Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute – Part 2

 

[This is the second and last installment of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute.”  (If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to 14 August and doing so; you’ll find this segment of the post makes more sense if you do.)  

[I’ll be presenting a “recovered” report on Carroll and Marty Martin’s one-woman play, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, introduced in Part 1, followed by a survey of the published reviews of the New York Off-Broadway productions.

[The recovered reports, which I’ve attempted a couple of times on Rick On Theater (“Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive: Othello,” 22 December 2020; “Much Ado About Nothing: A ‘Recovered’ Report.” 20 March 2021), are analogous to the contemporaneous play reports I post on ROT, except that I never wrote up the plays after I saw them.

[These reports are based on some comments I’d made in other contexts and a random collection of very vivid impressions of the performances I saw.  I also use a little research to help remind me of details of the production.

[I called the result a “recovered” report on the analogy of “recovered memory”—which is defined as “a memory of a past event that has been recalled after having been forgotten . . . for a long time,” according to Dictionary.com.]

The Circle Repertory Company presented Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at its Greenwich Village theater for six performances on Wednesday through Sunday, 6-10 June 1979 while the company was waiting for Sam Shepard’s Pultzer Prize-winning Buried Child to move from the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre), but Pat Carroll’s performance and Marty Martin’s script proved so popular that Circle Rep decided to keep it running.

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein and Buried Child opened in alternate-night rep on 24 June at the company’s Sheridan Square Playhouse, a former garage-turned-nightclub, and ran until September.  After a single benefit performance at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Carroll viewed the celebrated Cone Collection—the Baltimorean Cone Sisters were friends of Stein, who advised them on their collecting—on 29 September 1979, GS³ returned to the Sheridan Square Playhouse until October.

The play then moved on the 23rd to the historic Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street, where it ran for nine more months (and where I saw it in June 1980), closing on 3 August 1980—over a year’s run all together.  There was buzz about a possible Broadway transfer, but that never materialized.

After its successful New York run, the one-character play toured the U.S. into 1981 and beyond, including the Arena Stage in Washington; Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio; McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey; Zellerbach Theatre at the Annenberg Center, Penn State, in Philadelphia; Alliance Theatre in Atlanta; and other U.S. cities, many for a single night.  There were invitations to bring the play to festivals in Alaska, Canada, Europe, Australia, Israel, and South Africa.

There was talk of filming GS³ for either the big or small screen, and an adaptation was broadcast on CBS Cable (a short-lived pay cable service) on 6 and 7 March 1982.  (There was also the Grammy-winning 1980 Caedmon recording.)  Carroll reprised the role in productions across the country and around the world many times for the remainder of her career.

Carroll’s portrayal of Stein was a striking change from her habitual comic turns.  We theatergoers saw a compelling dramatic presentation—though with plenty of humor and (often snappish) wit.  I don’t write fan letters, but after seeing Carroll’s performance in GS³, I sat down and wrote one to her.  I told her that if she ever took on students, I was ready to sign up!  (She didn’t take me up on my offer.)

I trained as an actor and worked a decade in the profession, and retain a love for the practitioners of Thespis’ art.  I even used to keep a list in my head of a dozen or so individual performances that had astonished me.  Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was prominent on that list. 

I’ve sat through a good number of realistic and naturalistic performances that fooled me into forgetting I was watching a play.  One of the most notable in my memory is Carroll’s Gertrude Stein.  Her performance was so magical that I found myself literally thinking, as I was watching her, ‘Gee, Stein’s a fascinating person.  I’m so glad I met her.’

When I realized what I was thinking—that that was actually Gertrude Stein in front of me—I was mighty glad I didn’t say that out loud so my companion and others near me could hear how deeply I’d fallen under Carroll’s spell.

The play is set in the Paris apartment in which Stein and Alice B. Toklas live at 27 Rue de Fleurus.  (The street, pronounced flur-ooss, is named for a town in Belgium that was the site of a 1794 battle during the French Revolutionary Wars.)  Stein has lived here since 1903, first with her older brother Leo and then with Toklas from 1910.  (Leo and Gertrude separated in 1913; the break is the climax of the play’s narrative.) 

Designer Anne Gibson’s set at the Provincetown—there was a different scenic designer at Circle Rep, Tony Straiges—was a representation of the cluttered apartment with the Picassos, Gauguins, Matisses, and other art works with which the Steins had decorated their walls.  There were a few pieces of furniture from the period.  The stark lighting was by Ruth Roberts.

When the lights come up—there’s no curtain—68-year-old Stein (Carroll, who was 53 when I saw the play) is seated in a chair, at the center of the room, dressed in a brown caftan (the sole costume was designed by Garland Riddle), with closely-cropped grey hair.  Not as closely-cropped as Stein’s was at this time in her life, which was a mannish brush-cut, but not as matronly as her hair was styled, in a graying bun, in the ’20s.  She’s drinking a glass of tea and lights a cigarillo.

In the play, Stein sits in the throne-like chair with her legs spread, but my vision of her that I still carry with me when I think of this performance is the Jo Davidson terra-cotta sculpture (Gertrude Stein 1874-1946, 1922-23) in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. 

While Stein seems to be kneeling, a Man Ray photo of her posing for Davidson reveals that she was, in fact, sitting in a chair just as Carroll was in the play.  Davidson merely sculpted her from the knees up, making Stein appear Buddha-like—which the artist thought was appropriate for his subject.

(From 1992, there’s been a bronze casting of Davidson’s sculpture in Bryant Park, behind the main research branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets.  Whenever I see that rendering, it makes me flash back to the performance of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein I saw in 1980.)

Over the shoulder of the famous expat, among the other paintings, is the well-known Picasso portrait of her.  It’s 1938, the day before she and Toklas will be evicted from their home of 35 years because the landlord’s son needs a place to live.  It’s raining and there are thunderclaps.

Stein and Toklas have been packing and Stein’s flatmate is sleeping upstairs.  The imminent eviction makes Stein reminisce about the life that unfolded at 27 Rue de Fleurus over the past 3½ decades.  The apartment is so full of her life and the ghosts of her illustrious visitors that it prompts an outpouring of memories that’s echoed by the downpouring rain outside.

“It is    it almost always is    it was and it is    almost always    an inconvenience to be evicted.”

After that, Stein/Carroll becomes a superb raconteur and confides in us many of the stories of her life in Paris in the first four decades of the 20th century.  She also reaches back into her childhood in California and her studies at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins.  For 90 minutes, we become Stein’s confidants.  We hear Stein’s views on art, life, writing, and the import of genius and fame.

She recounts the disastrous Rousseau dinner the Picassos organized at their Montmartre home in honor of painter Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier (‘The Customs Agent’), at which everyone got very drunk—because there was nothing to eat but spinach—and behaved badly; the discovery of a painting by the as-yet unknown Paul Cézanne in a gallery by Gertrude and Leo; the time a drunken Hemingway paid Stein and Toklas a call and they refused to admit him, resulting in a rift between the young writer and older mentor and champion; and, finally, Leo’s loss of faith in Cubism and modernism and his embrace of a reactionary sensibility, causing him to call his sister’s avant-garde writing “tommyrot.”

At the end of the play, Stein looks around at the art works on the walls of the apartment.  She declares with quiet pride: “We moved out one century from these rooms and moved in another.”

There’s no plot in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, no narrative though-line, no cause-and-effect chain.  Martin’s text is a stream-of-consciousness tumble of memory, sometimes connected by a lot of “That reminds me”’s and “That brings me to”’s.

Needless to say, after all my undisguised praise, it was all wonderfully spun and fascinating to hear.  We’d been offered the invitation to be part of the literary world’s most renowned salonière’s Saturday evening soirée, and it was a delicious experience. 

It was a momentary puzzle why we’d be included among the intelligentsia who invented modern Western culture, not to mention how we’d all fit in Stein’s apartment—but that passed, unanswered, as we became engrossed in Carroll’s impressionistic portrayal of the disenfranchised intellectual.

There’s only a single actor listed in the program—GS³ is labeled a “one-person play,” but it’s really not.  Martin used the words and recollections of a score or more of the literary and artistic giants of the Western world in the early 20th century to make a portrait of Gertrude Stein, but Carroll contrived to bring them onto the stage for us to see and hear. 

Stein was a name-dropper extraordinaire, but Carroll did far more than drop illustrious names.  She made us see and hear the famous friends Stein and Toklas assembled at 27 Rue de Fleurus, creating and casting virtual playlets (long before that word had any meaning) that were as engaging as the one she was in.  I absolutely believed that Alice Toklas was just upstairs asleep.  It’s a conjuring trick no magician could accomplish.  Only an actor could do it.

Carroll accomplished this feat by recalling the personal traits of these people we tend to know only as icons.  Her Stein knew all their foibles and quirks, and sketched them in.  The distant legends of art and culture thus became warm human beings who did foolish—and sometimes hurtful—things.

Perhaps the most delicate memory Carroll’s Stein discusses is the matter of her lesbianism.  Carroll said she didn’t want GS³ to be a gay play, but she didn’t want it to be dishonest, either.  So when Stein reminisces about her first homosexual experience, with a woman at Johns Hopkins, it’s discussed paraphrastically, by inference. Nothing is said directly. 

But it leads Stein into talking about being fat, and that leads into talking about how she always felt different, which is ultimately what impelled her to leave America—because she never fit in.  It was also what made Alice Toklas follow the Steins, and what brought the two women together for the rest of Stein’s life.  (From 1907, when they met, to 1946, when Stein died, Stein and Toklas were never separated.)

The relationship with Toklas, however, isn’t emphasized.  It’s implied, of course, and hovers around the play whenever Stein brings her roommate up, but it’s not the emotional or dramatic center of the play.  As I’ve noted, the break-up with Leo was more impactful to the performance than Alice B. Toklas. 

