Truth be told, like it or not

In one of the more lyrical passages from Will Eno’s off-Broadway hit “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” actor James Urbaniak asks the audience: “When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt

Eno, whose quirky play opened to rave notices in February, is pretty sure he knows when his childhood ended: lying on a floor in his family’s house in Massachusetts reading about World War II at the “hurtable” age of 10. “I discovered that during the war whales had come up on sonar as submarines and had been torpedoed by mistake,” he recalls. “It made me feel sad, but then I also realized I had a more complicated feeling than just sadness. There was something poignant about it, even though I knew that only as a feeling, not a word.”

Three decades later, “poignant” is a word that has been used to describe the 40-year-old playwright’s elliptical 70-minute monologue, the reviews for which have heralded him as one of the most exciting writers in recent years. Until the morning of Feb. 2, he had been writing in obscurity, working as a housepainter and then, briefly, as a Wall Street broker. Heretofore, his literary reputation, in New York at least, rested on his sole major production -- an off-off-Broadway play, “The Flu Season” -- and as a cat-sitter for playwright Edward Albee.

But Eno awoke that day to rapturous reviews for “Thom Pain,” including one from Charles Isherwood of the New York Times, hailing the impressionistic piece: “It’s one of those treasured nights in the theater ... 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. Also in stitches here and there. Speechless, in any case.”

Those meditations are sandwiched within a seemingly plotless, direct-address piece that explores the heartbreak in the life of one Thom Pain -- a play on the name of the early American patriot that is more metaphoric than historical.

In an equally acclaimed performance, Urbaniak (an actor best known for the films “Henry Fool” and “American Splendor”) describes the end of a childhood that only later the audience comes to realize is his character’s: a little boy in a cowboy suit witnesses his pet dog’s accidental electrocution and retires that night to a sexual awakening that leaves him confused and isolated. What follows are poetic philosophic observations on adult love -- “ ‘You’ve changed,’ she said, the night we met” -- in the syntax of upended stand-up comedy. “You’re all so wonderful I’d like to take you home, leave you there, and then go somewhere else,” he tells the audience.

Urbaniak says he was “very nervous” about the reception in New York for the play, which he had helped develop through readings and a critically lauded debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2004, followed by a brief London run. “I was terrified that audiences wouldn’t be able to locate the deep feelings behind all that beautifully baroque language,” Urbaniak says.

“It’s dangerous because the emotions are teased out in a very dramatic way. Like all good dramatists, Will doesn’t spell it out for you. So when the play was well received,” he says, “I didn’t experience elation or excitement as much as relief.”

Eno acknowledges that “Thom Pain,” which he labored on for more than two years, seems to have divided audiences. “Some people hate it, a lot of people love it, and nobody seems willing to compromise on their positions -- and that’s fine by me,” he says of the “unvarnished” reactions he has witnessed by hanging out in the lobby of the 99-seat DR2 theater downtown, where the run has been extended through Sept. 4.

Those who hate it “find it boring, self-involved and aggressive, but for all the talk about it being purely philosophical, experimental and confusing, I think it’s linear and quite simple in that it is this single person who is always in that theater, never pretending to be somewhere else. I just wanted people to go through an experience that was something like life, both pleasing and difficult.” With a smile he adds that if there ever were a Thom Pain T-shirt, it would read: “He’s just like you -- except worse.”

Despite the bleak message, Eno appears to be handling his newfound success -- which includes being a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama -- with modesty and a reticence that has him groping thoughtfully for answers. At one point after a long, long pause, he begins to answer a question, stops and says, “I have to bail out of that sentence.”

Echoes of his voice

But there’s no doubt that “this dead horse of a life we beat,” as Thom Pain describes it, has been treating him well. He’s halfway through a new play, is also finishing “a fairly aggressive” adaptation of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” and there is renewed interest in his previous plays “Flu Season” and “TRAGEDY: a tragedy,” a Sept. 11 play written before Sept. 11. For the last year, the playwright has been involved with dancer Weena Pauly. “In the simplest and most remarkable way,” he says, “I can say that we have helped each other to be better people.” He pauses, then adds, “That all sounds very dry. She’s great, and we’re having a really nice time.”

That balance of heightened poetic style and the colloquial, even vulgar, infects “Thom Pain” as well. One gathers it’s the fruit of Eno’s quiet rebellion against a reserved Catholic childhood as the youngest of three born to a prosperous suburban Boston lawyer, now retired, and his wife, a full-time hospice volunteer. His brother became a psychotherapist and his sister the editor for the Appalachian Mountain Club’s magazine, but Eno dropped out of University of Massachusetts, moved to New York and kicked around the downtown Manhattan lit scene.

Influenced by Samuel Beckett, his writing was good enough to earn a number of fellowships, including a 1996 stint at Albee’s Montauk, N.Y., retreat. “Boy, is he good,” says the veteran playwright, who mentored Eno. “He’s a startling, beautiful writer; his ear is extraordinary. He quite properly considers himself a beginning writer. I just hope he doesn’t learn a lot of bad habits and tricks. I don’t think he will.”

As with Albee and Beckett, Eno eschews sentiment in favor of some hard truths. Asked if he chose the form of what Isherwood in the Times called “stand-up existentialism” to make those truths more palatable, he demurs. “That never crossed my mind, to be honest,” he says. “It was one person addressing a community, so I had in mind things like shamans, medicine men, eulogizers and priests, ancient storytellers.”

Asked if his mother’s work comforting the dying may have influenced his view of death, he says, “I just think it’s good to be reminded at this late date in history that we don’t know what happens when you die, it’s as mysterious as it was to ancients who were creating myths about a chariot that comes out of the sky and picks you up.”

For all the hurt and confusion in “Thom Pain,” Eno says he is most gratified when audiences respond to the play’s life-affirming message that he capsulizes as “though I may not know how to be with people, there is no reason not to try.”

The most hurtful review the play has received was from a critic who accused him of cynicism. He is adamant that “Thom Pain” is at his most sincere when he says to the audience, “Isn’t it a wonderful thing to be alive on this Earth?”

The playwright expresses the hope that the character’s prior admission of difficult truths makes him that much more of a credible messenger. “Hearing that from him,” he says, “is very different from hearing it from a sunny, optimistic person.”

“I would be ridiculous to say that I can’t see how anyone could misunderstand this play,” he says, adding that it would be odd to create a piece as a purely cynical exercise. After all, his early questions, “When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt