A significantly meandering 75-minute monologue of a play, Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a journey through the existential tangles of one middle-aged man’s mind.
“You really are very forgiving,” Thom Pain says to the audience at one point. “To let me get lost like this.”
The original Off Broadway production of Thom Pain (based on nothing), which enjoyed a six-month run in 2005, launched Will Eno as a playwright with a distinctive voice. Since then, Eno has crafted such quirky plays as The Realistic Joneses, The Open House, and Middletown, among others, that seriously contemplate life and death matters in a usually playful manner.
So, too, does this ruminative monodrama.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
Several of Eno’s plays were developed at Signature Theatre, which currently presents this revival of Thom Pain (based on nothing) as performed by Michael C. Hall, that fine stage actor whose fame from TV series such as Six Feet Under and Dexter undoubtedly will attract some viewers who are not yet acquainted with Eno’s works. Hopefully their minds will be as open to appreciating this offbeat play as much as Eno freely reveals Thom’s thinking to them.
Speaking directly to the audience in a mostly low-keyed, roundabout manner, Thom describes and reflects upon a number of his lifetime experiences: The traumatic boyhood incident when his dog was accidentally electrocuted. That day when he was swarmed by bees. And about the woman he loved, briefly: “We had an understanding, though neither of us knew what it was.”
Interspersed with scatterings of anecdotes, asides, and general observations, Thom’s rendering of these autobiographical events is intended by the playwright to suggest the way one’s mind skips and shuffles through its non-linear, often abstract, processes. The text is a stream of conscious flow that at times backtracks in memory and sometimes even stops completely as Thom silently gazes off into the middle distance. Non-sequiturs, incomplete jokes, and derailed trains of thought infiltrate the monologue, which registers as being more rueful than despondent in its not infrequently amusing musings.
The character of Thom that Eno creates and Hall ably realizes here is a moody, broody guy with a sardonic sense of humor. Unshaven, wearing a rumpled black suit, and looking melancholy (or perhaps mildly hung over), Hall delivers his rambling remarks in a quiet, yet clear, vocal manner. A persuasive actor, sensitive to the mood of the viewers he addresses, Hall conveys the impression that Thom is disappointed over how his life so far as turned out, but has not yet turned bitter about it.
Oliver Butler, the smart director of Heidi Schreck’s current What the Constitution Means to Me, and who staged the premiere of Eno’s The Open House for Signature, provides an effective environment for this production. Working with Amy Rubin, the set designer, Butler bares the stage to its walls to visually indicate that Thom’s life still remains an unfinished work in progress.
Construction materials and equipment litter portions of the stage, the deck is partly torn up, strings of caged light bulbs glow, and sheets of netting hang down from the rafters. The largest among Signature’s three theaters, its 294-seat Irene Diamond space, with its deep, expansive, 60-foot wide stage, is not so conducive to an intimate solo show such as this one, but Butler’s supportive production and Hall’s intriguing presence usually are able to bridge the distance.
Thom Pain (based on nothing) opened November 11, 2018, at Signature Center and runs through December 2. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org