That’s not in the least inappropriate.  After all, Leo had been his sister’s mentor for over 40 years.  But though he was the one who left their shared abode—Leo had actually instigated the salon, though Stein became the hostess—intellectually, she was the one who left him. 

She championed the new art and the new writing, going in her own direction, and he couldn’t handle that she stopped listening to him.  They never spoke to one another again.  That’s much more wrenching than a 30-year devotion between Stein and Toklas, isn’t it?

Carroll insisted that the performance was not a monologue, as most of the press coverage dubbed it.  It’s a “duologue,” declared the actress.  The other half of the conversation is provided by the audience.  (Occasionally, Carroll recounted, a theatergoer actually voiced a response to Stein.)  She added that the play is different at every performance, but not because she makes any changes.  Each audience responds differently.

Carroll sat in the chair for most of the play.  Only occasionally getting up, when Stein is especially agitated, for brief moments to walk about the apartment.  But her hands were so animated and eloquent that the play didn’t seem static.  Her face, too, was infinitely expressive.  Of course, GS³ is a verbal play, depending on Martin’s words to take the place of action. 

Ordinarily, that would be a detriment; word plays are almost always talky.  In one-actor plays like Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! (Broadway, 1966; television, 1967) and Clarence Darrow with Henry Fonda (Broadway, 1975; television, 1974), the actors walked about the set a good deal, but, as GS³ was conceived for an incapacitated Carroll, Stein is mostly seated.  Yet Carroll exuded energy so vibrantly that her Stein is always vital even when stationary.

Still, the words are the true action of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, and Carroll made them dance—the way one imagines Gertrude Stein would have when she captivated those students in 1934.

I guess it’s obvious without my even saying so that I thought Pat Carroll’s performance was extraordinary.  (I wasn’t the only one; her reviews were excellent.)  Even as restricted as she was, Carroll held the stage for the whole hour-and-a-half and never lost her grip on us.  She even made Stein’s idiosyncratic speech—those triple repetitions—seem like natural talk from a sophisticated, hyper-intellectual woman.

In several interviews, Carroll asserted that for this role, she didn’t just rely on the rehearsals and her homework to develop the performance.  She drew on everything she had learned over the thirty-some-odd years of her career. 

She pulled out all the stops, and whether she whispered or roared, she made the language alive.  No wonder the recording of the play won a Grammy.  (By the way, I even bought the album when it came out.  I wanted documentation of that performance.)

The smallest gesture—the shrug of a shoulder, the twitch of a finger, the slap of a table, or the clench of a fist—filled the theater.  Even her distinctive laugh that made her so popular on TV game shows was part of her offering; boisterous and infectious, it became Stein’s laugh.

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was one of the longest-running one-person shows of the ’70s.  The press found the evening “enormously fascinating” and “poignant” (from the New Brunswick Home News and Variety) and actress Carroll received the best reviews of her career, capturing both the humor and the sorrow of the character.  Let’s look at what some of the reviewers said about Marty Martin’s play and Carroll’s portrayal of the iconoclastic American expatriate in Paris.

Because the coverage was so extensive, with many regional papers reviewing the New York City run and then local papers all over the country writing about the national-tour performances, I’m going to limit my review round-up to the Off-Broadway productions alone.  (There were notices into 1985, and even reviews of Carroll’s performance in Jerusalem in the Jerusalem Post.)

In the New York Times in June 1979, after the play’s fill-in stint at Circle Rep was extended but before it moved to the Provincetown, Richard Eder characterized Martin’s script as “appealing,” but felt, “It lacks the intuitive brilliance of James Lapine’s effort to literally stage a poem of Miss Stein’s in “Photograph,”  two years ago.”  

Mr. Martin's assemblage is anecdotal, and intelligent rather than inspired; but it works very well on the whole, and it gives scope for Miss Carroll’s winning and often very moving performance.

(The 1920 poem “Photograph” is composed in five sections Stein labeled “acts.”  This gave Lapine [books for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion] a rationale to stage it in 1977 for the Performance Workshop at SoHo’s Open Space.  “It is a lovely and remarkably successful attempt to render the qualities of Gertrude Stein in theatrical terms,” wrote the New York Times.)

The Timesman found that the playwright “has realized that Miss Stein’s wit, her reflections about herself and others, and the wealth of anecdote need to be anchored to something; and he has accomplished this very well.”

Carroll, reported Eder, “glares and beams as she talks, caught up in the fascination of telling and recalling. . . .  [She] revels in the beat and counterpoint of her phrases; but she disciplines them as well, cutting them off abruptly in the sheer enjoyment of showing who is boss.”

“It is, all in all,” concluded Eder, “a moving and splendidly personified picture that Miss Carroll gives us; a piece of cultural history that like all good history strikes us as the history of ourselves.”

Four months later, after Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’s open-ended run had started, the Times’ Walter Kerr saw the play.  “Off to the Provincetown I went,” Kerr related, “and I went expecting a great deal.  I got more than I bargained for.”

He expected “outrageousness,” he confessed, and “Miss Carroll . . . obliges in spades.”  The Times reviewer noted that in her portrayal of Stein, “some of the time,” Carroll is

content to snuggle, warmed with self-satisfaction, in the chair built as four square as she is, as often as not she’s likely to leap to her sandaled feet, take a hearty belt from her omnipresent drink, and bellow out a great bleat of anger.

The review-writer asserted that “we feel confided in” with Carroll.  “I don’t know precisely how Miss Carroll is able to do it, but she manages—without any effort at all—to make us share Gertrude Stein’s attitude toward herself.”

In the end, Kerr concluded, having invoked a housekeeper famous for her outstanding souffles, “Miss Carroll’s own souffle is very choice indeed.  Superb texture, body and lightness both, four‐star anywhere, I’d say.”

Don Nelsen asserted in the New York Daily News that in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, “Martin’s script and Carroll’s performance make a perfect match and Milton Moss’ evenly paced direction is skillful, indeed.”

The Daily News reviewer proclaimed that “Pat Carroll has recreated [Stein] with remarkable fidelity and dimension.  She catches Stein’s snobbery, pettiness, perception, loyalty and wit and at the same time tells the story of an artistic revolution.”

Nelsen concluded, “I have never thought of Gertrude Stein as a particularly enchanting person but if she was anything like Carroll’s portrait, she must have been.”

“Wonderful wonderful wonderful is the phrase for Pat Carroll doing ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’ off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Theater,” wrote Mary Campbell of the Associated Press in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  She was one of the many journalists who found it irresistible to mimic Stein’s triple-ese.

The AP reviewer continued: “Gertrude Stein calls herself a genius, and Miss Carroll makes that—and everything else—believable.”

“She tells an anecdote richly . . .,” Campbell added.  “She delightedly sets out insights and one-line quips.  She has a remarkable mind that makes one wish to have known her.”

In a later edition of the paper, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Barbara Kantrowitz commented that Carroll “dominates the theater’s small stage . . . .  She raises name-dropping to a fine art.”  Kantrowitz prefaced this remark by asserting that “both the actress and her subject have gained new images.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Charles Ryweck observed that “‘Gertrude Stein etc.’ may be a one-character play but it evokes an entire gallery of the titans of modern art and literature . . . .”  Playwright Martin, Ryweck added, “has revealed [Stein’s] personality through the art of the raconteur.”

“Carroll,” the HR reviewer felt, “is a fascinating actress, funny, yet piercing . . . .” 

She is a mesmerizing actress as Gertrude and was rewarded with a standing ovation by an appreciative opening night audience.  Milton Moss directed the ebullient Carroll with flair.”

In the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, William A. Raidy of the Newhouse News Service asserted, “The avant-garde writer would be both pleased and flattered by Pat Carroll’s charming portrayal of her in . . . ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein.’”

Martin’s play “is a warm, intimate portrait of the woman from Allegheny, Pa., who from her armchair in a Paris studio encouraged such young artists as Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and a whole Lost Generation of writers.”

“Martin rarely directly quotes his subject,” explained Raidy.  “Instead, he lets her tell her story as seen through her relationships with others . . . .  He makes, therefore, Miss Stein perhaps a bit more likeable—and modest—than she actually was.”

“Pat Carroll’s Gertrude Stein laughs a lot,” pointed out the Newhouse reviewer. 

Reading most of the Stein canon, we never thought Miss Stein the laugh riot actress Carroll portrays.  Then we came across this evaluation from her old friend, [literary critic, biographer, and historian] Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]: “Gertrude’s personality was magnetic; she had a laugh from the middle of her . . . .”

“More than anything else,” felt Raidy, “Pat Carroll has captured the physical sense of Gertrude Stein in this one-woman show.”  The review-writer concluded with the observation “what a pleasure it is to be reminded of [Stein’s] very special genius with the help of Pat Carroll.”

Calling Carroll’s performance “brilliant” and labeling it the “undisputed highpoint of her career,” Variety’s Madd. (the reviewing “sig.,” or pseudonym, for John Madden) characterized GS³ as “an intelligently drawn, poignant, often hilarious, entertaining, thoughtful, instructive, and most of all exhilarating theatre experience.”

“Milton Moss has staged the work with authority,” continued Madden, “but obviously allows Carroll the freedom of instinct.”  Quoting the Circle Rep program for the play, the Variety reviewer wrote, Carroll “was determined to make the world of Gertrude Stein, once again, come alive.”

Madden added, “To that purpose Carroll has perhaps exceeded even her own expectations, with a performance that illuminates the stage throughout two acts and ranks among the best of the solo theatre pieces offered over the last decade or so.”

