Former DrillingCompany Short Grows Up
This was a short in TheDrillingCompany's
Theft in 2002.
Will also wrote
"Intermission" for
TDC's While You Wait,
in 2000 and
the full length "King"
which we read in
2002.
THEATER REVIEW New York Times
'THOM PAIN (BASED ON NOTHING)'
Life's a Gift? Quick. Exchange It.By CHARLES ISHERWOOD Published: February 2, 2005
s there such a thing as stand-up existentialism? If not, Will Eno has just invented it.
The name, an appealingly and appropriately quirky one that suggests a rebel warrior in a sci-fi movie, is probably not known to most New York theatergoers. The Brooklyn-based Mr. Eno has won scads of major fellowships, but the Off Broadway production of his play "Thom Pain (based on nothing)," which opened last night at the DR2 Theater in Union Square, is his first major New York production.
It surely won't be his last. Mr. Eno's play, a monologue that runs just over an hour and requires minimal stagecraft, is as unassuming in its means as it is astonishing in its impact. It's one of those treasured nights in the theater - treasured nights anywhere, for that matter - that can leave you both breathless with exhilaration and, depending on your sensitivity to meditations on the bleak and beautiful mysteries of human experience, in a puddle of tears. Also in stitches, here and there.
Speechless, in any case.
It nearly defies description, and yet invites embarrassingly vague panegyrics, the kind critics like to think they're above. Are above. Except for this one occasion. Really. So here goes: Run, don't walk. Four stars. Plus an extra. If you care about theater, blah blah blah. If you only see one show Off Broadway this season, etc.
Uh-oh. Mr. Eno's voice is so jaggedly quirky, crisp and hypnotic that it seems to have co-opted my own. Forgive the hysteria. Or the faux hysteria.
Anyway, "Thom Pain (based on nothing)" is, as noted above, a solo show. But don't turn the page just yet. Mr. Eno and his performer, the actor James Urbaniak, hereby reinvent that seemingly moribund theatrical genre. Mr. Urbaniak, a much-employed Off Broadway actor, also establishes himself as a significant artist with his sly, heartbreaking, exquisitely calibrated turn as Mr. Eno's antihero/narrator/master of ceremonies. Before going farther it's only fair to include the evening's director, Hal Brooks, among the triumphant; his work, too, is witty, sensitive and close to perfection.
The show opens with Mr. Urbaniak shuffling on stage in the dark. He lights a cigarette. Or tries to, anyway. As will soon become achingly clear, the character before us is not the kind of guy who gets things right the first time, or even the second. "Anyway. Now. I guess we begin," he begins. "Do you like magic? I don't. Enough about me. Let's get to our story."
Flashing the occasional friendly but slightly menacing smile, he gives us a picture to imagine: a little boy in a cowboy suit tracing words in a puddle on a cloudy day. A pet dog nearby. Tragedy strikes, and Mr. Urbaniak asks, in a gray monotone that over the course of the evening will seem to contain a hundred different inflections of deadpan: "When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?"
Then comes the kicker, both devastating and hilarious: "Isn't it wonderful how we never recover?"
Mr. Eno's voice, or rather the voice of Thom Pain, the ostensible narrator who is also, ostensibly, that dazed and changed little boy, is alternately lyrical and affectless, ecstatic and flat, sardonic and sincere. It reflects precisely in its disorienting rhythms and colors the range of perceptions embedded in the monologue. Life is awe-inspiringly wonderful. It's entrancingly mysterious. It's utterly disappointing.
A big joke. An inscrutable journey. A bountiful gift.
But one you want to exchange for something that fits a little better around the hips.
Standup-style comic riffs and deadpan hipster banter keep interrupting a corrosively bleak narrative: Mr. Eno might be called a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.
Let's try that again, minus the conditional: Mr. Eno is a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.
