Will Eno

Playwright

• Born: 1965
• Place of Birth: Lowell, Massachusetts

Contribution: Will Eno is an award-winning playwright best known for his play Thom Pain (based on nothing), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2005.

Background

Will Eno was born in 1965 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The youngest of three children, he grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a volunteer activist. Eno began cycling competitively around age thirteen; he left Concord-Carlisle High School early to train as a cyclist at the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and won a silver medal at the national championships. He later attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst but left after three years and moved to New York, where he got a job painting houses. His employer would play audiobooks of the poet John Donne while they worked, and as a result, Eno’s interests started to veer toward writing.

Eno studied fiction writing in his late twenties with the famous editor Gordon Lish. In 1996, he was invited to an Edward F. Albee Foundation fiction workshop in Montauk on Long Island. He was working a grueling ten-hour day as a low-level Wall Street broker at the time, and he began writing plays to assuage the feeling that his identity was slipping away from him.

Career

Eno’s first full-length play, Tragedy: a tragedy, premiered at the Gate Theatre in London in 2001. It made its American debut at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California, in March 2008. The play is a good introduction to Eno’s work, all of which has an existential and absurdist core. Tragedy is a satire about trivial subject matter and the hollow, meaningless, and often funny language of the news media.

Tragedy was well received in the United Kingdom, and Eno’s work continued to find support in Europe and Australia, but similar success in the United States eluded him until after the 2004 premiere of Thom Pain (based on nothing) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. The play did so well there that it was taken to New York City in 2005, where it opened Off-Broadway at the DR2 Theatre. New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood, who became one of Eno’s biggest champions, gave the monologue an uncharacteristically gushing review. In doing so, he helped open the door for Eno in the city and, indeed, the rest of the country. The seventy-minute monologue was originally intended to be about Thomas Paine, the eighteenth-century philosopher, but Eno instead wound up writing about an ordinary man and the suffering he has experienced. In 2005, Thom Pain (based on nothing) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Eno’s play The Flu Season is a love story, minus the happy ending, between a man and a woman in a hospital and features two characters named Epilogue and Prologue. It premiered at the Gate Theatre in London in 2003 and moved to New York in January 2004, where it won the 2004 George Oppenheimer Award for best debut by an American playwright.

Oh, the Humanity and other exclamations (later produced with the title Oh, the Humanity and other good intentions) is a collection of five short plays about ordinary people confessing private thoughts of fear and loneliness. It premiered at the Flea Theater in New York City in November 2007 with Academy Award–winning actress Marisa Tomei in one of the starring roles.

Eno’s play Middletown premiered at the Vineyard Theatre in New York in 2010. The play, which takes several cues from Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town (1938), is a series of vignettes about the people of Middletown but is largely about the mysteries of existence and time. Middletown received the inaugural Horton Foote Prize for promising new American play.

The Realistic Joneses premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in April 2012. The production featured Parker Posey and award-winning actor and playwright Tracy Letts. The play is about two couples, both with the surname Jones, getting to know each other. In 2014, the play earned Eno his Broadway debut with a run at the Lyceum Theatre.

Eno’s plots often read as static or thin, but the real heart of his plays is their language. His monologue Title and Deed opened at Signature Theatre Company in Manhattan in May 2012. It was Eno’s first production with the theater after beginning his five-year residency there; it was also his first full collaboration with Gare St. Lazare Players, an Irish theater company run by a husband-and-wife actor-director team. The monologue deals with place, both metaphysical and geographical.

Gnit, Eno’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1876 epic play Peer Gynt, premiered at the Humana Festival at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, in March 2013. The play was billed as a “willfully American misreading” of its predecessor.

In 2012, Eno and fellow playwright Adam Rapp shared the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for an American playwright in mid-career. Eno's next play, The Open House, premiered Off-Broadway in March 2014, and won a Drama Desk Award, as well as two OBIE Awards. In 2017, his play Wakey, Wakey opened Off-Broadway. The play starred only January LaVoy and Michael Emerson, and was directed by Eno. From November to December 2019, his play The Plot was produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre. The same year, The Underlying Chris premiered at Second Stage.

His 2020 play Gnit was an adaptation of the nineteenth-century play Peer Gynt by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. That same year, Eno’s radio play, Life is a Radio in the Dark, was broadcast on BBC Radio. The play was specifically written for and starred actor Toby Jones.

Impact

Eno has been compared to such diverse figures as Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Jon Stewart. His plays have been described as both bleak and comically enchanting, and he counted the legendary Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Albee, the author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), among his biggest supporters. In Eno’s plays, thick blankets of language cover chasms of existential dread. His style continues to divide critics, but he is consistently praised as one of the most innovative voices in the theater today.

Personal Life

Eno lives and works in Brooklyn.

Bibliography

Gassman, Ben. “At Wrest in the Middle of Time with Will Eno.” Brooklyn Rail, 3 May 2012, brooklynrail.org/2012/05/theater/at-wrest-in-the-middle-of-time-with-will-eno/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

Rothstein, Mervyn. “For Will Eno, The Realistic Joneses Is a Life and Death Kind of Play.” Playbill, 8 May 2012, playbill.com/article/for-will-eno-the-realistic-joneses-is-a-life-and-death-kind-of-play-com-193375. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

Snyder, Diane. “Will Eno Builds a Strange New World.” Time Out, 4 Oct. 2010, www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/will-eno-builds-a-strange-new-world-off-broadway. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

Wallenberg, Christopher. “Playwright Will Eno on Metaphysics and Middletown.” Boston Globe, 9 Feb. 2013, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/theater-art/2013/02/09/playwright-will-eno-metaphysics-and-middletown/P9Si4hCPCjBD48yqWy4W5L/story.html. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

"Will Eno [Playwright]." Will Eno official website, 2022, willeno.com/. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.