Thom Pain (based on nothing)
By Will Eno

This one man show starring Lance Baker races its way back and forth and around Thom's life. As he desperately and uncomfortably searches for the answers you come to realize that it isn't really his story at all, but yours.

Jeff Award Winner!
Lance Baker for excellence in Solo Performance

MEN OF STEEL
by Qui Nguyen. This astonishing superhero epic features both amazing fights and remarkable dialogue. A sophisticated social satire about our relationship as a society to power and our own heroes.

As Pain, Lance Stuart Baker navigates the many levels of Eno's script with gilded finesse. He masterfully underplays, guiding each moment to its comical height. As skillfully guided by director Jeremy Wechsler, Baker's Pain is shifty and indulgently downtrodden. Baker also backs up the unusualness of the proceedings with a firm emotional connectedness. His character actually aches and seemingly represents all the confusion and contradictory emotion that every human being experiences.

At one point in time, Pain exclaims..."Isn't it great to be alive?" It may be an even greater achievement to witness superb comic theater like Theater Wit's THOM PAIN (based on nothing).

—Chicago Free Press

More than the every-no-man of absurdist literature, Baker's Thom Pain is a specific one. He's that guy, the creepy, abject guy you don't exactly like but can't quite dislike, whose dyspeptic, disenchanted and self-consciously clever worldview intrigues as much as it distances. He reflects, and knows he does, your own sad soul.

—Time Out Chicago

Fascinating! Beautiful, clever and blackly comic.

—Chicago Sun-Times

"Brilliant! Outstanding! Bold and Breathtaking!"

—Chicago Tribune

Nguyen's script does something unexpected from the get-go. It straddles a line between parody and homage, and, in the end, actually succeeds in making you think. In the end, the show poses one question: If absolute power corrupts, what about superpower? Along the way, it just might challenge your beliefs of what it takes to be a hero (super or otherwise).
—Chicago Sun-Times

Fueled by Joseph Fosco's pile-driving sound design and wonderful video and animation by Jessica Ross and Robert Ross Parker, Jeremy Wechsler's slam-bang, film-noir staging moves things at warp speed, so fast you can't wonder about what's missing till it's over...
— Chicago Free Press