• Thom Pain (based on nothing)
• By Will Eno
• Directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner
• Produced by Rep Stage
• Reviewed by Tim Treanor

If, as Charles Isherwood famously observed, Will Eno is the Samuel Beckett of the Jon Stewart generation, then Thom Pain (based on nothing) is his Krapp’s Last Tape. Krapp, reflecting his playwright’s reclusive preferences, told his story into a tape recorder but Thom Pain (Timothy Andrés Pabon), reflecting the sensibilities of the Jon Stewart generation, requires an audience.

And his story is: story failure. Imagine Martin McDonagh’s Katurian, seen most recently being tried for his sins in Studio’s The Pillowman, liberated and permitted to tell his nasty little stories to an audience of grown-ups in Howard County, and you have Thom Pain to the letter. Katurian taught children that there were no happy endings, but Thom Pain teaches us that there are no endings at all, and that each story goes on interminably, events – sometimes awful events – happening at random without cause or effect.

And so he tells us the story of a young boy in a cowboy outfit – shorts, regular shoes, no cowboy boots, no socks – writing with a stick in a puddle of water. Soon there are dead dogs, bad haircuts, masturbation, a job in the morgue, falling in love (“‘You’ve changed!’ she told me on the night we met,” he says in one of Eno’s many mindbending asides, all of them tossed off with casual precision by Pabon), separating from his beloved for reasons which he forgot or never knew, and finally the present moment, where he finds himself inexplicably talking to a roomful of strangers, all of whom are vaguely afraid of him.

Perhaps they are afraid of him because not only his story but his manner of presentation are unmoored from any hint of rationality or linearity. “Imagine a newly-blue sky,” he instructs the audience, using a familiar storytelling technique. “Imagine a bird. Now, go – ” and here he tells the audience to perform an anatomically impossible act.

All of this could be cold, inaccessible – even boring. That it is not is largely the responsibility of Pabon, and of Lee Mikeska Gardner’s crisp direction. Pabon gives Thom Pain a jumpy personality in which rage, fear and heartbreak lie as close to the surface as viscera, and he consistently gives us the impression that the laughs, far from being cheap, are being paid for in blood. Harold Burgess’ fine lighting design helps make Eno’s dialogue, as strange as it sometimes is, seem as natural as pain, and based on everything.

Toward the beginning of the play, Thom Pain tells a joke which begins “a horse walked into a bar.” After telling the joke – or mistelling it, since it comes out as a horrible tragedy – he says, “it’s funny because it’s true.” Thom Pain (based on nothing) is not for everyone, but if you can understand that it’s funny because it’s true, it might be for you.

• Running Time: 85 minutes (no intermission)
• When: Wednesdays through Sundays until April 13. Wednesdays and Thursdays are at 7.30; Fridays and Saturdays are at 8. There are 2.30 matinees on Saturdays and Sundays.
• Where: Howard Community College, Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, Maryland.
• Tickets: $17-$25, with discounts for seniors (60 and over)

More information or to order: Call 481.772.4900 or go to the website.