“The Nether” gets under your skin — and not in a pleasant way.
Not only does it deal with pedophilia, but there’s an actual kid in it.
And while nothing unsavory happens on stage, playwright Jennifer Haley makes suggestions, and lets your imagination do the rest. It’s a fitting approach for a near-futuristic thriller whose other big theme is virtual reality.
“The Nether” is the name of the latest stage of the Internet — a 3.0 version where you can create lifelike avatars and lifelike habitats. A member of the “investigative unit of the Nether,” Detective Morris (Merritt Wever of “Nurse Jackie”) is interrogating a man named Sims (Frank Wood) in a room that looks as if it had been lifted from 1950s East Germany — all dark, dank walls and heavy doors.
Sims runs one of these virtual places, a Victorian house he dubs the Hideaway, where men with special tastes can hang out with children like Iris (13-year-old Sophia Anne Caruso).
Carefully vetted adults animate all of the Hideaway avatars, including the kids, but it’s still unsettling to watch Iris — looking Alice-like in her period dress and blond ringlets — entertain gentlemen callers with a mix of innocence and perversity.
“It’s okay to forget who you think you are,” Iris tells a client, Woodnut (Ben Rosenfield). “And discover who you might be.”
An informant has given Morris intel about the goings-on at the Hideaway, and she grills Sims — whose Nether name is the creepy “Papa” — to find out his off-shore server’s address. She also calls in another client, Doyle (Peter Friedman).
This MCC production, directed by Anne Kauffman, is handicapped by Wever’s uneven performance. She’s not entirely convincing as a hardboiled investigator, though she fares better when suggesting Morris’ own troubled agenda.
Flawed as it is, the show tackles real issues, like how we create different identities on the Web. It also ponders whether online reality could help keep dangerous fantasies under control in real life.
Still, when Papa tells Iris the Hideaway provides “an opportunity to live outside of consequence,” you can’t help but shudder.