[ssba]
Thom Pain (based on nothing)
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
The Geffen Playhouse
Through February 14
RECOMMENDED
One can tell that the new year is beginning for theater when encountering two solo performances in a single week, thereby already making a heavy dent in my allotment of the form. (Without some effort at resistance and selectivity, one can overreach the limits of tolerance well before summer.) Luckily, both these contrasting exemplars are exceptional entries, well worth redeeming your ration coupons for.
Will Eno’s acclaimed Thom Pain (based on nothing) arrives in Los Angeles after a decade of playing virtually everywhere else. As perhaps the only person in this town who actually travels to New York to get away from the theater (privileging instead friends, relations and music), nevertheless I could hardly resist the chance in 2005 to see James Urbaniak perform the piece at the Union Square theater just up the block from where my younger daughter was dropped off at her first-year NYU dorm.
Eno’s monologue was a hit, yet a goodly portion of the audience in 2005 was audibly bewildered by it. Teetering on the fulcrum equidistant from Beckett and avant-standup, the hard-edged lyrical spasms of borderline parodic despondency sowed palpable doubt as to whether or not it was funny or bleak, as though both could not coexist. The New York house was as uneasy in its way as Eno’s abrasively hapless, less than sympathetic, eponymous character.
Fast forward a decade of now culturally dominant attitudinal irony, and the Geffen opening night crowd rolled perhaps too easily with the cryptic outbursts of acerbic alienation. Casting a popular and garlanded comedy actor like Rainn Wilson (who I had only glancingly encountered before in his small role in the movie Juno) unquestionably cued the spectators to be receptive to the humor underlying the rather cruel quandaries of the indistinct man’s existential perplexity.
By contrast, Urbaniak’s almost avian asperity missed none of droll marks but yielded the wit grudgingly, shrouded in dread. Thankfully, Wilson exhibits the discipline and control not to reach for laughs, though they came aplenty. Director Oliver Butler orchestrates the craggy rhythms and thorny tone with a rigorous mastery of pitch, with Wilson a virtuoso instrument. I especially relished the way he can, seemingly at will, appear alternately too large and too small for his pedestrian suit.
Eno’s sly screed retains its innate mystery, rich with eloquent pauses, nuggets of paradox, with an aftertaste of bile, its rhetoric suggestive of European absurdism in an American vernacular. When it cuts, it’s to the quick, and for all the affectation of abstraction, it can be remarkably specific with its uncanny ear: “I hate your breathing,” for example, was one of my father’s pet derisions.
Eno zeroes in on our national fear of blame and abhorrence of awkwardness without passing judgment, leavened with mock self-seriousness. But time has leached a lot of the originality and subversive iconoclasm from the text; it’s grown accessible, even familiar, in its once difficult stratagems. How dispiriting that a cautionary, transgressive work could come so quickly to measure our bemused comfort with the reflection of our own despair?
Thom Pain (based on nothing), Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 3 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through February 14. (310) 208-5454, geffenplayhouse.com. Running time: One hour, five minutes.