“Carroll,” the reviewer continued, “brings such warmth and personal appeal to the role, as well as a marvelous gift for story telling, the audience becomes immediately intrigued with the gossip and friendly intimacies she reveals . . . .  A lengthy and hilarious tale about a near disastrous dinner party she attended, is a highlight of her impeccable delivery.” 

In Long Island’s Newsday, Allan Wallach, dubbing the play a “tour de force” for Carroll, reported, “Her triumph is so complete that the theater piece has become a surprise hit of the summer . . . .”  In explanation, Wallach said, “What Carroll has done to bring all this about is, simply, turn herself into Gertrude Stein at every performance.

The words of the play aren’t Stein’s, as we’ve seen, “but the actress invests them with Stein’s enthusiasm and rhythms.  The intelligence and humor—and occasionally a haunting sadness—shine through.”

Proclaiming that Stein “has been made, finally and inevitably, the center of an enormously fascinating play,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Home News, “In the person of Pat Carroll she is also the play’s sides, top and bottom.”  The actress, he wrote, “is giving a performance of enormous energy and magnetism.”

“This is a real play,” the review-writer admonished us, “that happens to have as its one and only character a figure from real life.  It is a work created for the stage out of all the things the stage finds most useful.”

“Miss Carroll is seated at the center of the famous room at 27 Rue de Fleur[u]s, Paris, for virtually the entire evening. . . .  But,” observed the man from the Home News, “from this throne-like seat, Miss Carroll miraculously creates a[n] evening that always seems alive and active.  She tells the stories brilliantly.”

“Miss Carroll plays with the language as if it were a musical instrument.  Her stories are oral impressionistic paintings and the glimpse into the ego are startling revelations of vulnerability,” affirmed Albrecht.

He didn’t spare his praise: “If you want a model of stunning acting by which to judge all other such attempts, do visit Miss Carroll at the Provincetown Playhouse.  So much of what passes for acting in other enterprises merely seems so much ranting and raving in comparison.”

The Home News reviewer concluded by stating, “All of which adds up to an enormously varied evening that treats us as [her] intellectual and emotional equal.  What greater tribute can an artist pay her audience?”

“With Miss Carroll playing [Stein], it is sometimes difficult to remember that it is, after all, only a play,” continued Albrecht.  “She makes it seem like a private soiree.”

As readers can see, the reviews all hit much the same notes.  These were all notices of the performances in New York City, either at Circle Rep or the Provincetown, but the reviews of the tour dates were in the same vein.  So, I’ll stop here—with two exceptions.  The first is a review of the Caedmon recording (TRS 367) of the play, released in September 1980, about a month after the play’s New York run ended.

In the New York Times, Paul Kresh, an author, critic, record producer, and broadcaster who specialized in spoken-word recordings, advised, “Plays for one or two performers not only make for economical stage productions but are ideally suited to the recording medium.”

Kresh labeled the two-disk, stereo release “Pat Carroll’s tour-de-force monologue.”  Having seen the live performance, the record reviewer acknowledged,

It was a joy to watch Miss Carroll . . . thronging the stage with the ghosts of the great as she reminisced on a rainy afternoon in her studio about life in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus.  You could swear that Alice B. Toklas was really napping away all the while in the next room!  Yet, little is lost when you only hear this performer, since most of the delights of Mr. Martin’s compelling script are in the flow of language that illuminates character as the formidable Stein recalls her adventures, her quarrels with her brother Leo, her love affair with modern art, and her attempts to make language do what Picasso was doing on canvas.

Kresh made a side note to say that compared to a recording of Stein’s actual voice, “Pat Carroll has caught its cadences and even its timbre without resorting to slavish mimicry.”

The other outlier is a review in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant of the 1982 television broadcast of the play on CBS Cable.  (The telecast ran two hours, rather than the 90 minutes of the stage version.)  Owen McNally, the paper’s television critic, described GS³ as “a good play, a good play, a good play” (I warned you about the triple-ese) and credited Carroll’s “tour de force performance.”

“It is a one-woman monologue,” McNally explained, “with Carroll pulling out all the stops” in what he called Martin’s “imaginary monologue.”  The TV reviewer characterized Carroll’s work as a “vivid, earthy performance,” presenting “a very bold, flesh-and-blood Gertrude Stein, a Stein running over with brilliance as raconteur and writer.”

“Although most sympathetic,” warned McNally, “this is not a totally idealized representation of Stein.”  The reviewer added (as we recall what Anita Loos revealed), “What you get in this two-act monologue is no mere ‘Saint for Two Acts.’  Stein also comes across as at least a bit of a bitch.” 

The Courant writer reported, “The play itself is all but totally static.  Yet Carroll makes it come very much to life by generating static electricity that lights up the Stein character. . . .  The words—the words made flesh by Carroll—are the real action.” 

(Stein wrote the libretto to an opera with music composed by Virgil Thomson entitled Four Saints in Three Acts, 1927-28.  She also wrote a libretto, often performed as an avant-garde play, called Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, 1938—but I think that apparent reference is inadvertent.)

I will also quote a few passages from one of the tour-stop reviews because it was the only one I read that had anything negative to say about GS³.  James Lardner’s Washington Post notice was generally laudatory, especially regarding Pat Carroll’s performance (the piece’s headline was: “On Stage: Fierce, Convincing ‘Gertrude Stein.’”)

The WaPo reviewer, who saw the show at Washington’s Arena Stage two months after it left the Provincetown, found that Martin’s script “succeeds in making Stein an absorbing and sympathetic figure,” but “is much less successful in its structure and selection of material.”

Carroll is constantly forced to jump from one subject to another . . . .  And there is no compelling dramatic reason behind Stein’s speaking to us from the mid-1930s: The story doesn’t build to any ’30s climax, and indeed sweeps through the ’20s . . . with alarming briskness.

Lardner, however, immediately returned to his complimentary assessment of the play, which he dubbed “a highly entertaining excursion to a unique time and place,” and especially Carroll’s acting, which, he proclaimed “is the bottom-line reason to see this show.”

In Carroll’s bio in the Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein program, the actress made a statement, part of which the Variety reviewer quoted.  The rest of Carroll’s thought reads: “personalizing history through Gertrude Stein is a fantasy come true.”  I’m thrilled that it did and I got to share in it.  It’s remained indelibly engraved on my memory for 43 years . . . and counting.

[Thinking about the possibility of other negative reviews of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein aside from a brief passage in the Washington Post notice, I wondered what John Simon might have written in New York magazine.  In my original searches, I never found a New York review, so I made a search specifically directed at finding one.

[It looks as if Simon may not have written a full review, but penned the blurb New York used in its theater listing for GS³.  It doesn't have his name attached, but it sounds like him and the abstract/citation on one database points to it if you look for “John Simon” and "Pat Carroll." 

[(Wouldn’t you know that the first use of the blurb in question—there was another text in the theater guide in earlier issues—appears in an issue that follows one that’s missing from the database of complete issues.  If there was a full review from which the blurb was excerpted, the frequent practice, it'd probably be in that missing issue.  I’ll try to remember to check in a library my next opportunity.)

[So, to complete the record, here’s what the “anonymous” critiquer of New York magazine said about Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein:

The Gertrude Stein that emerges is, unlike the title, far from triple—only a third.  She is less formidable, much more easygoing than the original.  The comedienne Pat Carroll plays her heroine with verve, variety, and finesse, but Marty Martin’s monodrama simplifies, falsifies, and vulgarizes the life and times and works of Ms. Stein.

[Assuming this is John Simon, I’m not sure how he would know “the original” Gertrude Stein—though he was 20 when she died.  I don’t know, though, that he was in Paris at the time.  We’ve heard in the testimony of people who knew, or at least met, her, that Stein presented a different face in person and in private than she did in her writing. 

[Besides, as Carroll and Martin both repeated, GS³ isn’t a history lesson, it’s theater.  It isn’t presenting historical truth, but theatrical truth—and, however the New York reviewer felt about Martin’s dramaturgy, he praised Carroll’s acting.]

Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute – Part 1

 

[As a tribute to actress Pat Carroll, who died last month, I’m presenting a hybrid post in two parts.  The first part will cover her obituary and a more detailed biography, focusing on her career.  Part 1 will conclude with a history of the play and Off-Broadway production Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein which I saw in 1980 and, which you’ll read, has stuck in my memory ever since.

[Part 2 of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute” will be a “recovery” of the report I might have written for GS³.  As with my real-time play reports, this one will end with a survey of the critical response to the production.  Part 2 will be published on Wednesday, 17 August.]

Comedic actress Pat Carroll, who had a seven-decade acting career on television, stage, and film, died at 95 on Saturday, 30 July, at her home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  The cause was pneumonia, for which she was being treated at her death.

Carroll began on the stage, making her professional début at the Brattle Theatre Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a 1947 summer stock production of Harold J. Kennedy’s A Goose for the Gander with Gloria Swanson.  She parlayed that into a long period as a game-show contestant and member of the casts of the popular variety shows on TV, then films (she débuted in 1948’s Hometown Girl) and the comedies, dramas, and musicals of TV’s “golden age.” 

By then she was a stage and screen mainstay, returning to the theater in what became her iconic performance as the title figure in the 1979 monodrama Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein by Marty Martin.

The success of GS³ made her not just a respected actor, but a sought-after performer and she made an artistic home in Washington, D.C., especially at the Shakespeare Theatre where she won three Helen Hayes Awards for her work. 

The Hayes Awards, recognizing excellence in professional theater in the Washington, D.C., area, were for her performances in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.  Carroll was also nominated for a Tony Award in her Broadway début in 1955, Catch A Star!

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein brought Carroll 1980’s Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Performance in an Off Broadway Play.

