The Handsome, Witty, Sorrowful Man at the Bar

P icture a tony Upper East Side bar on a quiet night. The  man next to you is effortlessly handsome, impeccably dressed in a well-cut suit. His diction suggests an expensive education. He puts away gin-and-tonics like lemonade. He is irresistibly clever, and he knows it. Life, you think, must be gentle on such a fortunate man. Yet it isn’t. He spins sorrowful autobiographical anecdotes from a distance, mocking himself along the way so as to foreclose any suspicion that he is seeking your pity. Whenever he gets close to earnestness or genuine feeling, he capers away. The more playful asides and one-liners he delivers, the more you realize how regretful he is, how apart he stands from himself. You come to realize that you are one of many, many people for whom he has put on such a performance over the years. You start to sneak glances at your watch. He notices. He keeps talking. Your attention is important to him. You can sense him straining to be understood, even as he pretends not to care.

This is approximately the experience of watching Thom Pain (Based on Nothing), the monologue by Will Eno that gathered in considerable acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, upon its 2005 Off Broadway run. The play is a digressive series of melancholy memories interrupted by absurdist asides and pointed witticisms. There is no story or lesson here, just a drolly self-aware character protecting himself behind the barbed wire of irony. In other words, the play is almost perfectly on the wavelength of, say, a self-loathing alcoholic theater critic. No, I’m not thinking of anyone in particular, why do you ask?

In a revival (at West 42nd Street’s Signature Theatre Company through December 9), Michael C. Hall (best known for Dexter and Six Feet Under) nails the role, delivering a series of shaggy-dog stories and updates from his consciousness with a kind of poisoned panache that leaves the audience off balance. This outcome is very much intended. We hear about “a little boy” (this can only have been Thom) in a cowboy suit whose dog died when it was electrocuted while drinking from a puddle. A bee attack was suffered. Later, much later, a love affair collapsed. “We had an understanding,” Thom says, “though neither of us knew what it was.” Why it ended Thom can’t quite say. “Except for all of our unfixable problems, everything was perfect.” He takes turns teasing himself and the audience. “I have that shirt!” he tells one fellow. He takes care to hit on a woman in the front row.

The play takes place in a pointedly shabby, unfinished space, with drop cloths and ladders and debris on the stage, suggesting an empty house between productions. Lighting is meant to appear provisional, haphazard. The absence of artifice is, of course, part of the artifice. Thom is playing games with us, like a jaded, WASP Andy Kaufman.

Thom promises a raffle, then says, “There is no raffle. Who said there was going to be a raffle?” He mocks an audience member for walking out, though this is scripted, then spends several minutes roaming the house looking for “a volunteer,” only to discard the idea. Then take it up again. When the volunteer is finally chosen, he isn’t asked to do anything. He merely waits nervously for something to happen.

As did I. Eno’s words made me laugh intermittently — “‘You’ve changed,’ she said, the night we met,”  and then there’s “I disappeared in her and she, wondering where I went, left.” But the intentional shapelessness of the play vexed me. So did the gravitational tug of Thom’s angst. Pull out all of the absurdist one-liners and you’d have a pretty good basis for a Steven Wright set at a comedy club. Like many comedy-minded souls, Eno has a lot of despair, but most comics know enough to set that aside as long as there’s an audience present. Eno’s inquiries into the hurt that comes with existence aren’t as effective as his quips: “I had promise. I don’t have anything anymore” made me squirm. Two hours of Thom’s pain would, I think, be insufferable. Luckily the show ends after an hour. Like many others in the audience, I applauded politely and walked away briskly.