The tale of a little boy's anguished journey to adulthood, and to a more thorough acquaintance with heartbreak and loneliness, is the central narrative thread of "Thom Pain," but it is continually being spliced into fourth-wall-breaking bits of business and tongue-in-cheek forays into cheesy showbiz hucksterism. ("Now I think would be a good time for the raffle.") Morsels of philosophy are juxtaposed with more pedantic observations: "It's sad, isn't it? The dead horse of a life we beat, all the wilder, all the harder the deader it gets. On the other hand, there are some nice shops in the area."
Time to stop quoting. Mr. Eno's voice is so assuredly his own, simultaneously delicate and audacious in its measurements of poetry, philosophy and Monty Pythonesque silliness, that he should be allowed to speak for himself, in full. Similarly, Mr. Urbaniak's performance is so peculiar and precise that descriptions can only be approximate. Think a miserable postal-service clerk too stuffed with irony and anomie to put up a fight against life's indignities.
Mr. Eno is speaking, with infinite compassion and wit, to the lowly clerk in all of us, or, to borrow one of his images, to anyone who has ever felt "not really outfitted for this life, not properly clothed, not enough skin." (Ecstatically happy folks had best stay home. All two of you.) Interaction with the audience is used here not as an ingratiating gimmick but in the spirit that art shouldn't be afraid to reach out and grab us by the throat, to insist that it's not there to be admired at a distance, but experienced intimately and maybe even painfully.
To sum up the more or less indescribable: "Thom Pain" is at bottom a surreal meditation on the empty promises life makes, the way experience never lives up to the weird and awesome fact of being. But it is also, in its odd, bewitching beauty, an affirmation of life's worth. A minor proof of it, even. Nearly the last words spoken by Mr. Urbaniak are as follows: "I know this wasn't much, but let it be enough." It is. A small masterpiece had better be, for heaven's sake.
P.S.: Hope I haven't gotten your hopes up.
Just kidding! Sort of.
"Thom Pain" runs through April 3 at the DR2 Theater, 103 East 15th Street, Manhattan.
Theft in 2002.
Will also wrote
"Intermission" for
TDC's While You Wait,
in 2000 and
the full length "King"
which we read in
2002.
THEATER REVIEW New York Times
'THOM PAIN (BASED ON NOTHING)'
Life's a Gift? Quick. Exchange It.By CHARLES ISHERWOOD Published: February 2, 2005
s there such a thing as stand-up existentialism? If not, Will Eno has just invented it.
The name, an appealingly and appropriately quirky one that suggests a rebel warrior in a sci-fi movie, is probably not known to most New York theatergoers. The Brooklyn-based Mr. Eno has won scads of major fellowships, but the Off Broadway production of his play "Thom Pain (based on nothing)," which opened last night at the DR2 Theater in Union Square, is his first major New York production.
It surely won't be his last. Mr. Eno's play, a monologue that runs just over an hour and requires minimal stagecraft, is as unassuming in its means as it is astonishing in its impact. It's one of those treasured nights in the theater - treasured nights anywhere, for that matter - that can leave you both breathless with exhilaration and, depending on your sensitivity to meditations on the bleak and beautiful mysteries of human experience, in a puddle of tears. Also in stitches, here and there.
Speechless, in any case.
It nearly defies description, and yet invites embarrassingly vague panegyrics, the kind critics like to think they're above. Are above. Except for this one occasion. Really. So here goes: Run, don't walk. Four stars. Plus an extra. If you care about theater, blah blah blah. If you only see one show Off Broadway this season, etc.
Uh-oh. Mr. Eno's voice is so jaggedly quirky, crisp and hypnotic that it seems to have co-opted my own. Forgive the hysteria. Or the faux hysteria.
