Artery

• Photo by Alan Dehmer/ Manbites Dog
• Lormarev Jones in Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations.

Will Eno is to theater as Steven Wright is to stand-up comedy. His deadpan, non sequitur one-liners throw both the audience and the medium into awkward mirth. Like Wright, Eno is more deeply a poet than anything else. He interrogates language and being and neatly dissects our assumptions, rationalizations and sentimentality, while yearning on our collective behalf for the very simple yet deep contentment that he tells us we're foolish to want. (There is a character who calls himself "The Beauty of Things" and "The Majesty of Life," smirking the whole time.)

Eno's writing contains a dramatic tension between the beautiful and the lacerating, the soothing and the snide—much as there is in another recently performed work, Alex Chilton's Big Star masterpiece of 1978, Third/Sister Lovers. (See the Indy's preview and Lisa Sorg's superb report from the show.)

Oh, the Humanity has lines that wonder at one point whether men in a photograph (which the audience is kept, tantalizingly, from seeing) have just done something heroic or are about to do something violent. Are the characters in the final scene going to a funeral or a christening? Should we feel devastated by a plane crash that kills everyone on board, or perhaps cheered that the jet managed to stay in the air as long as it did—even that it could fly at all? Which side of your life are you living on? In describing your likes and dislikes, do you find that they just cancel one another out?

Eno's is not so much the comedy of half-full/ half-empty—he's a flag-waving pessimist, albeit a very, very funny one—as of whether you can nudge your consciousness into seeing its pitiful little lot from the right side of the glass, if you can even decide what side that is. There is a satisfying laugh-line early in the play, in which an embattled (i.e. losing) sports coach says: "I found myself standing in the unforgivable light of a grocery store, staring at my reflection in a freezer, and realizing: ‘You’re not having a bad day—this is just what you look like.’”

(The moment echoes the most memorable line from 2007's The Cornucopia of Me, the occasionally Eno-like one-woman show by Katja Hill, who also performs in Oh, the Humanity: "You're not depressed. Your life just sucks.")

Well, how does he think the bags of corn niblets feel on the other side, freezing to death in their little plastic baggies, hoping desperately to be plucked from a pile of other corn niblets? The monologues following the coach's, aptly, are given by people making video personal ads of themselves.
Eno unsparingly harries not only his characters but his audience, as he did in Thom Pain (based on nothing), a highlight of local theater in 2006, also a Manbites Dog production and also directed by Storer. When was the last time a stranger described your expression for you? (How hard it is not to immediately assume it!) How often, recognizing your own feeling in an onstage character are you filled not with sympathy and identification but embarrassment?

You walk out of Oh, the Humanity on edge, maybe even put off by Eno's presumptuousness. "Be more mortal," one of his characters exhorts you—while asking you and your fellow audience members to pose for a photograph, that most immortalizing and self-conscious of moments.

Not an easy thing to be charged with, since a) you're already doing that, with animal inevitability, and couldn't possibly do it more unless you were to drop dead in the theater; and b) being mortal is the one thing above all you'd probably rather not think about doing. Doesn't God promise us immortality—if, that is, as Eno interrupts himself to add at one point, if there is a God?

After the play I felt scoured clean. Oh, the Humanity scrubs off not just the simple syrup of sentimentality, but its more insidious relative, what Vladimir Nabokov called poshlust: a Russian term that encompasses "corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature."

(A fuller elucidation appears in Nabokov's 1967 interview with the Paris Review.)

What's dangerous about poshlust is that it lurks even in well-made art and uprightly lived lives. Eno battles it many ways—and in the Manbites Dog production, he has to wage further war against the comforting, pretty and prettily sung John Prine tunes with which Storer has interlarded Eno's scenes (the production's only significant misstep, I thought).

But Eno's drying, acidifying, truth-seeking strategy is perhaps best exemplified by the poor, pathetic football coach, who builds up to a big explanation for his team's failure but finally just says: "I don't know."
And it was in that state—uncertain, in-between, both-sides-of-the-glass—that I walked out of Manbites Dog Theater into a world uncertain and in-between. Into a world transformed, or transforming.

But why, pray tell, should we have all the fun?

Below are the categories and guidelines our critics will follow in determining the award winners for 2010. If you were on our panel of critics, which show would you nominate for best production? Which individual performances would get the nod for best lead and supporting work? Did any production rise to the level of Achievement in Ensemble — with superior acting in all leading and supporting roles on stage? And what individuals, groups or organizations — again, if any — gave special assistance to the theater or made special theatrical achievements in the Humanities?

Go ahead. Tell us. Tell the world. The recognition that you give a deserving artist for their superior work — in our comments section below — will make your appreciation and support of them public. (Plus, it just might jog our critics' memories!)