Thom Pain Reviews
Variety- Recommended
"...Wilson keeps the audience rapt during the taut show running a little over an hour, wondering if he really means it when he says there will be a raffle and to keep their tickets, or that he's looking for a volunteer from the audience. Wilson's deadpan delivery makes Thom that much more amusing even while he offers very little backstory for the character."
Examiner- Recommended
"...Its director, Oliver Butler, has worked with Eno before, winning an Obie for direction of Eno's "The Open House"�, which also won the Lucille Lortel award for Outstanding Play and the Drama Desk Ensemble Award. Butler, in working with Wilson in "Thom Pain"� exquisitely directs the actor through a quirky and taxing performance of a marvelously ingenuous play. But it demands that you pay attention!"
ArtsInLA- Recommended
"...Oddly, no matter how abstract Thom Pain might at first appear, it is the opposite. It is the personification of each of our own realities surviving the daily assaults of a troubled world, easily identifiable to those of us, like him, who feel our "childhood running out"� as we become foreigners to our upbringing and to the place where we were born, searching desperately for windmills like modern day Quixotes for what Eno calls "un-aloneness at last"
TheatreTimes.org- Recommended
"...Rainn Wilson gives the 80 minutes of turn-on-a-dime, mood-swinging monologue a letter-perfect delivery. In the end it's easy to sift through the splintered, sometimes venomous and frequently comic narrative to find the handful of obsessed-over highlights that, for Pain, define his life and make it illustrative. Wilson's edgy intensity pins us to out seats in silent wonder, allowing just enough wiggle-room for uneasy laughter. While the character is a far cry more troubled than Dwight Schrute, the office paper salesman who shot Wilson into television history on "The Office," there are similarities. Schrute was conniving and sycophantic, falling short of true evil by his incompetence. Pain's off-putting nature and frequent nastiness are due to"
TheatreMania- Somewhat Recommended
"...Eno's play is a Rorschach test, one that never clarifies the point after 80 minutes. Audiences may find their own interpretation in what has spilled out or simply dismiss the entire evening as the work of a self-indulgent playwright. Thom Pain is probably a bit of both, a perplexing evening about the universality of discomfort and isolation, as well as completely obtuse."
Total Theater- Somewhat Recommended
"...As maddening and perverse as much of Thom Pain is, there is much to like about Eno's text, which comes off as a lesson in irony, especially when the world-weary, oft-wounded protagonist concludes the night by exclaiming, "Isn't it great to be alive?