The Great American One-Act (based on nothing)

It seems that American one-man plays are being morphed more into performance art with, dare I say, slam poetry deliverance more than straightforward drama. Not that this is a sign of decline, as there have been plenty of exceptional one-man shows in the past decade. They just seem to be relying more on the skill of the performer than the writer. John Leguizamo's shows, and plays like The Syringa Tree and I Am My Own Wife (a Pulitzer Prize winner, and deservedly so) have one person perform multiple roles, often thirty or more. While this is extremely effective at awing an audience and gaining a more complete picture of the scenario at hand, it cheats the audience from an intimacy with the performer on a level only possible with a one-man show. No surprise then, that the first act of Homebody/Kabul (which by purist standards doesn't even count) and Thom Pain (based on nothing) which I saw tonight, are the two best recent one-man shows because they create that intimacy while skidding the borders of narrative. Thom Pain is so distinct from the others in that we feel for the character, intuitively sense his emotions, plights, reflections on life & death, without them being expressly stated. It's no surprise that writer Will Eno is a student of Albee and a Beckett fanatic, as he has a grasp on life's absurdity, which he powers through astounding use of the English language, that matches or surpasses many of the aforementioned writers' expositions on the subject. Thom Pain has all the verbal antagonism of George and Martha with the emotional vacuousness of Vladimir and Estragon and the downtown philosophical authoritativeness of Jimmy Porter. And all of this is somehow conveyed, with the audience's full sympathy, by the cryptic ramblings of a man in a crinkled suit on an empty stage for 80 minutes. It's one of the more fascinating American plays I can imagine, and that goes for more than just the past decade.