Even when a play is as likely to infuriate as to entertain, Artistic Director D. Lynn Meyers is willing to give it a shot at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati (ETC). Meyers, whose theatre offers local, regional, and national premieres, is generally fearless in choosing scripts that will challenge her audience. It's a formula that seems to work, since ETC is now in its 20th anniversary season. Meyers' production of Will Eno's recent Off-Broadway hit, Thom Pain (based on nothing), is exemplary of her bold choices.
There's almost nothing to watch beyond New York-based actor Ean Sheehy deliver the play, a 70-minute monologue, with a measured, deliberate pace. Eno's script is a disjointed stream of consciousness, perhaps the work of a self-indulgent playwright who simply likes playing word games. But his words are devilishly clever and amusing, too. (Thom Pain was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in drama.) The show is funny but in a discomfiting way, a work about being off-balance.
ETC's production is presented on a totally bare stage, a platform of unfinished plywood sheets. Sheehy moves among changing paths and pools of light that provide subtle signposts to related points of the text: Romantic recollections happen in circles of rosy light; painful memories happen in angular, harshly lit corridors. Despite the barren set, Brian C. Mehring's lighting design is exquisitely evocative.
Thom Pain (not to be confused with the colonial-era pamphleteer) lives up to his name as he recounts a "painful" fits-and-starts tale about a boy (perhaps himself, abandoned and afflicted in several agonizing ways), his dog (electrocuted drinking from a puddle), and a love affair gone awry. Sheehy's Thom is a matter-of-fact but nondescript everyman dressed in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and oversized dark-framed glasses. He drifts through the narrative, seeming on the brink of making a point, never quite getting there.
The character plays games with the audience, announcing a raffle and magic tricks, only to pull them back almost immediately. These abrupt twists appear to be intentionally antidramatic, but in fact they engage the audience if for no other reason than to make it desire to see where he's headed.
Sheehy delivers the commonplace language of the monologue with intentional flatness, swinging the tone of the play back and forth between amusement and awkwardness. He asks questions but turns to new topics before answers can be offered.
"If I were you," Thom says about two-thirds of the way through, "I'd be sick of this already." But audiences intrigued by provocative theatre -- a mad blend of Beckett and Mamet -- will respond to this challenging production that underscores how the "nothing" of our lives can add up to a very intriguing something.
Thom Pain (based on nothing) runs Jan. 25-Feb. 12 at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, 1127 Vine St., Cincinnati. Tickets: (513) 421-3555. Website: www.cincyetc.com.