Abby (Laura Kaldis) where her hopeful, anxious face is magnified and projected to the audience. In those scenes, the stereotypical role of the patient, long-suffering girlfriend is given a new dimension. We can’t help but feel her pain as she tentatively encourages her boyfriend in his hopeless endeavors, trying to put on a brave face when he gives another excuse for not visiting her. The large projector screen also helps us feel more sympathy for Andy. Trolls leave nasty comments on his blog, comments that might normally make us chuckle if simply read aloud by an actor – but when those comments projected onto the screen, we feel the same sting that Andy does, even if we partially agree with his detractors.

The technology in the show is excellent, but the play would be lost without its excellent cast. Sean Hefferon, Laura Kaldis, and Natasha Strang slip easily in and out of different characters that fill Andy’s life, whether they’re playing Andy’s bosses, co-workers, friends, or the living embodiments of Internet pop-up ads. Hayes Dunlap, meanwhile, portrays Andy with enough charm to make us care about him and enough obliviousness to expect his downfall. Andy isn’t as clever as he thinks he is, and we cringe when he tries to create another walking stereotype of a character, but we still feel for him when he looks at his much less clever, much more popular competitors and sucks up to them through gritted teeth.

FriendAndy.com is a clever, innovative show, but not simply because it uses a lot of technology and fancy gadgets. It’s an innovative show because of the way it challenges us to think about our own relationships with technology. At the end of the play, I felt a pressing desire to check my phone, look at my blog stats, and devise a witty tweet about my night at the theater – and at the same time, I wanted to throw my phone into the gutter and never look at it again.Most people who have any sort of Internet presence will see themselves in Andy, finding a great opportunity for self-reflection that they might not have otherwise had – but they probably won’t feel comfortable with what they see.

FriendAndy.com played at the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre on 145 6th Avenue from August 11 to August 22.