'Thom Pain,' a Slippery Ride

Rep Stage's Quirky Monologue Cuts to the Heart of the Blues

Hang on, there -- wait, it's a play . . . maybe . . .

(Sigh)

Ready now: This, in the fits and starts of a man who's too shattered to get it together, is "Thom Pain (based on nothing)," the 2005 Pulitzer-nominated play that's bound to annoy some and enrapture others. This intriguing but slippery 80-minute monologue is anything but conventional. It begins in the dark and lingers there, with actor Timothy Andres Pabon lighting a match and letting it burn to nothingness.

How intriguing you find gesture may indicate how well you take to this exercise, for playwright Will Eno maintains a teasing, tenuous relationship with the audience all night. For instance, do you want a story?

"Yes," someone said from the seats Saturday night at Columbia's Rep Stage, where this delicate play is getting an intelligent and extremely sympathetic staging. But the story keeps dancing away. Thom Pain -- very bright, oddly playful and deeply cynical -- begins to tell a tale, a vivid one. A boy, a dog, just outlines really. But Eno's prose is sharp enough to get you going.

Eno's sensibility, or at least that of the bruised figure onstage, is bitter enough to knife the scenario (and others like it) in its cradle. At which point Pabon might saunter into the audience, chatting with a patron or asking for a spotlight as he explores the far corner of Rep's Black Box Theatre.

Among other things, these forays into the crowd let you monitor how the show's going, and it's unsurprisingly polarizing. Some people hang on every word, happily going with the heady linguistic flow and twirling in the eddies, while others stare crossly at their watches as Pabon's restless Pain switches gears, ginning up hopes of a raffle (really) and elaborately looking up "fear" in the dictionary.

That fat book and a chair are all that is on the stage. It's a lean show but a highly stylized performance, with light and sound smoothly tweaking the mood as Pabon consistently engages the viewers. Eno's metatheatrics -- yanking the narrative rug out from under us, contemplating the nature of our time together -- are almost painfully self-aware. But painful self-awareness is part of what the flitting, pondering show's about.

Reports of the acclaimed New York production described a brainy affair presided over by a puckish intellectual, but under Lee Mikeska Gardner's direction, Pabon comes at this angular script softly and with a ton of heart. He's dressed casually in jeans and sport coat, and while the character's thoughts are often arch and ironic. And Pabon is more plainly hurt than aloof and dry. (Seems there was a woman.) This may be an abstract version of the blues, but in Pabon's vulnerable performance, it's blues nonetheless.

As in "Bad Dates," the solo show by Theresa Rebeck that the busy Gardner directed on the other end of Route 108 (it opened March 19 at the Olney Theatre Center), affable acting is framed in an understated, assured production. The plays could've been a festival: the bold (female?) fabric of "Dates" and the slender existential (male?) thread of "Pain." Or Struggling Singles.

Or narrative difference: The effusive "Dates" keeps winking at you, while "Pain," by design, is a poke in the eye.

Thom Pain (based on nothing), by Will Eno. Directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner. Lighting design, Harold F. Burgess II; costumes, Melanie Clark; sound, Chas Marsh. Through April 13 at the Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center at Howard Community College, 10901 Little Patuxent Pkwy., Columbia. Call 410-772-4900 or visit http://www.repstage.org.