Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...Lance Baker, an actor with an impeccable feel for the way words can both bruise and caress, and for the way silences and asides can serve as potent dramatic punctuation marks, is one of those actors. And in Will Eno's alternately arch and agonizing "Thom Pain (based on nothing)," now at Theater Wit, he has found the ideal showcase."
Time Out Chicago - Recommended
"...But I think many who are tripped up by Eno's formal tics are missing the careful blend of cutting and compassionate that laces his vision of life's mundane tragedies. And Baker makes a terrific delivery system for this piece of stand-up dramedy, an actor who's particularly adept with solo work, as he's shown over the years in pieces like Adam Rapp's Nocturne, David Sedaris's The Santaland Diaries and Mike Daisey's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. His Thom Pain struts the bare stage with well-honed intensity and painstaking attention to pushing back against the temptation toward aloofness-sometimes bemused, sometimes sinister but never indifferent in his recounting of a sad boy's brush with tragedy and a sad man's brush with human connection."
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...Director Jeremy Wechsler allows Baker's performance and Eno's script to speak on their own behalf, endowing the production with just the right naturalism to pull off the many metatheatrical elements in the play. The set is appropriately sparse and dark, reflecting the very emptiness Pain tries in vain to escape. Early in the play, Thom Pain smiles and tells us we'll think of him when we have thirty seconds left to live. It seems laughable, but he's right. Thom Pain is the dissenting conscience that exists somewhere within each of us, and Eno has captured the voice from the void that none of us can - nor should we want to - escape."
ChicagoCritic - Recommended
"...Undoubtedly, Thom Pain isn't going to suit everyone's tastes. Those who tend to dislike nervous laughter-that is, those who think pleasure and pain are mutually exclusive states-might find Pain's sense of humor a bit too ambiguous in tone. But others should find in it an achingly honest and formally inventive examination of life's traumas and the equally absurd means we employ to cope with them."
Chicago Theatre Review - Highly Recommended
"...It's not all fun and games, though; at key, precious moments, whether it be an elongated pause, a shocking outburst, or bouts of tears, Baker slowly, subtly allows the loneliness and desperation and sadness of Thom to seep through the cracks, to overwhelm the vulgar, vain shell he so dearly clings to - and for the truth, no matter how evanescent, to emerge. And of course, credence must be given to Eno's writing, which is erudite and unpredictable in equal measure. Unfairly described by the New York Times as "Samuel Beckett for the John Stewart generation" (a cute but vapid description), Eno's work on "Thom Pain" was considered a breakthrough when it originally premiered in 2004, and it's easy to see why. Bold, original, and most important of all, entertaining without sacrificing its artistic leanings, "Thom Pain" is the work of a writer finding his voice."
