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Published on 7/23/08
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The temptation in critiquing something so dazzlingly literate as Will Eno’s Oh the Humanity and other exclamations is to simply square one’s shoulders in humility and expend the whole review just quoting lines. The characters that inhabit the five elegant, bleakly funny playlets of Eno’s anthology—“lone people in serious wait,” as one of them says—are ordinary stiffs given to lyrical existentialist crises on inappropriate occasions, and their hearts leak out a stream of deadpan one-liners, pointed non sequiturs and rueful aphorisms. “I’ve been described as the Girl Next Door, by neighbors,” says a woman in a video-dating session. “Officially, we would like you to feel giddy,” advises an airline-company spokesman to the families of people who have died in a crash. “My love is like a sunset: stunning and then over,” says the coach of a losing sports team, in the middle of a press conference.
Out of context, such citations cannot do justice to the cumulative effect of their deployment: They unfold like pages of a book you can’t wait to reread and share with your friends. And in Jim Simpson’s appropriately spare production, Eno’s wittily heartsick dialogue is brought to aching, hopeful life by two excellent actors: Marisa Tomei, whose loveliness camouflages an unsettling depth of feeling, and Brian Hutchison, a master of subtly shell-shocked candor. (He’s like Will Ferrell transposed to a minor key.) Vivid as it may be in print, Eno’s gallows humor truly comes alive in its execution.
—Adam Feldman
