Perfectly Performed “Thom Pain” Perhaps Too Reminiscent of Beckett

Peruse playwright Will Eno’s bookcase and no doubt you’ll come across not only the usual Samuel Beckett suspects but also a dog-eared copy of Three Novels, whose interiority and ruminations on living our little lives seem to be a direct influence on Eno’s Thom Pain (based on nothing). Even the play’s meaningless subtitle echoes Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing. Clearly, Eno ❤️ Beckett.

Needless to say, he’s far from alone. Beckett’s impact on theatre is rivaled only by the likes of Shakespeare and Brecht. But in Thom Pain the influence is so obvious that it’s got a far better shot of putting you under its spell if your experience with Beckett doesn’t go beyond Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

Thom Pain is a one-man show explicitly conscious of being a one-man show. Although we aren’t given a context, Mr. Pain (Paul Knox) addresses and at times interacts with us directly, delivering a sort of lecture on his life experience from the inside. Once upon a time he was a little boy, and he had a dog who died tragically, and he got stung by bees, and later in life there was a woman he loved but who is gone now. That’s about all we get by way of external biography; the rest is the idiosyncrasy of experience, fraught with digression and non sequitur and emotional logic typical of how our mind/soul appears to us from the confines of our selves. Ultimately, Eno seems to be aiming for evocative vagueness, hoping the audience will resonate with so many lines that read like verbal Rorschach inkblots.

On stage this technique would be doomed to failure without getting the delivery just right. But the Garage Theatre — which in this case mostly means Knox and director Matthew Anderson — do just about everything right to ensure that those who might be touched by Eno’s text indeed feel whatever it has to offer. 

The means to this end is more art than science. Despite the lack of a strong through-line, Thom Pain has a sort of emotional ebb and flow, from which Pain himself often stands aloof, presenting his pain and (let’s call it) adriftness as if it’s the entrails of a dissected frog and we a class of Biology 101 students. Between the cracks in his aloofness oozes the feeling, and Anderson & Knox have managed not only to locate those cracks but keep them open long enough so that the ooze seeps over us. Knox’s performance is incredibly patient. In what is basically a 90-minute monolog, he never, ever rushes and never makes an emotional move that betrays the logic of the (sub)text.

Yes, Samuel Beckett has been here before, authoring several narrators who, like Mr. Pain, are “a feeling thing in a wordy body” and communicate that they are “in terrible pain, trying to make sense of my life” without needing to be so on-the-nose, while at the same time providing levels of detail and idiosyncrasy that Eno never approaches. “You really are very forgiving to let me get lost like this,” Pain says to us, and that’s probably true. 

But Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist precisely because it’s the right sort of raw material to crystalize into emotional truth in the forge of certain souls. And the Garage Theatre is mining it for all it’s worth. 

Thom Pain (based on nothing) at the Garage Theatre
Times: Thursday–Saturday 8:00 p.m.
The show runs through October 7.
Cost: $18–$25 (Thursdays 2-for-1); closing night w/afterparty: $30
Details: thegaragetheatre.org
Venue: The Garage Theatre, 251 E. 7th St., Long Beach