Brooklyn playwright Will Eno's Pulitzer Prize finalist one-hander Thom Pain (based on nothing) is a 75-minute work that could be called a thought piece or an exercise in existentialism, or even a Beckettsian exploration of futility. All of those things would be true, but far too restrictive. The title character's musings aren't Generation X-malaise but rather a multifaceted, genuinely sad, sympathetic story. Thom Pain is, at heart, a tale that we can all identify with.

Thom takes us back to a traumatic experience when he was a child in a cowboy costume, playing in puddles after a storm. He remembers when he was attacked by bees. He recalls the time when he had love and lost it. And now he is left, as he admits, only with the phrase that's "the brainless and simpering tolerance of everything, our fading national soul: 'whatever.'"

Thom loses himself in his thoughts, often abandoning his story to tell deliberately unfunny jokes or bring up the possibility of raffles and magic tricks, neither of which ever happen. Thom Pain lives in a world of disappointments, and he likes to set you up for them too.

He's a lone antihero, trapped in his musings on pointlessness, who takes us into his cluttered mind and into the childhood incidents that shaped him — a man who, underneath his seeming coldness, is desperate for connection with other people.

David Mandel turns in a spectacular performance. He's fascinating to watch as he dips in and out of Thom's varying moods and trains of thought. He and director Peter Karapetkov have made an apathetic malcontent likeable, drawing out of Thom the charm, sadness, and "the former child" that Thom mourns. Karapetkov keeps Mandel moving, and every action seems just right. Nothing is distracting, even the rare bits of stylized movement.

Thom asks a lot of his squirming audience: attention and self-scrutiny — as evidenced by a wall-sized reflective surface behind him that slides ominously closer to the audience over the course of the play. There are moments of supreme uneasiness in this play — are we supposed to be in complete darkness? Is one audience member a plant? Is Thom going to come up and talk to me? This confusion and anxiety are symbols of the play's point. Thom reminds the audience that he's going to make us feel like he feels. He establishes in us the same agitation that pervades his life. He brutally reminds us of how we live our lives: "If you only had one day left to live, what would you do?" After commenting on how brave and loving we'd all behave, he then asks, "What would you do if you had 40 years?"

The mirror has moved closer towards us.

"I'm a feeling thing in a wordy body," Thom tells us, and nothing could sum up the play better. Rather than a sprawling, existentialist, self-indulgent, boring, and depressing reminder of how much life sucks, Will Eno's play is a beautiful portrait and a touching story — of Thom Pain and of us. He's the voice inside our heads, put into better words. The development of a life and the presentation of human, universal feelings are wrapped up in an eloquently verbose, creatively structured piece of art.

Here, as Shakespeare famously said, art really is holding a mirror up to nature.

Playwright Will Eno feels that everything in life, no matter how disparate, is related in some way. Maybe that's why this Pulitzer Prize finalist keeps on a shelf in his refrigerator a framed picture of his grandfather riding a ski lift.

Or maybe that's why he gives anthropomorphic qualities to the title of his enigmatic, one-person comedy-drama "THOM PAIN (based on nothing)," now playing at Pure Theatre in the Cigar Factory.

"The play's title reminds me, of course, of Thomas Paine (famous for his Revolutionary War pamphlets with the words, 'the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot'), but it also somehow reminded me of a broken arm, both soft and hurtful, recognizable, but somehow wrong," says Eno of the play's strange title, which is partly in capitals with the parenthetical portion all lower case.

Eno, 41, who has written five full-length plays, says he rarely gives interviews because he fears he won't be able to express himself on the spur of the moment.

But in a phone interview from Princeton University, where he is teaching playwriting for the semester, he becomes enthusiastic about "THOM PAIN," which was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist in the drama category.

"I think if there were to be a T-shirt advertising this play, it should say, 'THOM PAIN, he's just like you - except worse,'" says Eno. "In this play, I just wanted to create a really believable character, and I don't mean believable as in plausible, but as in 'someone we can believe,' because Thom's lovableness and noxiousness come out of the same thing, which is his unflinching, and sometimes incredibly flinching, view of the world."

When asked if "THOM PAIN" can be compared to Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," Eno said, "Beckett is a gorgeous writer and it is hard to resist those sentences of his, so his work rings in my head a bit, as does the work of Edward Albee, Emily Dickinson, Don DeLillo, Gordon Lish and Thornton Wilder."

Eno adds that he thinks, however, "THOM PAIN" is 10 or 20 times more optimistic than "most things around."

"I would even say it is more earnest (than most), which is a dangerous word in the wrong mouths. But in some essential way, the play simply says: Try to be better; try not to spend your life in fear."

At the famous Fringe Festival for the arts in Edinburgh, Scotland, a critic gave "THOM PAIN" a scathing review with no mention at all of its playwright, but Eno viewed this as a positive.