Carroll won an Emmy Award in 1957 for Caesar’s Hour, NBC’s live, hour-long television sketch-comedy program starring Sid Caesar.  The recording of GS³  won the 1981 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama.  In 1991, Carroll received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Siena College in Albany, New York.

In 2000, Carroll was part of the cast of Songcatcher that won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for their outstanding ensemble performance; Carroll was also nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female in the same film.

Carroll became beloved as an actress when she fulfilled a lifelong dream of doing a Disney movie by voicing the character of Ursula, the sea witch, in The Little Mermaid in 1989.  If Gertrude Stein was Carroll’s most emblematic role, Ursula was her best known—especially among young audiences.

Patricia Ann “Pat” Carroll was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 5 May 1927.  Her family moved to Los Angeles when Pat was five, and there she began performing in local stage productions.  She graduated from Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart High School and then attended the associated Immaculate Heart College (closed in 1981).  After hiring on with the United States Army as a “Civilian Actress Technician” in the mid-’40s, Carroll transferred to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

After graduating from Catholic University with a bachelor’s degree in 1949, Carroll began performing comedy in nightclubs and gained early experience with appearances at vacation resorts.  Her 1947 theatrical début with Swanson led to more than 250 stage productions.

The budding character actress married Lee Karsian (1925-91), a William Morris agent, in 1955, but the marriage ended in a divorce in 1976.  Carrol and her husband had three children: son Sean Karsian (1956-2009), and daughters Kerry Karsian (b. ca. 1958), a casting director, and Tara Karsian (b. 1965), an actress, screenwriter, and producer.

She made her off-Broadway début in the revue Come What May (Weidman Studio Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea) in 1950.  A talented singer, Carroll earned a 1956 Tony nomination for Catch a Star!, another revue, and then appeared in a number of regional and stock productions of such musicals as On the Town, Once Upon a Mattress, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Then the new entertainment medium of television discovered Carroll’s talents.  First came the variety shows like The Red Buttons Show (1953), The Saturday Night Revue (1954), and Caesar’s Hour (1954-57), which brought her Emmy Awards in 1957 and ’58.  Carroll also earned good reviews (and lasting renown) in the recurring part of Bunny Halper (1961-64), the wife of Danny Thomas’s nightclub manager, Charlie Halper (Sid Melton), on the sitcom The Danny Thomas Show.

Carroll’s TV trademark was her distinctive, infectious laugh, which made her a popular panelist on game shows like To Tell the Truth (1961), Password (1961-64), You Don't Say (1963-69), and I've Got a Secret (1972-73).  One description of that laugh is:

Pat Carroll’s laugh starts deep in her ample body, knocks her head back, and explodes joyously into the air.

In 1965, Carroll co-starred as Prunella, one of the wicked stepsisters, in the first TV remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella starring Lesley Ann Warren in the title role.  (On 25 April 2013, I posted “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” about the première production of the endearing TV musical.) 

When her television shows, the early ones of which were broadcast live, were on hiatus Carroll returned to the stage to recharge her batteries, as she put it.  Though live TV had some of the performer-spectator relationship, as well as the immediacy, of stage work, Carroll believed that theater was the only place where an actor had a connection to the audience.

In 1979, the actress’s career got a big boost with the monodrama Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, which garnered her multiple awards and excellent reviews.  Carroll commissioned the play and co-produced it (under the corporate name Sea-Ker Inc., named for her two oldest children) with the Circle Repertory Company, an Off-Broadway troupe in New York City.  (I’ll be writing in detail about this performance later in the post.)

Later, Carroll had recurring and regular roles on the last season of The Ted Knight Show (1986-87; retitled from Too Close for Comfort in its final season) and the Suzanne Somers sitcom She’s the Sheriff (1987-89).

Carroll had only limited success in film, including supporting roles in the slight comedies With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), her second big-screen appearance and Doris Day’s last, and The Brothers O’Toole (1973) with John Astin.  Late in her life, Carroll’s film work included Outside Sales (2006), Freedom Writers (2007), Nancy Drew (2007), Bridesmaids (2011), and BFFs (2014).

In the late 1980s, she became a popular choice for voice work on a number of animated films, largely for Disney.  The villainous Ursula in The Little Mermaid came in 1989 and Carroll’s rendition of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” became something of cult hit among the very young.  She did other voices in A Goofy Movie (1995) and following the turn of the millennium, Carroll gave voice to many Disney-related characters on screen, in video games, and on special projects.

The actress then returned to Broadway after 30 years to appear in the short-lived Dancing in the End Zone (1985; 15 previews and 28 regular performances).  That was followed by a revival of 1924’s The Show Off (1992; 26 previews and 45 regular performances) and Sophocles’ (by way of London’s Donmar Warehouse and Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre) Electra (December 1998-March 1999; 15 previews and 116 regular performances) in which she played the Chorus.

Carroll surprised her fans by taking on Shakespearean roles, earning consistent critical praise.  She won Helen Hayes awards for her interpretations of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (1 November-23 December 1986; Outstanding Supporting Actress, Resident Production), a production I saw as it happens, and Sir John Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (24 April-17 June 1990; Outstanding Lead Actress, Resident Production) for Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger (precursor to today’s Shakespeare Theatre Company).  

Carroll won another Helen Hayes award for the title role in Brecht’s Mother Courage, also for the renamed Shakespeare Theatre (1994 Outstanding Lead Actress, Resident Play).   A life member of The Actors Studio, other challenging stage roles over the years have included the title role in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (Shakespeare Theatre; 1996) and the Stage Manager in Our Town (Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland; 2001).

Still interested in comedy on occasion, the actress played the Reverend Mother in a number of adaptations of the wacky musical comedy Nunsense.  Branching out once again, Carroll took on directing, staging a musical version of Alice in Wonderland for Washington’s Kennedy Center’s children’s theater program in 1993—sort of “Carroll Doing Carroll” (though the Washington Post was quick to point out that there was “no relation, one assumes”).  Carroll remounted the show for a cross-country tour in 1994. 

Carroll helmed productions of Noel Coward’s Private Lives for the Interact Theatre Company at the Folger Theatre in Washington (1995) and George Furth’s The Supporting Cast (1995) for the Cape Playhouse (Dennis, Massachusetts), the Ogunquit Playhouse (Ogunquit, Maine), and the Westport Country Playhouse (Westport, Connecticut), as well.

Sometime in the early ’90s, Carroll moved to Cape Cod.  She was active in the Cape community, lending her talent to entertainments and fundraisers in towns all around mid-Cape, where she apparently had her home.  Oddly—though typically for the Cape—there was no obituary for her in the Cape Times at the time of this writing. 

(There’s an old quip about the slowness of Cape Codders to adopt as one of their own someone not born in Barnstable County.  An old man who originally came to the Cape from Boston as a small boy died after a very long life.  The headline of his obituary read: “Boston Man Dies.”) 

Forty-three years ago, when she was still performing GS³, Carroll said:

So, by the end of a career, I can look back and say, “I’ve done everything.”  That’s marvelous to say about life, for heaven’s sakes, much less a career.  Whether you’ve done it poorly or well, I think it’s the fact that you’ve done it that’s the most exciting thing.  I will have been fortunate enough to have done everything that I’ve wanted.  So any time the great producer in the sky wants to take me up for bigger casting, I’m ready to go.

Well, Carroll didn’t quite do everything in the entertainment field she wanted.  At the time of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, she said she’d never done a soap opera.  She didn’t want to return to TV, but she voiced the wish to someday do a soap.  She never got to.

Carroll had started on the idea that became Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein in 1975 when, recuperating from knee surgery, she began looking around for a woman she’d like to play in a one-woman show.  She eventually hit on Stein (1874-1946) and began reading her writings.

(A word about the typography of the play’s title: in many publications—reviews and other coverage—it’s written with commas and, at least in one instance, with slashes.  The way Marty Martin composed it, and the way it’s printed on the program cover, on the cover and title page of the published text, on the record album cover, and in advertisements is without any punctuation marks at all.

(I’m sure most readers will recognize that the repetitions of the name in the title is an invocation of Stein’s habit of doing that for emphasis, as in her famous line, “a rose is a rose is a rose.”  But Stein also had another habit in her writing: she eschewed punctuation—an occasional period, but few commas or question marks, or much of anything else.  Martin replicated that Steinian quirk in the title of his play—and I’ve respected that.)

After considerable reading and research—Carroll read not only Stein’s own works, but everything she could find by others who wrote about her—the actress was very engaged by the American expatriate writer and poet—but not for her writing.  Carroll had read some of her work in college and it hadn’t interested her much.  But now she read biographies of Stein and the famous woman’s personality, her life, fascinated Carroll. 

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, on 3 February 1874 to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants.  She was the fifth of five children; her brother Leo (1872-1947) was the next youngest.  When Stein was three, her family moved to Vienna and then to Paris.  

When Stein was 14, her mother died; three years later, her father died as well.  Stein’s eldest brother, Michael (1865-1938), moved his four siblings to San Francisco and in 1892 arranged for Gertrude and another sister, Bertha (1870-1924), to live with their mother’s family in Baltimore.

Stein attended Radcliffe College, the women’s college of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897, where she studied psychology with philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910).  After leaving Radcliffe with a bachelor of arts degree magna cum laude, she enrolled at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, where she studied medicine for four years, leaving in 1901.  Failing two courses, Stein didn’t complete the medical degree.

In 1903, Stein moved to Paris with Leo, an art critic and painter.  Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967) arrived in Paris from San Francisco in 1907, met Stein the day after she landed, and the two would remain partners throughout Stein’s life.  The brother and sister Stein took an apartment on the bohemian Left Bank at 27 Rue de Fleurus—Toklas moved in permanently in 1910—which soon became a gathering spot for many young artists and writers, the titans of modern Western culture.  