Anyway, "Thom Pain (based on nothing)" is, as noted above, a solo show. But don't turn the page just yet. Mr. Eno and his performer, the actor James Urbaniak, hereby reinvent that seemingly moribund theatrical genre. Mr. Urbaniak, a much-employed Off Broadway actor, also establishes himself as a significant artist with his sly, heartbreaking, exquisitely calibrated turn as Mr. Eno's antihero/narrator/master of ceremonies. Before going farther it's only fair to include the evening's director, Hal Brooks, among the triumphant; his work, too, is witty, sensitive and close to perfection.
The show opens with Mr. Urbaniak shuffling on stage in the dark. He lights a cigarette. Or tries to, anyway. As will soon become achingly clear, the character before us is not the kind of guy who gets things right the first time, or even the second. "Anyway. Now. I guess we begin," he begins. "Do you like magic? I don't. Enough about me. Let's get to our story."
Flashing the occasional friendly but slightly menacing smile, he gives us a picture to imagine: a little boy in a cowboy suit tracing words in a puddle on a cloudy day. A pet dog nearby. Tragedy strikes, and Mr. Urbaniak asks, in a gray monotone that over the course of the evening will seem to contain a hundred different inflections of deadpan: "When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?"
Then comes the kicker, both devastating and hilarious: "Isn't it wonderful how we never recover?"
Mr. Eno's voice, or rather the voice of Thom Pain, the ostensible narrator who is also, ostensibly, that dazed and changed little boy, is alternately lyrical and affectless, ecstatic and flat, sardonic and sincere. It reflects precisely in its disorienting rhythms and colors the range of perceptions embedded in the monologue. Life is awe-inspiringly wonderful. It's entrancingly mysterious. It's utterly disappointing.
A big joke. An inscrutable journey. A bountiful gift.
But one you want to exchange for something that fits a little better around the hips.
Standup-style comic riffs and deadpan hipster banter keep interrupting a corrosively bleak narrative: Mr. Eno might be called a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.
Let's try that again, minus the conditional: Mr. Eno is a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.
The tale of a little boy's anguished journey to adulthood, and to a more thorough acquaintance with heartbreak and loneliness, is the central narrative thread of "Thom Pain," but it is continually being spliced into fourth-wall-breaking bits of business and tongue-in-cheek forays into cheesy showbiz hucksterism. ("Now I think would be a good time for the raffle.") Morsels of philosophy are juxtaposed with more pedantic observations: "It's sad, isn't it? The dead horse of a life we beat, all the wilder, all the harder the deader it gets. On the other hand, there are some nice shops in the area."
Time to stop quoting. Mr. Eno's voice is so assuredly his own, simultaneously delicate and audacious in its measurements of poetry, philosophy and Monty Pythonesque silliness, that he should be allowed to speak for himself, in full. Similarly, Mr. Urbaniak's performance is so peculiar and precise that descriptions can only be approximate. Think a miserable postal-service clerk too stuffed with irony and anomie to put up a fight against life's indignities.
Mr. Eno is speaking, with infinite compassion and wit, to the lowly clerk in all of us, or, to borrow one of his images, to anyone who has ever felt "not really outfitted for this life, not properly clothed, not enough skin." (Ecstatically happy folks had best stay home. All two of you.) Interaction with the audience is used here not as an ingratiating gimmick but in the spirit that art shouldn't be afraid to reach out and grab us by the throat, to insist that it's not there to be admired at a distance, but experienced intimately and maybe even painfully.
To sum up the more or less indescribable: "Thom Pain" is at bottom a surreal meditation on the empty promises life makes, the way experience never lives up to the weird and awesome fact of being. But it is also, in its odd, bewitching beauty, an affirmation of life's worth. A minor proof of it, even. Nearly the last words spoken by Mr. Urbaniak are as follows: "I know this wasn't much, but let it be enough." It is. A small masterpiece had better be, for heaven's sake.
P.S.: Hope I haven't gotten your hopes up.
Just kidding! Sort of.
"Thom Pain" runs through April 3 at the DR2 Theater, 103 East 15th Street, Manhattan.
posted by Unknown at 6:37 AM
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