One-man act — one existential man

If you leave a performance of "Thom Pain (based on nothing)" undecided about whether you love, loathe or have violently conflicting feelings about this solo one-act, you won't be alone. And the playwright Will Eno probably has you right where he wants you.

Eno's surprise 2005 Off Broadway hit and Pulitzer Prize finalist is performed at Seattle Repertory Theatre by the invaluable Todd Jefferson Moore. And it's maybe what Samuel Beckett would write if he was a Gen X-er with a yard-wide absurdist streak, a love/hate relationship with sincerity and a badly fractured heart.

Or maybe not. Just kidding. Think of an elephant now — better yet, don't.

The phrases above are like many you will hear from the stage in Jerry Manning's aptly lean, precise Rep staging of "Thom Pain."

Moore's unnamed character stands on and near the Leo K. Theatre stage for 70 minutes, delivering (literally) a disjointed shaggy dog story (or lecture, or stand-up act). To summarize: It's a roundabout affirmation of the necessity of love and torment of estrangement.

This monologue is laced with detours, as well as ambivalence and contradictions, confessions and retractions, puns and curses.

The speaker can be tender and poetic, funny, flippant and/or gross. He mocks stage conventions by toying with audience members and telling garishly unfunny jokes. Then, without warning, he may emit an animal cry of pure grief.

But the guy is very sneaky. He demands you take him seriously, then neatly cancels that order like a mischievous child puncturing his new red balloon. No wonder you want to throttle him, or soothe his fevered soul — or both.

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now," Beckett concluded.

In "Thom Pain," Eno's character tries to make sense of the heart's hungers in a world too chaotic and glib to brake for pain.

As performed Off Broadway with geeky intensity by cult stage actor James Urbaniak, "Thom Pain" seemed a more mannered, laborious exercise in faking out the audience and imitating the absurdist masters (Beckett, Sartre, Albee et al). At the Rep, the piece gets a little lost on a big stage. And it still seems too precious and too long. ("If I were you, I'd be sick of this already," we are warned early on.)

And yet ... thanks to Moore's painstaking mastery of the play's mini-symphony of utterances and silences, it's clearer here what Eno is up to — and what is valuable, if not entirely realized, in "Thom Pain."

That's partly because Moore's essential humanity bleeds through any role he tackles. He can express alienation, but he's not alienating. His intelligence and naturalness draw you in, even when his character (to paraphrase Beckett) has nothing but his own impotence to offer.

One can see why Eno might prefer a younger, nerdier, less inviting actor for this existential bagatelle. But what the Rep mounting has in Moore, the author (and patrons) can be grateful for.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com