By 1913, Stein’s championship of Cubist painters and her increasingly avant-garde writing caused a split with Leo, who reverted to conventionalism and moved to Florence, Italy.  Her writing was profoundly affected by modern painting.  In her prose, images and phrases came together in surprising ways—similar to Cubist painting.  

Stein’s writing, characterized by its use of words for their associations and sounds rather than their meanings, received considerable interest from other artists and writers, but didn’t find a wide audience.  Until, that is, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was a best-seller.

The next year, Stein and Toklas returned to the States for the first time since they moved to Paris, for a lecture and reading tour of college campuses.  The young audiences—Stein was 60 by this time—was absorbed with this odd, new figure.  (This became a model for Pat Carroll’s performances in GS³.)  

Gertrude Stein died of cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 27 July 1946.  She was 72.  Alice B. Toklas lived another 20 years, dying in Paris at 89 on 7 March 1967.  She died in poverty and poor health and was buried next to Stein.  Her longtime partner had willed most of her estate to Toklas, including the art collection, but because their relationship had no legal standing, Stein’s family wrested the art from Toklas’s home when she was away.

Another enticement for Carroll, she’s acknowledged, was a fascination with the period of the ’20s in Paris.  Aside from the many Americans who were living there in those years, Carroll saw that it was a time of cross-fertilization of the arts. 

Painters, sculptors, writers, composers, musicians, and dancers all knew one another and socialized together, sharing their creative discoveries and experiments, Carroll felt.  GS³ is a kind of a look back at the old practices being displaced by modern ones, of the 19th century being overrun by the true beginning of the 20th in art and literature. 

Stein, herself, responded to what the Cubists were doing in painting and sculpture—the fragmentation, the stripping away of the conventional structure, and the use of a part to stand for the whole—and tried to employ the same impulse to writing.  “Strip the object so only the idea remains, that’s what I did with my writing,” says Stein in the play.  “Do with words what they are doing with painting.”

Carroll tried writing the script herself, then she decided she needed someone to do the playwriting.  She’d read two of Marty Martin’s bioplays, not yet professionally produced, and in 1976, hired the 26-year-old Texan to write the script. 

As it happened, Martin was working on a Stein play—but it had a full cast . . . and was four hours long.  (Martin’s scripts tended to be very long, which may be why he hadn’t had a professional production yet.)  Carroll convinced him to rewrite his play for a single actor and shorten it to 90 minutes.

The actress and the dramatist were collaborators, working by phone, tape, and letter to exchange ideas, but both she and he affirm that Martin wrote all the words, while Carroll advised on the dramatic direction and the format (to which director Milton Moss also contributed during development).

Living at the time on a farm in High Falls, near New Paltz in upstate-New York, she turned the barn into the “salon” of the Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Company.  It was filled with books by and about Stein, copies of doctoral theses, literary journals, and other odds and ends about the best-known salon‐keeper in literary history.

The text isn’t made up of Stein’s writings—aside from not especially caring for them, Carroll didn’t want to have to pay large sums in royalties for Stein’s words—but is drawn largely from her autobiography, deceptively titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and colorful anecdotes about her and her Paris salon told by her illustrious friends like Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin, James Joyce, Ambroise Vollard, Henri Rousseau, Isadora and Raymond Duncan—and, of course, Toklas, herself, Stein’s friend, cook, confidante, lover, muse, secretary, editor, and critic.  Most reviewers later declared that Martin and Carroll had captured Stein’s style and personality even without using quotations from her writing.

(A note about the Duncans: in the play, Stein remarks that the sandals she’s wearing were made by Isadora and Raymond Duncan.  Raymond [1874-1966] and his Greek wife used to dress in “classical” garb, including tunics and sandals.  Their son, Menalkas [1905-69], was required to do so, too, until he rebelled. 

(He apparently liked the sandals, though, and started making them to sell.  He opened the Duncan Sandal Shop in Provincetown, Cape Cod, which outlived him at least into the 1970s.  Duncan sandals, both real ones and knock-offs, were available all over the Cape.)

In the end, GS³ isn’t a scholarly or literary work, but a dramatic one.  It isn’t a reading of a writer’s works, but a theatrical presentation.  It’s also not a documentary or a role-play—Carroll doesn’t try to imitate Stein’s voice—but an actor’s (and playwright’s) impression of a character who happens to have been a real person. 

The actress referred to the character she played as “my Gertrude,” not in the sense of ownership, but as the particular version of the writer’s persona Carroll and her collaborators created.  As playwright Martin declared, “You can’t recreate Gertrude Stein anyway.  All you can do is try to share the sense of what she has done to you.”

Another revealing comment is by someone who knew Stein: actress, novelist, and playwright Anita Loos (1888-1981), who came backstage and admonished Carroll that in reality, “Gertrude Stein was a bitch.”  Then she added, “Anyway, you’re probably doing the Gertrude Stein she would like to have been.”

(Carroll may not have mimicked Stein’s voice, and she said she deliberately didn’t listen to any recordings of Stein or watch a recent documentary film, but reviewers of the production as well as the Caedmon recording attest that the actress caught the expatriate writer’s resonances nonetheless.)

The first draft of the pay, which was entitled Goodbye 27 Rue de Fleurus (a reference to Stein’s Paris apartment for 35 years and the setting for the play), was three hours long.  Martin and director Moss helped trim it to 90 minutes.  An early version of the play, which is performed in two acts, went on a small try-out tour in July 1977 to the University of Texas College of Fine Arts in Martin’s hometown of Austin.

On 4 and 5 May 1978, the play was tried out again at Pennsylvania State University in State College.  Then in February of ’79, the little troupe took the play to Seattle shortly before the New York première.  In Carroll’s initial conception, the Stein play was meant for university stages and concert performances, but it outgrew its intent—a sort of theatrical mission-creep.

[This concludes Part 1 of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute.”  Part 2 is ready to go and, as I said in my foreword, I’ll be posting it on 17 August.  I hope ROTters will return to this blog for the conclusion of my tribute to a wonderful actress.]

'Thom Pain (based on nothing)' (Signature Theatre Company)

Until 10 days ago, I’d only seen two of Will Eno’s plays, The Open House in 2014 and Wakey, Wakey in 2017.  (Reports on those performances are posted on Rick On Theater on 16 March 2014 and 24 March 2017, respectively.)  They were both quirky, interesting, surprising, and fun, and I put Eno on my list of writers on whom to keep tabs.  So when I saw that a revival of the 53-year-old playwright’s break-out play, Thom Pain (based on nothing), was to be part of the Signature Theatre Company’s 2018-2019 season, I included it among my subscription selections.  Diana, my usual theater companion (and my STC subscription partner) met at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Theatre Row on Friday night, 16 November, for the 7:30 performance in the Irene Diamond Stage of the intermissionless, 70-minute, one-man show.

The presentation is part of this season’s Legacy Program at Signature, which the theater bills as “a homecoming for past Playwrights-in-Residence,” showcasing premières of new works or revivals of older plays by writers who have had Residency 1 or Residency 5 seasons previously.  (Eno, the first “graduate” of Signature’s Residency 5 program, was a resident writer from 2012 to 2017.  The two plays I saw were presented during that tenure.)  The current revival of Thom Pain, directed by Oliver Butler (who also staged Open House) and starring Michael C. Hall (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Realistic Joneses; he’s probably best recognized for his eight seasons as the title character, the serial killer in Showtime’s Dexter) began previews on 23 October 2018 and opened on 11 November; it’s currently scheduled to close on 9 December (after two extensions from 25 November and 2 December).

The world première of Thom Pain (based on nothing), after a Launch Pad reading at the Soho Theatre in London, was at the Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Festival from 24 to 30 August 2004; the Soho Theatre Company production, directed by Hal Brooks with James Urbaniak as Thom Pain, won the First Fringe Award at the festival.  The production returned to London and the Soho Theatre for a regular run from 3 to 24 September 2004.  Thom Pain’s New York and U.S. première was at the Off-Broadway DR2 Theatre in Union Square from 1 February to 4 September 2005; Urbaniak was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for the production and Charles Isherwood proclaimed Eno in the New York Times as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”  Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  

Since then, there have been many revivals around the U.S. (Seattle Repertory Theatre; Dallas Theater Center; Theatre Wit of Chicago; Austin, Texas’s Hyde Park Theatre; Actor’s Express in Atlanta, and others) and the world (Finland, France, Israel, Holland, Norway, Portugal, China, Mexico, Germany, and more); the script has been translated into over a dozen languages.  The  current STC revival is the first in New York City since the 2005 début.  A filmed adaptation of Geffen Playhouse’s production of Thom Pain (based on nothing) starring Rainn Wilson (and also directed by Oliver Butler) was aired on the streaming service BroadwayHD in January 2018.  (The text of the monodrama is published by Oberon Books [as Thom Pain (based on nothing): Published with Other Monologues for Theatre, 2004], the Dramatists Play Service [2005], and the Theatre Communications Group [as Thom Pain (based on nothing): With Other Monologues for Theatre, 2018].)

I included a brief biography of Will Eno, along with a discussion of his dramaturgy, in my report on The Open House, noted earlier, but to bring it up to 2018, his play The Realistic Joneses was presented on Broadway in 2014, receiving a Drama Desk Special Award; it was named Best Play on Broadway by USA Today and best American play of 2014 by the New York edition of The Guardian.  The Open House won the Obie Award for Playwriting for its 2014 production at the Signature Theatre Company and the 2014 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play; the cast and Eno all won Drama Desk Award Special Awards for the production as well.  The citation, which was for both the Off-Broadway Open House and Broadway’s Realistic Joneses, read: "For two extraordinary casts and one impressively inventive playwright.”  Last June, New York Times theater writers Ben Brantley and Jesse Green included The Realistic Joneses in their list of “the best 25 of the last 25 years.”  Of Eno’s writing, Brantley and Green wrote:

A philosopher and a wisecracker, Mr. Eno is a playwright who favors ideas over plot.  He also makes space for the language that gets those ideas across, the crackle of a quip, the snap of an upturned cliché. 

At home, Eno and his wife, actress Maria Dizzia, now have a four-year-old daughter, Albertine.

There’s no plot per se to Thom Pain (based on nothing)—which began as a character study of American revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737-1809), then Eno’s concept shifted when he realized his own “present and past pains” were the better vehicle for his message.  Even an event-by-event description of the 70-minute play would be longer than the performance.

It’s a monologue that might be called stand-up Existentialism (a label coined by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times).  Variously described as a “Beckettian monologue of a tortured soul,” “a combination of a Samuel Beckett-like meditation on the absurdist vicissitudes of life and a caustic monologue by one of those lesser late-night talk-show hosts,” “a mixture of a Shakespeare comedy and a (Samuel) Beckett piece,” “a stand-up routine that self-destructs as it goes along,” “a hybrid of stand-up com[edy], motivational speak[ing] and storytell[ing],” and “a Rorschach test . . . that never clarifies the point,” the play wanders with apparent aimlessness (but carefully planned by Eno) from subject to subject like a mental pinball.  An Absurdist mental pinball.  Describing the work, the playwright says: “Thom Pain is trying to tell his life story and gets interrupted by the fact that he’s alive.”

Eno has added a note on the Wikipedia page for Thom Pain that explains that it

is painstakingly constructed to create the effect of humanness in action . . . .  Because of his own defects, strengths, anxieties, and personality, he finds himself asking major questions about human life and how we define it, narrate it, value it, and ultimately live it.

In a program note for the Queensland Theatre Company (South Brisbane, Australia) production of the play, the playwright dismissed the notion of that Thom Pain is a playwriting experiment.  He said: “I guess I just think of it as a play.  Or, to be honest, more of a ‘thing’, I guess . . . I don't know.’"

The bare Diamond Stage is full of junk—not trash or garbage, but odd pieces of furniture, drop cloths, ladders, plastic sheeting on the wall, protective netting on the ceiling, and other odds-and-ends, as if it were a storage space for the detritus, discards, and left-overs of life.  It might be a basement somewhere (there are no windows) or an abandoned building.  It might be the theater itself, under reconstruction but the work has been halted.  Up right is a door to another room inside which is more stuff.  (The costumes and sets were designed by Anita Yavich and Amy Rubin; Jen Schriever's lighting leaves pockets of dark into and out of which Pain moves.)  The lights go to black. 

Pain (Hall), the play’s sole character, enters in the darkness—we can hear his shuffling footsteps—and after some preliminary feints, he asks, “Do you need to see me to hear me?” adding “If so, sorry.  Not yet.”  Then the lights go on and Hall’s standing down rightish, dressed in dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie.  He wears glasses which he’s cleaning with a handkerchief. 

Eventually Pain begins to tell the audience a story about a little boy writing in a puddle with a violin bow.  The story will reappear, but at the end of the introduction, Pain tells the spectators to go fuck themselves.  Hall’s remoteness makes it clear that the audience’s wishes are not Pain’s concern.

The tale of the little disabled boy whose dog is electrocuted in a puddle is just one of many bleak images Pain, a man who himself has suffered pain, imparts to his viewers as he muses about the awfulness of existence: “You just try to keep on living but it all seems so useless,” and “Maybe I was just born with a headache.”

Then he breaks into questions about life (“I disappeared in her and she, wondering where I went, left.”) interspersed with a bunch of non sequiturs: “It’s sad, isn’t it? This dead horse of a life that we beat all the wilder, all the harder, the deader it gets? . . .  On the other hand, there are some really nice shops in the area.”  Is the deconstructed setting a visualization of Pain’s disjointed mind?

At the end of the performance, Pain says, “I’m done with this.  Important things will happen, now.  I promise. . . .  I know this wasn’t much, but let it be enough.  Do.”  Then he adds, “Boo.  Isn’t it great to be alive?”  

That’s about the best I can do, people.  As you can gather, Thom Pain was a decidedly peculiar experience.  I have no idea what to make of it!  It sounded to me like a parody of Spalding Gray on acid channeling Ionesco or Beckett.  If you can conceive of that.  I’d need to read (and, probably reread) the script to unpack this play—and that’s not really any fun, and it’s decidedly anti-theatrical.

I can’t think of a way to report on this play.  I can’t even describe it much beyond what I just said—much less evaluate it or interpret it.  So, I’ve decided to approach this report from a completely different angle.  (Check what I did for Perfect Crime, an awful mystery play Diana and I saw seven years ago.  I couldn’t write about that play, either, so I decided to write about how the producers kept it on stage for what then had been almost 25 years despite how bad it is.  That report was posted on Rick On Theater on 5 February 2011.)

Taking Ben Brantley’s New York Times “review” as a starting point, I’ll examine reviewing a play like Thom Pain.  What Brantley did, which really ticked me off, was write about how this production differed from the Soho Theatre production he saw in London in 2004.  (Don’t confuse London’s Soho Theatre with New York City’s Soho Repertory Theatre.)  Maybe he just couldn’t come up with anything cogent to say about the STC mounting, or he didn’t want to write this review.  (I know—this is similar to my own situation.  But, first, I’m not being paid to render a judgment of the shows I see—that’s not my job, but it is Brantley’s and all who call themselves “drama critic.”  Second, I’m not posting “reviews” on Rick On Theater; I’m posting “reports,” and I reserve the right, as this is my blog, to cover the shows I see from any perspective that strikes me as interesting.)

Brantley wasn’t the only review-writer to use the earlier production of Thom Pain (based on nothing) as a yardstick by which to measure Butler’s version for the Signature Theatre Company.  (Other than Brantley, though, all of the others based their comparisons on the play’s 2005 New York début.)  The Times reviewer, however, was the only one I read who based essentially his whole critique on the comparison.

On 1 December 2010, I posted ”Dante update neither divine nor comedy,” a film review by Kyle Smith of the New York Post.  Smith had found a clever way to write about a movie he obviously didn’t want to bother reviewing, Jackass 3D.  What Brantley did wasn’t close! 

In my introduction to my repost of Smith’s review, I wrote:

I got the sense that Smith didn’t really want to review Jackass.  It’s his job and he was handed the assignment, so he couldn’t just blow it off, and writing a “serious” review would have been dull—both to do and to read, I imagine. . . .  But Smith found a way to do something interesting while still fulfilling his responsibility: telling us what he thought about the movie.

What Smith had done was find references and parallels in Jackass 3D’s “trademarked gross-out shenanigans” to Dante’s Divine Comedy, surely one of the most classic poems of all classic literature.  (He even found parallels between Johnny Knoxville, the movie’s producer, and the medieval Italian poet himself, Dante Alighieri.)  The mismatch was surely meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but Smith never addressed that juxtaposition.  He treated the comparison as legit, even upbraiding Hollywood for sneaking in so much surreptitious education into a boorish popular entertainment.  (I  congratulated Smith for his “delicious—and effective—use of irony.”)

In my afterword, I pointed out, “What gets me most here is how Smith, even while taking a humorous approach that clearly is meant to make fun of the movie itself, still manages to tell us what he thinks of it (even though, until the last sentence, he doesn’t directly state his opinion).”  I concluded: “I think this may be one of the best reviews of a bad movie (in the opinion of the reviewer, of course) I’ve ever seen.”  I added at the end of the intro, “There’s a lesson here for all writers . . . who are required to write about something in which they find little of interest or value.”  (ROTters who are interested—and I strongly recommend this—should read Smith’s review: https://nypost.com/2010/10/15/jackass-3ds-dante-update-neither-divine-nor-comedy/.)  Brantley didn’t learn it.

I feel Brantley’s review of Thom Pain, which I’ll try to summarize later, was a cop-out.  He dodged his responsibility and revisited an experience he already digested 14 years ago.  He opened his review by stating: “Audiences already familiar with Will Eno’s ‘Thom Pain (based on nothing) . . . may find this Stygian space roomier and less oppressive than they remembered.”  Well, that’s not me.  The Timesman went on to describe the STC revival in terms of Soho’s première and Hall’s performance with respect to James Urbaniak’s.  Cop-out.  Unhelpful cop-out. 

What pissed me off was that, not having seen that London production, I have no way to understand what Brantley thought of the Signature version or how he felt about it.  For me, it was a meaningless review because he assumed knowledge or experience I didn’t have; I had no frame of reference.  It’s a version of the blind man and the elephant—me being the blind man and the elephant being the play.

As far as I can find, Brantley didn’t publish a notice on either the 2004 Soho Theatre mounting or its subsequent 2005 transfer to Off-Broadway in New York City so I also wasn’t sure what Brantley’s opinion of his original experience was, either.  That left me with a vague impression of one experience compared with a vague impression of another.  A double whammy.

There’s also the fact that Brantley based his opinion of the STC production on a previous experience, but since I’d be seeing the play (like many in the audience, I imagine, more than a few of whom would have been pretty young 14 years ago) for the first time, that kind of assessment is useless.  As far as I’m concerned, Signature’s is the definitive interpretation of the play—their staging is how the play’s supposed to be done.  (I don’t know how involved Eno was in the STC revival, but since they promote the notion of playwright engagement in rehearsals, and Eno is a former resident writer at the theater, I’d guess he was involved.)  I want to know how Butler and Hall stack up, not against another director-actor team but against their own goals and aims for this presentation.  “Comparisons are odorous” as Shakespeare’s Dogberry proclaimed.

