This professional listener has worked as a receptionist himself, including when he interned at Trinity Rep during the years Richard Jenkins was in charge (1990-94). As a public relations assistant, he was frequently tapped to fill in for the permanent receptionist.
"I realized how many different languages you speak when you're a receptionist," he says. "You speak one way to the person on the phone you know, one way to the person you want to hang up with, one with someone you don't know, one with your boss, and then also with people walking in the door."
That's a crucial concern for any playwright, who after all is working with styles and modes of interactions as much as with words.
"So I'm always manipulating language," Bock says. "I'm always listening. I heard one time, these kids went: 'Nuh-uh.' 'Uh-huh.' 'Nuh-uh.' 'Uh-huh.' 'Nuh-uh.' 'Uh-huh.' 'No way — really?' That's what makes me laugh, that stuff. To hear those sounds."
Related:
Behind closed doors, Rock n' Roll saves the day, Life and how we live it, More 
- Behind closed doors
Ricky Gervais meets Dick Cheney in The Receptionist.
- Rock n' Roll saves the day
One way to keep dry, academic art theorizing from getting too, well, dry and academic is to inject some rock and roll.
- Life and how we live it
We're far too close to life to see it accurately, aren't we? With noses pressed up against our problems and delights, we need our perceptive artists — such as Chinese playwright Gao Xingjian — to remind us of what's really going on.
- Three-ring circus
This is the fifth season of the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Repertory Theater, and the three productions are quite a delightful array of comedies-in-the-works, all dealing with social survival. The plays being workshopped include an existential examination from a canine point of view.
- Must-see moves
Two of this fall's dance performances will tell Halloween-style stories — a reprise of Viktor Plotnikov's THE WIDOW'S BROOM , by Festival Ballet Providence, and a premiere of Miki Ohlsen's DRACULA , by Island Moving Co.
- Back to the barricades
In the fall of 2005, when the artist and curator Mark Tribe began teaching at Brown University, he was struck by how little protest there was on campus at a time of war.
- Water, benign and fierce
In Onne van der Wal's sailing photos, it seems the weather is always balmy and the golden sun always setting. The Jamestown resident's exhibit at Moses Brown School's Krause Gallery (250 Lloyd Avenue, Providence, through October 2) depicts a world that's forever at its endless summer, can't-get-any-better-than-this peak.
- Glasses, bikes, and a better world
If you thought you saw more black-rimmed glasses and aluminum bikes around town this weekend, you weren't imagining it.
- Knowledge in a flash
Jake Rolan sat at Starbucks on Thayer Street one day last month, busy on both his laptop and iPhone, seemingly no different from the other students who had carved out an itinerant workspace there, cursing out the wireless network that seemed to fade in and out.
- Photos: Kirsten Hassenfeld at Bell Gallery
Photos from Hassenfeld's show at the Bell Gallery
- Dark and light sides of pleasure
"I want to create a place where people can take a little vacation from reality," Brooklyn artist Kirsten Hassenfeld has said. "I'm interested in going to a place where there is no want, only endless plenty." In "Recent Sculpture," her exhibit at Brown University's Bell Gallery (64 College Street, Providence, through November 1), she succeeds magnificently.
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