# The Dog Dug Under the Fence. The Humans Did the Rest. 2026-09-18 · Somerset County, New Jersey · Reported Feature New Jersey Repertory Company’s Nacho Ate Superman starts with a missing pedigreed rabbit, a rescue dog and a hole beneath a fence. Then the people arrive and turn an animal incident into something much more recognizably human. New Jersey Repertory Company’s Nacho Ate Superman starts with a missing pedigreed rabbit, a rescue dog and a hole beneath a fence. Then the people arrive and turn an animal incident into something much more recognizab… --- The dog dug under the fence. That part is simple enough. What happens after that is where the humans get involved. New Jersey Repertory Company’s new comedy Nacho Ate Superman, running Oct. 1 through Oct. 25 in Long Branch, begins with a premise that sounds almost engineered for a neighborhood group chat. Spiderman, an award-winning, well-bred rabbit, has disappeared. Nacho, the shaggy, good-natured rescue dog next door, recently dug beneath the fence separating the two properties. The rabbit is gone. The dog crossed a boundary. Suspicion has somewhere obvious to land. NJ Rep describes the surrounding beach community as sunny, laid-back and progressive until the dispute between the neighbors gets darker. The animals are the catalyst, but the confrontation belongs to the people. That is what makes the setup so much richer than a simple comedy about a badly behaved dog and a missing rabbit. The pets cannot testify. They cannot explain intent. They cannot clarify what happened on the other side of the fence. Their owners have to do what humans always do in the absence of perfect information: build a story. And the available details are almost suspiciously good at becoming symbols. Spiderman has pedigree and awards. Nacho is a rescue. There is a literal property line between them. One animal is associated with breeding, achievement and carefully established value; the other arrives with the cultural vocabulary of rescue, second chances and unknown history. None of that tells us what either animal did. It does, however, give their humans an enormous amount of material from which to construct meaning. Pet disputes become personal very quickly because animals rarely remain socially separate from the people who live with them. Tell someone their dog is dangerous and they may hear that they are irresponsible. Suggest the dog was poorly trained and the conversation can sound like a judgment of the owner’s competence. Defend the animal and you may no longer be defending only the facts of the incident; you are defending your household, your choices and sometimes your idea of yourself as a good person. That is one reason a fence is such an effective piece of machinery for this story. Fences are practical objects until something crosses them. Then they become arguments about responsibility. Who was supposed to prevent the crossing? How secure was the boundary? What counts as a reasonable precaution? How much responsibility belongs to the animal, and how much belongs to the person who was supposed to manage the animal? A hole in the dirt can become a referendum on trust remarkably fast. The comedy is also working with a familiar neighborhood paradox: communities often understand themselves through shared values right up until those values have to survive inconvenience. It is easy to be relaxed, tolerant and neighborly when everyone stays on their side of the fence. The useful test comes when something important disappears, blame becomes plausible and two people have to decide whether the person next door is still the person they thought they knew. The title makes the whole thing sound wonderfully ridiculous. Nacho Ate Superman. The missing rabbit is named Spiderman. The alleged culprit is a dog named Nacho. Before the first argument even starts, the names have already turned the incident into something that sounds like a story people will repeat. But that is also how ordinary conflicts grow: a complicated event gets compressed into a sentence simple enough to carry around. The dog ate the rabbit. Your dog crossed my fence. You should have known. You should have stopped it. The shorter the sentence becomes, the easier it is to forget how much of it is interpretation. Michelle Kholos Brooks wrote Nacho Ate Superman, and Sarah Norris directs the NJ Rep production. The cast includes Ezra Barnes as Xander, Anna Khaja as Devorah, Christopher Daftsios as Brad 1 and Kevin Loreque as Brad 2. NJ Rep is staging the show at the Lumia Theater, 179 Broadway in Long Branch, with performances Thursdays at 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. As an advance, the premise is enough to make the play worth watching closely because the animals create a useful kind of pressure. They cannot join the argument their behavior started. They cannot defend their reputations. They cannot explain whether a boundary was crossed accidentally, instinctively or with anything resembling the intent their owners may eventually assign to it. So the people do the explaining for them. And once people begin explaining what an animal’s behavior means, it does not take very long before they are really explaining what they think about each other. The dog dug under the fence. The humans did the rest. SOURCE NOTES • New Jersey Stage, Sept. 15, 2026: NJ Rep presents "Nacho Ate Superman" --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.