“Astonishing in its impact . . . One of the treasured nights in the theatre that can leave you both breathless with exhilaration and, depending on your sensitivity to meditations on the bleak and beautiful mysteries of human experience, in a puddle of tears . . . Thom Pain is at bottom a surreal meditation on the empty promises life makes, the way experience never lives up to the weird and awesome fact of being. But it is also, in its odd, bewitching beauty, an affirmation of life’s worth.” —Charles Isherwood, New York Times

“Eno has emerged as one of the most original young playwrights on the scene. He is one of the few writers who can convert discomfort and outright agony into such pleasure.” —David Cote, Time Out New York

“It’s hard to imagine more dazzling writing on any stage.”—Daily Telegraph (London)

“It’s sad, isn’t it? The dead horse of a life we beat, all the wilder, all the harder the deader it gets. On the other hand, there are some nice shops in the area.”

Thom Pain has come to a certain point in his life. Maybe you have too. His entire existence is ordinary; but that ordinariness is a revelation and a wonder and a curiosity. To him at least. He’d better hope so. It’s all he has (except maybe a dictionary and an old love letter).

Comic and disturbing, this provocative monologue charts one man’s anguished journey from shattered childhood dreams and trauma to the tenuous, if guarded, optimism of adulthood, told in dangerous intimacy by a voice loaded with wry humor and deceptive charm.

Will Eno lives in Brooklyn with his wife Maria Dizzia and their daughter Albertine.