He's just like you, except worse. He is trying to save his life, to save your life in that order. In his quest for salvation, he'll stop at nothing, be distracted by nothing, except maybe a piece of lint, or the woman in the second row.
"Run, don't walk. Four stars, plus an extra!" . . . " small masterpiece!" . . . "It nearly defies description." . . . "A treasured night in the theatre." . . . "Will Eno is a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation!" - NY Times
"It is a magic trick, a disappearing act that leaves behind the shell of a human being. A little walking, talking dust... New York playwright Will Eno is an original, a maverick wordsmith whose weird, wry dramas gurgle with the grim humour and pain of life." The Guardian
Philadelphia Premiere
Directed by Gregory Scott Campbell
September 2 -19, 2010
Featuring: Christopher M. Bohan
REVIEWS ARE IN!!!!
Child as Father to Man
Thom Pain
by Jim Rutter; Broad Street Review
by Mark Cofta; City Paper
"This year’s Live Arts/Fringe Festival offers more than 180 acts. Potential patrons looking for a way to sift through the good and the bad could ease their confusion by trusting the proven talents of Luna Theater and members of the creative team behind 11th Hour Theatre Company. Both tackle a similar theme: how a grown man deals with the lingering effects of childhood trauma.
Luna’s production of Will Eno’s one-man Thom Pain (based on nothing) begins with a simple tale of boy whose dog is electrocuted by a stray wire. This event leads first to bedwetting and then to bullying, homelessness and lifelong loneliness. Did I mention how funny it is?
"There’s little common sense from Will Eno’s smarmy, scruffy, sadsack Thom Pain (no, not Thomas Paine). His everyman anti-hero — gloriously played by Christopher M. Bohan with twitchy, bouncy abandon — conducts a disturbing yet mesmerizing self-vivisection. When he says “If I were you I’d be sick of this already,” accept the challenge and stay; the harrowing story he disgorges in all his desperate showiness (there’s a raffle — no there isn’t!) and messy non sequiturs (“I have that same shirt!”) is gut-wrenchingly cathartic. Though Luna tries too hard (awkward life-size cutout?), by this wild hour’s end, forgiveness feels right."
Eno’s titular narrator (played by Christopher Bohan) conceals his pain behind comedy and terrible one-card magic tricks while his psyche retreats into philosophy. The script explodes with outrageous and offensive humor. “Picture a boy and his dog,” Bohan asks. “Now break his arm.” Later, he asks us again to “Picture whatever you want” and follows with, “Now go fuck yourself.”
Luna’s staging endows the hour-long monologue with the feel of a stand-up comic’s dream performance and the theatrical heritage of a one-man Waiting for Godot. Pain (the narrator) erases our feelings of individuality in his cynical self-reflective musings on love and life while his reaching out to the audience draws on our common humanity in suffering. When Pain asks us to share what we saw onstage, he implores, “Tell them you saw someone trying.”
Bohan tries very hard in the role, and what he lacks in comic timing he more than makes up in dramatic force, a multi-faceted portrayal sublimely blending the threads of an AA confessional, a Sunday sermon and an inverted Tony Robbins seminar into a coherent, masterful whole. Ken Sooy’s lighting design evokes the feel of a back-alley nightclub lounge."
NEW PERFORMANCE VENUE!
UPstairs@The Adrienne
Adrienne Theater (3rd Floor)
2030 Sansom St. Philadelphia, Pa 19103
(Having difficulties ordering? Call Theatre Mania; 866-811-4111)