This kind of reviewing really isn’t fair to me and theatergoers like me.  It tells me little about the play I’m going to see and fills my head with extraneous information I don’t need, don’t want, and can’t use.  At the same time, even though this isn’t a reviewer’s responsibility, it’s not fair to the actors, director, and designers who worked on the current production.  Director Butler and actor Hall aren’t trying to make a comparable version of the Soho’s Thom Pain; they’re trying to make the best performance of the play they can based solely on Eno’s script and their artistic imaginations and creativity.  If Brantley didn’t think their interpretation works, that’s fair.  He should say so—and, if he can, say why he didn’t think so.  But simply saying, as Brantley essentially does, that the STC revival is different from the Soho première doesn’t do me any good and does Hall, Butler, his team, and the Signature Theatre a great disservice.

Okay, let’s look at the overall critical record.  Based on 21 published notices (as of 24 November), Show-Score gave Thom Pain (based on nothing) an average score of 76, which is middling in my experience with the review compiler.  Of the tallied reviews, 76% were positive and 24% were mixed; there were no negative notices in the Show-Score survey.  The highest score was one 95 for More Than The Play Blog, backed by two 90’s (WNYC radio and Front Row Center); the lowest a 55 for DC Theatre Scene, preceded by three 60’s (New York Times, TheaterScene.net, and New York magazine/Vulture).  My review round-up will comprise 17 notices.

In that New York Times review (which received a Show-Score rating of 60, the site’s second lowest), Brantley described the play as a “full-frontal attack on the audience that Mr. Eno had engineered” and “a sustained, cryptic, circular apologia pro vita sua” that is “70 uninterrupted minutes” of Pain “wallowing in bitter self-consciousness.”  In comparison to the 2004 London version, Branltey found that Oliver Butler’s revival “lets some fresh air and even a sliver of sunlight into the nocturnal depths of its title (and only) character’s imagination” and Hall’s Pain “appears as less of a lost cause than he once did” in James Urbaniak’s hands.  “I can’t honestly say that this transformation is for the good,” the Times reviewer proclaimed.  (I’m not going to recap all of Brantley’s characterizations of the Soho Theatre staging.  Interested ROTters can read the review for themselves at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/theater/thom-pain-review-michael-c-hall.html.) 

In 2004, Brantley acknowledged, “I may have wanted to take a shower immediately, but I was also electrified”; however, he found the play “seems to have shed its ability to shock.”  The Timesman posited that “that’s partly because we have had a chance to become accustomed to the skewed perspective of Mr. Eno,” but added that “this relative tameness is also a matter of Mr. Butler and Mr. Hall’s interpretation.”  In Hall’s performance, Pain’s “narrative of self-catechism and self-laceration has the carefully modulated quality of a classically trained actor doing an intense audition piece.”  Brantley felt that “this Thom is seldom lovably loathsome enough to make us squirm” and therefore, “the script now registers as the product of a restless and very talented young dramatist, showing off and playing with the influences he has absorbed.” 

“It’s Mr. Eno’s love for and grasp of rhythmic language that most impress here,” affirmed the Times writer.  “The ghost of Beckett still hovers, but so do, just as visibly, the specters of T. S. Eliot, Edward Albee and Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man.”  In conclusion, Brantley wrote: “Thom’s angst may feel a trifle sophomoric now, like something he might grow out of.  But his way with words, and that of the man who created him, is already deliciously ripe.”

“‘So what was that all about?’” Max McGuinnes[s] quoted his companion at the performance in the U.S. edition of the Financial Times.  “In lieu of an answer to that question,” the FT review-writer continued, he described what he saw on stage.  (Sounds a little like my dilemma, doesn’t it?)  Of Pain’s monologue (a taste of which I’ve tried to supply), McGuinness observed, “It would be wrong to call these musings stream-of-consciousness since they do not flow so much as limp along in fits and starts.”  The reviewer found, “At just over an hour, Thom Pain goes on a bit too long”; however, “the play remains mostly entertaining thanks to Eno’s deadpan humour and some playful audience interaction, which leavens its knowing solipsism.”  Noting that monologues challenge a director to decide what, aside from talking, the actor should do on stage, McGuinness deemed “Butler’s stripped-down staging acquits itself admirably on that front.”  Hall, he felt, “seems at once pitiable yet faintly intimidating.  And by the end, we still only have a hazy idea of who he really is.”  The FT writer’s overall assessment of the STC Thom Pain was: “What we see here is a man struggling, without much success, to hold it all together and make sense of everything that has happened to him.  Which is what life and theatre are all about.”

Sara Holdren of New York magazine and Vulture, whose notice also scored a 60, declared that “I found myself recoiling from [the play’s] aggressive flippancy.  There’s something brittle and deceptive about Thom Pain’s systemic self-deprecation.”  Thom Pain “gropes tentatively, and I believe sincerely, after compassion and beauty, but it cuts itself off at the knees over and over again with its paralyzing fear of commitment—to earnestness, to theatricality, to anything bigger than the self in pain.”  Holdren insisted, “Thom Pain is not Beckett.  Its heart is still about three sizes too small and its ego is bigger than it thinks.”  She reported, “The pleasure of the production is watching Hall in moments of simple, full presence.”  But she continued, “The problem is that what Thom Pain wants to be and what the play is are two different things.”  Holdren explained that she only knows what Eno wants the play to be because she’s read interviews, notes, and analyses of it.  “Meanwhile, the actual experience of sitting through Thom Pain feels like watching someone blow up one tiny, feeble balloon after another and then contemptuously pop them all, one by one.” 

She gave plenty of examples and illustrations from the text of the way “Thom is constantly appealing to our sympathy while simultaneously resorting to snide escape hatches.”  In the end, however, Holdren felt, “I don’t want to be cruel, to dismiss the scale or weight of the character’s suffering, but that’s the kind of gaze that sees the entire world in its own navel.”  The play’s “endless cycle of reaching and running starts to feel self-defeating in ways that go past intention,” she found, and “it’s also addicted to a coldness, a nonchalance that too often exhibits the very same fear it would like to examine.”  She ends by lamenting, “I feel for Eno’s poor Thom . . ., but there are limits to sympathy when its object, for all his trying, still possesses very limited courage.”

. 

In National Review, Kyle Smith (apparently the same writer who composed the Jackass notice discussed earlier) started his review by describing encountering a man in a bar who closely resembles the Thom Pain of Eno’s play.  The NR writer then noted:

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?

“Michael C. Hall . . . 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,” Smith reported. “Thom is playing games with us, like a jaded, WASP Andy Kaufman.”  The NR reviewer confessed, “Eno’s words made me laugh intermittently,” but added that “the intentional shapelessness of the play vexed me.”  His last word was: “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.”

Helen Shaw, describing Thom Pain as an “elliptical, existential monologue” in Time Out New York, asserted that “Eno’s text is a wonderfully light thing—a butterfly’s erratic passage through a man’s mind as he tries to narrate both his past . . . and the constant, irritating demands of the theatrical present.”  She explained, “Eno so exactly reflects a scattered self to us that he amplifies the scattering. When you try to recall Thom Pain, your thinking can't penetrate it; it's like trying to shine headlights into a blizzard.”  Director Butler “has given it a very handsome and polished revival,” but Shaw found that the play “has to fight a little too hard to be heard in the” large Diamond house.  Hall, she felt, “performs Eno’s script with immense charm (if not danger), but it’s a piece that requires the intimacy of a mind moving very close to yours.”  The TONY review-writer observed, “You can almost see the lightning leaping between Hall and the first four rows, but he has to cover such a huge space and so many people that the effect is necessarily intermittent.” 

In the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck’s “Bottom Line” was “Hall delivers a riveting turn that makes this challenging play fully accessible.”  He quipped, “If Samuel Beckett and James Joyce had a literary love child, it would be Will Eno’s Thom Pain (Based on Nothing),” which Scheck described as “an existential stand-up routine, delivered by a man riffing on life’s disappointments and absurdities in alternately comic and bitter tones,” but it “never really coheres into a discernible storyline, which will certainly prove frustrating for those looking for a linear narrative.”  Nonetheless, the HR reviewer asserted that “the play’s deliciously clever wordplay and theatrical inventiveness provide myriad rewards for the more open-minded.”  The STC revival “particularly highlights the work’s strengths, thanks to [Hall’s] formidable charisma and charm.”  Scheck reported, “It’s all very dense and requires intense concentration, and you may find your mind wandering at times.  But it doesn’t take long for it to spring back to attention, thanks to the brilliantly inventive language and such memorable phraseology.”  Hall, the review-writer found, “is mesmerizing throughout” and “makes the piece accessible and engaging.”  Scheck concluded that “Thom Pain may not be for all tastes, but adventurous theatergoers are unlikely ever to experience it in a more riveting presentation.”

Marilyn Stasio, calling Thom Pain  “unsettling” in Variety, said that “the play was deliberately designed to make us uncomfortable about all the supposedly immutable verities, from the objective reality of our common language to truth itself.”  Stasio affirmed that “Eno’s intellectually dizzying drama is still a dangerous thrill.”  The Variety reviewer explained:

Although Eno was a protégé of Edward Albee, his absurdist sensibility reaches further back to Albee’s less playful philosophical mentor, Samuel Beckett.  This non-linear narrative—an explosive outburst of dazzling wordplay concocted of unfinished anecdotes, unstructured asides, and stream-of-consciousness ramblings—is decidedly, triumphantly Beckettian.

