In the moment after the whopper of a surprise, a religious stillness permeates the theater, like the aftershock of a ghost sighting. The revelation divides time itself, as in the plots of our most hallowed myths. Now there’s a time before you knew and a time after.

It’s not just that you didn’t see it coming, though that’s one reason “Edit Annie” lands like a sucker punch. In unspooling the unlikely relationship between a scruffy video editor and the high-femme social media influencer she works for, playwright Mary Glen Fredrick exposes something about human nature that most of us would prefer to keep buried: just how needy and lonely we are at our core, and just how low we’ll stoop to cope.

Crowded Fire Theater’sWest Coast premiere triumphs despite some formidable obstacles (which is why the Chronicle isn’t assigning the show a rating). First, the company postponed the show for two weeks for non-COVID-related health reasons. Then, on Monday, Oct. 9, the show’s rescheduled opening night atMagic Theatre,co-director Leigh Rondon-Davis understudied for Monique Crawford as Annie, the video editor, staying on book sometimes and calling offstage for lines at others. Further complicating matters is that the play makes extensive (and brilliant) use of recorded video, for which the company had captured Crawford as Annie. That meant we were seeing two actors in the same part, one onscreen and one onstage.

部t the show is so richly envisioned and executed by Rondon-Davis and co-director Nailah Unole Dida-nese’ah Harper-Malveaux that the hiccups barely registered. It’s the kind of directing that, if you’re not already part of the world of Gen Z social media influencing, invites you in. Every little gesture or inflection communicates a specific culture and particular set of norms, but without didactic exposition.

As the play begins, Annie has never met Clara (Jordan Maria Don) IRL, even though Annie knows everything about her — not just her very elaborate coffee order, but every facial pore and vocal tic. Annie knows the Clara between the takes she shoots for her beauty-themed social media brand: the Clara who berates her boyfriend, Jackson (Kenny Scott, who appears only onscreen), the Clara who sneers before forcing out a beautiful smile that everyone else sees, making the smile seem sinister and maniacal.

When a chance encounter brings video editor Annie and her employer, Clara, together, the two finally have to deal with how weird that one-way intimacy is. Clara, by contrast, knows almost nothing about Annie, and Don embodies her as a C-list celebrity, one who’s pleasantly unsurprised to be recognized by a fan in a coffee shop but who doesn’t make a big deal out of it, all as part of the brand.

Fredrick’s lean writing shows instead of tells, and as the pair find they’re simpatico and start to hang out, the script empowers you to keep up. Even if you don’t know the slang meaning of “ship,” if you can’t tell that Annie and Clara are iterating a TikTok dance, if you have no idea which TV show Annie is intently explaining as if it’s as important as breathing, it doesn’t matter. “Edit Annie” makes each of these references into a little power game that either draws the two closer or reifies the pecking order.

That pecking order is clear, not least because Clara is Annie’s boss, as Dana (Chibueze Crouch), the one friend of the agoraphobic Annie, keeps trying to explain. But Annie won’t have it. There’s something so beautiful and compelling about Clara, even or especially in the outtakes. Maybe that’s why she’s such a successful influencer. She’s not just pretty and polished. The true core of her yearns, demands to be seen for what it is, and Annie knows she’s just the person to make it so.

The relationships we have or think we have with the profiles we follow on social media are a poorly understood byproduct of our current digital moment. The genius of “Edit Annie” is to suggest that our brains have not yet evolved to make sense of those attachments. There we are, casting out blindly in the dark, hearting posts, dropping emoji reactions, replaying videos one more time, all in hopes of a flicker of connection. We might only get a few pixels back, but what the brain does with that is Bay Area theater’s biggest surprise this season.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com