Be advised at the start about the title of playwright Will Eno's soliloquy, "Thom Pain (based on nothing)," now receiving its Chicago premiere courtesy of actor Lance Stuart Baker, director Jeremy Wechsler and Theater Wit. It is a red herring.

There is absolutely nothing about old Tom Paine, that firebrand pamphleteer of the American Revolution, to be found in Eno's poetic, erotic, self-mocking, anguished and altogether twisted and twisting existential meditation. Yet by the end of this 75-minute show, Eno certainly has put a unique spin on Paine's famous cry: "These are the times that try men's souls," for what consumes Eno is profoundly personal rather than political.

The title, like much about this fascinating piece, is clearly designed to divert, mislead, manipulate, undermine and trick. Yet by the time it's all over, there is a distinct countersensation -- that the man who has been playing with the audience has simultaneously been baring his shattered soul.

Eno's writing is beautiful, clever, blackly comic and, as has often been remarked, "Beckettian," right down to its man-in- the-dark opening moments. And, magically, the writer's own discomfort level with self-revelation carries over to both the actor and audience. The play is seductive; it also triggers nervous laughter.

On the surface, "Thom Pain" -- which debuted in Britain in 2004, opened Off Broadway in 2005, and was named a finalist for that year's Pulitzer Prize -- is an exercise in self absorption of the one-man show variety. A cradle-to-grave saga of lost innocence, psychic scarring, passionate love gone amok and hope-turned-to-despair, it even indulges in a shaggy dog cliche (and the dog is paired with a small boy in pajamas). But Eno is far too smart and self-aware to go down such a road in any pedestrian way. Instead, he gives a feverish brilliance to the ordinary.

Baker, an actor with precise musical timing and dry delivery that can grow shockingly sensual, is an ideal choice of interpreter. Handsome in an F. Scott Fitzgerald sort of way, he finesses the work's many levels of extreme difficulty. The more he performs it, the more intriguing it is bound to get.

As Eno muses, life might just be a winning raffle ticket of the cosmic sort. His play is a winning ticket in its own way.

Chicago Sun Times, 2005

What makes Will Eno’s monologue on the alienated modern man so resonant is that Lance Baker doesn’t play him as such. Both Baker and director Wechsler resist the temptation to treat Thom Pain’s “based on nothing” as a disaffected manner covering empty matter—which would be the temptation with this Beckettian one-man show, an Off Broadway hit in 2005. Telling a sad boy’s sad story and his own sad love affair, Baker’s alienated self isn’t an empty self but one reeling against such emptiness; Baker reels captivatingly. More than the every-no-man of absurdist literature, Baker’s Thom Pain is a specific one. He’s that guy, the creepy, abject guy you don’t exactly like but can’t quite dislike, whose dyspeptic, disenchanted and self-consciously clever worldview intrigues as much as it distances. He reflects, and knows he does, your own sad soul.

Time Out Chicago

Will Eno's Pulitzer-nominated play is being billed as a send-up of one-man shows, but that only begins to describe it. Premiering in Chicago after successful runs in Edinburgh and New York, this stream-of-consciousness monologue makes a floppy felt hat of the confessional form, beating the material into numerous conventional shapes, from expressionist fable to romantic elegy to rickety, denial-choked consideration of the whole communicative undertaking. It holds any given shape only for fleeting moments, and trades mightily on the hoarse shadow laughter that trails every "heartfelt" declaration in the Theater of Me. But it's also undeniably earnest in its irony, creating a palpable sense of the aching self-consciousness behind it. Eno's real subjects--the mysteries of corporeal life, the way our adult selves are cast in patterns born of early, arbitrary injuries--find haunting expression in his lyrical but cutting style. Lance Stuart Baker, who's recently channeled David Sedaris and Adam Rapp, is a no-duh call for the role of Thom in this Theater Wit production. His intelligence, sensitivity, and command of language suit Eno's tricked-out head games perfectly, and his fragile intensity has never been in sharper focus.

Chicago Reader

As Pain, Lance Stuart Baker navigates the many levels of Eno's script with gilded finesse. He masterfully underplays, guiding each moment to its comical height. As skillfully guided by director Jeremy Wechsler, Baker's Pain is shifty and indulgently downtrodden. Baker also backs up the unusualness of the proceedings with a firm emotional connectedness. His character actually aches and seemingly represents all the confusion and contradictory emotion that every human being experiences.

At one point in time, Pain exclaims..."Isn't it great to be alive?" It may be an even greater achievement to witness superb comic theater like Theater Wit's THOM PAIN (based on nothing).

— Chicago Free Press

So it is with Thom Pain, the bitterly funny man at the center of this sardonic playlet based ( its subtitle says ) on nothing. The work is a metaphysical comedy routine, colorful and specific enough to hold our interest yet vague enough to touch some sense memory in everyone. Call it purposeful obscurity. Although just 75 minutes, the material requires a superior actor with both comedy chops and a sharp edge. Fortunately, Lance Stuart Baker is a superb comic actor with a deep dark streak. His completely naturalistic and self-deprecating manner, as he leaps from point to point and always circles back, reminds one of Robin Williams on meds, slowed down from 90 miles an hour to a sedate 35 but still dangerous behind the wheel. Indeed, when Baker invites audience involvement, we aren't sure what would happen if we really responded. Thom is in control, but possibly just for the moment. Director Jeremy Wechsler clearly is a man Baker has been wise to trust in developing the relaxed tension of his performance. Thom Pain ( Based on Nothing ) is filled with emotional pinpricks, but has no sum of its parts. Thom is deeply sad and richly funny. Your own personal pain will establish the balance.

Windy City Times