Hall, she reported, is “persuasive” and his “deadly deadpan is deeply funny, in an unnerving way.”  Stasio found that he “tries his level best to be true to this self-absorbed character; but he just can’t help himself.  He’s a fine actor, but a personable one, much too likable to pull off the character’s blinding, self-regarding narcissism.”  She concluded, “If you look it in the eye, Eno’s soul-searching monologue is nothing less than a searing meditation on the meaning of life.   But if you look at it sideways, it’s more of a sick joke.”

On WNYC radio, an NPR outlet in New York City, Jennifer Vanasco warned that “nothing much happens in this 70 minutes of seemingly aimless ruminating.”  Then she added, “And yet there’s so much beauty and humanity in it.”  Pain’s narrative “should be sentimental or sad or feel manipulative, but it’s not and it doesn’t,” reported Vanasco in her review that scored a 90 on Show-Score.  “Partly this is because of Eno’s beautiful and eccentric verbal imagery,” she explained, “and the way he undercuts each perfect word picture with eerie tragedy.”  Hall, the reviewer felt, “brings out the dark poetry of this play.  He is ingratiating without ever being fully knowable, esoteric while still grounded in his body.  He’s funny, charming and completely believable.”  She summed up by observing, “This is an astoundingly intimate show.  It’s a direct look into someone’s unfiltered brain—sometimes wandering, ugly and shallow, while at other times focused, lovely and profound.”

Show-Score’s highest-rated review, a 95, was Domenick Danza’s notice on More Than The Play, in which the reviewer declared:

The subtleties are astounding in Will Eno’s Thom Pain (Based on Nothing).  This play tells a captivating tale of loss of innocence, finding love, losing love, and maintaining hope.  Mr. Eno plays with words in this seventy-minute, one-character play that vividly depict the dichotomy of life’s journey.  His use of language brilliantly paints the landscape of emotion that floods the turning point events that define a life.  

Butler’s direction “seamlessly connects moment to moment, pulling truth to the surface of this distinctive theatrical work that is rich in subtext.”  Danza felt that Hall “maintains composure and distance, while engaging the packed house on an emotional level” and “evokes a sense of empathy from the audience.”  In the end, Danza found, “This play is a unique and intimate experience that will speak exclusively to each person who sees and hears it.  Don’t miss it!” 

Once again, New York Stage Review posted two notices.  Elysa Gardner asserted, “Thom Pain is . . . something of a magic act . . .—a bleakly comic, brutally detailed study of human frailty and suffering that somehow . . . becomes life-affirming.”  Calling it a “significantly meandering 75-minute monologue of a play” and a “ruminative monodrama,” Michael Sommers labeled Thom Pain “a journey through the existential tangles of one middle-aged man’s mind.”  Sommers was the second reviewer to report that the Diamond stage “is not so conducive to an intimate solo show,” but he added that “Butler’s supportive production and Hall’s intriguing presence usually are able to bridge the distance.”

On Talkin’ Broadway, James Wilson thought that Thom Pain, which he dubbed a “discursive, confounding, and invigorating monologue,” “demonstrates the futility of words and the limitations of language to connect thought with feeling, experience with reflection, and the individual with the world.”  Wilson asserted, despite the difficult personality of his narrator, that “Eno has created a highly entertaining, poignant, and intellectually stimulating evening.”  He affirmed, “Under Oliver Butler's direction, this is also a master class in comedy” and “Hall is outstanding.”  (Unlike the other reviewers who felt that the Diamond’s large stage was a drawback, Wilson found that the “larger space intensifies the feelings of isolation.”)  In the end, the TB reviewer advised, “The most effective way to experience the play is to give oneself over to it and luxuriate in the moments of linguistic playfulness and emotional catharsis.”

“In its own deliberately aimless way, Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) is a profoundly existential work,” observed Kenji Fujishima on TheaterMania, “with Pain’s struggle to give his own life meaning peeking through the numerous bits of trickery and wordplay he employs to avoid confronting the big questions.”  The TM review-writer explained, “Because so much of the interior drama in Eno’s play lies in what Thom Pain doesn’t say, it’s up to the performer to locate and transmit the psychological desperation between the lines” and continued that “this is where director Oliver Butler’s new production falls short.”  He felt that “a sense of pained inner life is lacking in Hall’s interpretation, with the actor seemingly prizing speed over depth in delivering his character’s ramblings, skating right over his character’s tragic pathos as a result.”  Fujishima asserted, “The experience of watching Thom Pain is akin to chasing after smoke.”  In conclusion, the TM reviewer reported that “this new production leaves us feeling more like we’ve gone on an entertaining roller-coaster ride through a man’s mind than truly gotten a glimpse into his agonized soul.  More than anything, this Thom Pain unsettles us less in its evocations of existential desire than in the sense that this material has much more to yield emotionally than it lets on.”

On CurtainUp, Charles Wright, whose review scored a 65, reported that “Thom’s recollections, though colorfully phrased, are often cryptic, with a seeming randomness that guarantees the audience occasional surprise if little in the way of suspense.”  (After quoting Isherwood’s 2005 New York Times praise of Thom Pain, Wright wondered “how Eno . . . might have fared—and what course his career might have taken—had Isherwood not been on the Times theater desk 13 years ago.”)  Having seen the 2005 production, Wright found, “The play struck me then, and strikes me now, as intriguing on the surface, with what’s beneath having only a glancing connection to lived experience.”  In comparison, he felt that “the 2018 Thom Pain is no more satisfying; but the magnified scale of this production suits the grandiosity of Eno’s exercise in synthetic Beckettry.”  The CU reviewer concocted a decidedly unusual finale for his assessment:

The fact that Thom Pain (based on nothing) is getting this superb revival suggests that there’s a sizable audience that will share Charles Isherwood’s enthusiasm for Eno’s Beckett-inflected navel-gazing.  Others, though, are bound to identify with the hapless audience member to whom Hall, as poor Mr. Pain, says, “If I were you, I’d be sick of this already.  I’d feel restless.  I’d feel like eating or urinating.”  Or, perhaps, be wishing for an intermission to permit a discreet exit. 

Joel Benjamin of TheaterScene.net was another reviewer who not only compared the Butler-Hall Thom Pain with the Brooks-Urbaniak production but found the new one a shadow of the original version.  Benjamin based his objections largely on the differences between Hall’s Pain and Urbaniak’s.  (He did complain about the “overzealous production” in the Diamond Stage.)  Hall, the TS reviewer thought, “is a fine actor who keeps the audience fascinated, but he turns the play into a standup routine.”  He asked, “[W]hy spend an hour-plus with a pleasant, slightly irritating person [Hall’s Pain] when you could just as easily be moved, shocked and titillated by a borderline lunatic [Urbaniak] (knowing full well that the relationship would last only a finite period).  Which is the better theatrical experience?”  Benjamin also found that Butler “gives Hall great leeway, making for a relaxed atmosphere, rather than a pacing-in-a-prison-of-his-own-making presentation.”

New York Theatre Guide’s David Walters told us, “At the beginning of the play, Thom says that he doesn’t like magic, but just as nothing is everything, ultimately this is a play all about magic.  The magic of human interaction.”  Walters reported, “The thoughts and observations falling out of [Pain’s] mind are not linear and dance from avoidance, to gallows humor, to deep profundity that will leave you searching those parallels in your own life.”  The NYTG writer characterized Eno’s writing as “a deep poetry . . ., a poetry of reflection, judgement and the bitter irony of what befalls us as we grumble, stumble and tumble through our lives.”

On DC Theatre Scene, which received Show-Score’s lowest rating at 55, Jonathan Mandell (whose review also appears on his blog, New York Theater) quipped, “Like a boxer faking out an opponent, Michael C. Hall as Thom Pain plays tricks on the audience.”  Mandell then observed, “But a prizefighter feints to win the match,” asking “What’s the point of the 70 minutes of  the mild audience abuse, self-conscious digressions and interruptions, deliberately unfunny jokes and funny non-sequiturs, bleak stories, and self-pitying effusions that make up Thom Pain (based on nothing) . . .?”  Answering his own question, the DCTS reviewer stated, “The easy out would be to answer that a good performance at least keeps our attention.”  He surmised, “Those theatergoers who have seen a previous production are likely to be disappointed by the Off-Broadway revival at the Signature.”  Mandell admitted, “I struggle to see anything profound in Thom Pain,” though “I can’t deny Eno’s sly wordplay.”  Still, the review-writer asserted, “For Thom’s jousts and jabs to feel like something more than random cleverness and intermittent entertainment, the actor must somehow show us an interior life that’s seething, longing, striving,  bursting with sadness and anger and resentments and pain that he’s trying to mask.”  As his final comment on the play and the character, Mandell wrote, “When [Pain] asks, ‘Does it scare you?  Being face to face with the modern mind?’ your answer might be: If only.”

I peeked at some past reviews of  the original production of Thom Pain in 2004/05 and some of the earlier revivals, and they all left me just as confused as the STC performance itself.  Still, it’s astounding how laudatory most of them were!  I wonder if there’s an “Emperor’s New Clothes” dynamic operating—no one wants to admit they don’t know what the hell Eno was on about.  

[When I was but a lad, back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, one of the comedians we used to listen to—they were on TV variety shows (anybody remember those?) and we bought the albums and listened to them over and over until we knew the routines by heart—did a bit on the plays of writers like Harold Pinter.  It might have been Shelley Berman, but if not, it was one of his contemporaries.  Anyway, after talking about these plays in which the characters struggle and fail to communicate, the comic raised his voice and proclaimed, “I think that people who can’t communicate should just shut up!”  Of course, if that had happened, about three-quarters of modern drama would cease to exist.  Nonetheless, I think of that line maybe once every three or four months.  This was one of those times.]