Oh, The Humanity and other Exclamations (review)

Marisa Tomei and Brian Hutchison in OH, THE HUMANITY and other exclamations. Photo: Richard Termine.

Any fear that playwright Will Eno was a one-shot phenom for THOM PAIN (based on nothing) should be dispelled by OH, THE HUMANITY and other exclamations. THOM PAIN, a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, played like the stand-up autobiography of a bi-polar, bad-boy con man beset by ADHD and combining equal parts humor, self-pity, and meanness. That play earned Eno the epithet “Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation,” and it manifested with a vengeance the qualities of disinvolvement and sarcastic distance that theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann sees as a hallmark of much postmodern theatre, with its cool emotionality and ironic feelings always already in quotation marks.

In OH, THE HUMANITY—which comprises five one-acts—Eno’s signature language of pastiche and almost non sequiturs is anything but disinvolved, sarcastic, or cool. In fact, the eight characters, played at the Flea by Marisa Tomei and Brian Hutchison, ache with loneliness and loss, yearn for connection, dream of falling in love, mourn for lives slipping away, and wish for second chances. In this production, under Jim Simpson’s assured but subtle direction, the actors compellingly conveyed something embedded in all eight characters’ sadness: the glimmer of hope and clung-to belief that they can and will dispel their despair. Their nonstop chatter is nothing if not an attempt to talk themselves into believing that true love, closure on lost loved ones, professional success, or meaningful work is just around the corner.

In Behold the Coach, in a Blazer, Uninsured, a depressed and anxious man sits behind a bank of microphones confronting the press about the terrible losing streak in which his team has been mired for years. The coach’s subject is less organized sports than disorganized life. One day he sees his reflection in a grocery store freezer and realizes that he is not having a bad day; this is the person the years have made him. He is beset by “punishing, crushing, nauseating sorrow” and gets by on “rosemary for remembrance; Glucosamine and Chondroitin for the joints.” Can he lead the team to victory? Frankly, he doesn’t know. Yet he marvels at the joy of simply getting some fresh air, sun, exercise, and selling hot dogs, while wishing it were easier to break the habit of not speaking one’s mind or heart.

The evening’s other solo piece, Enter the Spokes-woman, Gently, features a woman facing a crowd of people who have just lost family members in an airplane crash. On behalf of the airline company she attempts to apologize, only to realize that she lacks both the information and possibly the distance from the situation writ large to play her role with smooth savoir faire. Tomei created a Spokeswoman that was a cross between professional confidence and the look of a deer caught in headlights. What can the company offer? She imagines it would like us—and she unites herself with the bereaved—to feel giddy that planes fly at all, and by extension, that we are here at all. If this sounds Pollyannaish, recall that Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, is neither mournful nor a requiem, but a repetitive, extended extolling of God’s omnipresence—--arguably an attempt to induce giddiness by speaking one’s (believing) mind (and heart).

Drew Hildebrand, Marisa Tomei, and Brian Hutchison in OH, THE HUMANITY and other exclamations. Photo: Richard Termine.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rain presents a couple who have yet to meet, if they ever will. Each is making a video to submit to a dating service. The actors faced forward, with Hutchison’s eyes trained upward, to the last row of the audience, and Tomei’s downward at the first row of feet. The data the speakers convey is platitudinous and even contradictory. (She...