Solo Savagery

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Although the explosion of one-person shows on New York City stages seems to belie it, there was a good reason the ancient Greeks introduced a second actor into the drama. The essence of theater is human interaction, not introspection. No amount of skill can give a monologue as much insight and texture as the best dialogue. Even at their best, solo acts are a triumph of economics over aesthetics.

Some soloists, like Spalding Gray or Claudia Shear, play themselves. Some, like Irene Worth impersonating Edith Wharton, re-create celebrities past or ) present. Some, like Sherry Glaser or John Leguizamo, portray a whole family and achieve miracles of transformation.

The subtlest and most daring, Eric Bogosian, does that and more. A sometime playwright, he creates characters related by theme, in skits that never peter out. At his fiercest, he confronts audiences with the daily ugliness they try to screen out, from deranged bums urinating in the subway to drug freaks convinced that violence is the answer, whatever the question is, to smug suburban successes siring second families who want only to forget their offspring from Wife No. 1.

His new off-Broadway work, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead -- the title evokes his hyperthyroid style -- is a midlife lament. It begins with a radio host musing over whether America was really better and happier in the '50s than today, or merely more self-deceiving. It ends with a middle-aged man confronting medical and moral decay. In between, it depicts rage between the accomplished and the envious, each side etched in acid. Bogosian is politically incorrect enough to play an unappetizing street black, arrogant enough to enact an egomaniacal fan and complex enough to risk a jolting tirade against "starving Africans" who, by their unsettling omnipresence on the evening news, "spoil everything." This rant is at once a wail over injustice and a plea for the surcease of not caring -- and it makes audiences careen between those poles of feeling too.

-- W.A.H. III