Fringe Festival's "Thom Pain' and "Untitled'

This year's Live Arts/Fringe Festival offers more than 180 acts. Potential patrons looking for a way to sift through the good and the bad could ease their confusion by trusting the proven talents of Luna Theater and members of the creative team behind 11th Hour Theatre Company. Both tackle a similar theme: how a grown man deals with the lingering effects of childhood trauma.

Luna's production of Will Eno's one-man Thom Pain (based on nothing) begins with a simple tale of a boy whose dog is electrocuted by a stray wire. This event leads first to bedwetting and then to bullying, homelessness and lifelong loneliness. Did I mention how funny it is?

Eno's titular narrator (played by Christopher Bohan) conceals his pain behind comedy and terrible one-card magic tricks while his psyche retreats into philosophy. The script explodes with outrageous and offensive humor. "Picture a boy and his dog," Bohan asks. "Now break his arm." Later, he asks us again to "Picture whatever you want" and follows with, "Now go fuck yourself."

Luna's staging endows the hour-long monologue with the feel of a stand-up comic's dream performance and the theatrical heritage of a one-man Waiting for Godot. Pain (the narrator) erases our feelings of individuality in his cynical self-reflective musings on love and life while his reaching out to the audience draws on our common humanity in suffering. When Pain asks us to share what we saw onstage, he implores, "Tell them you saw someone trying."

Bohan tries very hard in the role, and what he lacks in comic timing he more than makes up in dramatic force, a multi-faceted portrayal sublimely blending the threads of an AA confessional, a Sunday sermon and an inverted Tony Robbins seminar into a coherent, masterful whole. Ken Sooy's lighting design evokes the feel of a back-alley nightclub lounge.

Magical Parisian panhandler

If nothing else, Untitled Project #213 proves that if you stuff enough creative minds into a room, magic will happen. In no particular order, this talent consists of Matt Mastronardi (cello and vocals), Alex Keiper (vocals), the incredible virtuosity of Sarah Gliko (accordion, flute, vocals, all around awesomeness), David Raphaely's solid acting, Virgil Gadson and Samantha Shepherd's dancing as well as co-creator Steve Pacek's absolutely heartbreaking clowning.

All this talent is enlisted in a story of a panhandling Parisian street performer. He first entertains us with a little soft-shoe and a dash of Edith Piaf lip-synching, before charming a stumbling American psychiatrist (Raphaely), who just so happens to study mutism.

It's a crude plot device, yes, but it enables the mime to explain why he stopped speaking. He "tells" the tale through the other performers, who clown about to Daniel Kazemi's powerful musical compositions, dance with red balls and umbrellas in Jenn Rose's poignant choreography and play a variety of musical instruments, including a set of bottles in a mesmerizing jug band number.

The lesson here— that an artist conveys and conceals his pain through art— may be clichéd, but the cast's transcendent performances and the originality of the staging transform something common into a rich and charming evening.