Ben
Brantley

May 26, 2015

Have they come up with a name yet for the fear of identity theft? Egokleptophobia, maybe? Whatever you want to call this topical neurosis, it throbs like an insistent bass line in “D Deb Debbie Deborah,” Jerry Lieblich’s dizzyingly clever new play about mutating selfhood. The subject of this comedy of anxiety, the auspicious opening production of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks series at the Wild Project in the East Village, isn’t exactly like that of those alarmist television commercials about Internet predators who make merry with your credit cards. True, the title character, a fledgling artist in a big city, has her phone, wallet and computer stolen in the opening scene. But what really disturbs this young woman — let’s call her Deb, and say she’s portrayed by Brooke Bloom — is that she had buzzed the thief into her apartment because she had assumed (after a garbled intercom conversation) that this person was her friend Lizzie. Even worse, when she talked to the police afterward, she couldn’t describe the intruder who had held her at knifepoint.