"The reviewer referred only to James Urbaniak, the actor who starred in the play," Eno explains.

"He essentially reviewed the personality of (the character) Thom Pain, by which he, the reviewer, was not impressed. It was the first review the play received, and it was incredibly negative. But the extent to which the character was taken as a real person was incredibly gratifying."

Interestingly, by the end of the Fringe Festival, "THOM PAIN" had won every award that was to win, including Urbaniak winning Best Actor out of 1,000 performers at the festival, Eno says.

Another of Eno's plays, "The Flu Season," recently won the Oppenheimer Award from New York Newsday.

Asked if "The Flu Season," which is about an amorphous doctor, nurse, man and woman, is pessimistic, Eno explains that he is trying to show characters distracted by their own nostalgia, by certain pains from their pasts.

However, when asked about his lines in that play: "People get married in sleet storms. People get cancer on soft summer evenings, listening to the radio," Eno says these words are not pessimistic, but rather just accepting the terms of life.

"The body gets older, The sight goes. The sun collapses. Locusts and floods come. What a world. These things are beautiful. Come on, look at the clouds, we are lucky," says Eno, quoting from "The Flu Season."

The playwright adds, "Both 'THOM PAIN' and 'The Flu Season' establish new forms, without overthrowing established feelings."

And what is Eno's goal in the theater?

"There can't be an ultimate goal," he says. "Without wanting to sound precious or pretentious, I really am just working on the next line of the next play."

"THOM PAIN (based on nothing)," starring David Mandel and directed by Peter Karapetkov

Tickets are $18 and may be purchased by calling 723-4444 or at the door.

THOM PAIN Offers Charm, Truth at PURE
Review by Carol Furtwangler
Post and Courier

Continuing what has already become a proud tradition of presenting cutting-edge productions, PURE Theatre opened "THOM PAIN (based on nothing)" Friday night.

Playwright Will Eno's one-man, one-act show is reputedly as controversial (and this in New York circles) as Edward Albee's work was in his time.

This is a play of charm and wit, honesty and truth - in the hands of director Peter Karapetkov and expert actor David Mandel.

In other hands, this piece could easily be caustic, smarmy, precious and generally obnoxious. In this case, it really is all in the interpretation. And the interpretation realized here makes the audience fall a bit in love with our hero (anti-hero?), while squirmingly "coming face to face with the modern mind."

"PAIN" is a sort of manic stream of consciousness, a leap at existentialism, perhaps, but altogether accessible. The language is intriguing and full of puns and ironies.

Karapetkov, a recent arrival, via Bulgaria, New York and Atlanta, adds immeasurable depth to this Pulitzer Prize-nominated play.

Mandel virtually never stops moving, except to shoot those chocolate eyes toward his audience in a sudden turn of vulnerability.

Otherwise, Mandel is stage center, or wandering through the audience, or behind a particularly effective hanging mirror the size of a wall ... or is it supposed to be a wall? A worm hole? A result of global warming? The division between life and death? Oh, never mind. Just go.

Preview by Dottie Ashley
Post and Courier

"We are all born mad. Some remain so." - Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," 1927.

Inspired by Godot's theme, Will Eno's offbeat play, "Thom Pain," starring David Mandel, continues at Pure Theatre at the Cigar Factory.

Peter Karapetkov will direct the one-person show. Karapetkov, a native of Bulgaria, was the artistic director of Dimitrovgrad City Theater before moving to the United States.

In the States, he has directed in New York, Houston, Pittsburgh as well as other cities. He is the associate artistic director of the Fourth World Theatre Lab in New York.

Although the play is said to be "based on nothing," Karapetkov says the character of Thom is definitely not a repeat of "Waiting for Godot," but rather is an individual's journey through pain, love, disappointment and horror.

The director says the play asks the question: "How much do our childhood disappointments and pain affect the rest of our lives?"

Not trying to teach or entertain, playwright Eno's work looks inside the brain and the intentions of one Thom Pain, who has reached bottom and entertains the audience with what has been described as "a surreal meditation on the empty promises life makes, and the way experience never lives up to the weird and awesome fact of being."

Yet at the same time, the script has been deemed "an affirmation of life's worth ... a small masterpiece" by The New York Times.

"Thom Pain" premiered at London's Soho Theatre and had its American premiere Feb. 1, 2005, at the DR2 Theatre in New York, where it starred James Urbaniak and was directed by the legendary Hal Brooks.

Playwright Eno lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he continues to write. His play, "The Flu Season," won the Oppenheimer Award presented by N.Y. Newsday for best debut production in New York.

His works have been produced by BBC Radio in London, at the Gate Theatre in Ireland and at Naked Angels, also a theater in New York.