Eric Bogosian (buh-GOHZH-yuhn) describes himself as is “a creator of monologues and solo shows,” a playwright, a screenwriter, an actor, a novelist, a solo performer, and “a candidate for intensive Prozac therapy.” Besides being one of the most talented, funny, versatile, and restlessly creative people in show business, Bogosian is also one of the United States’ fiercest and most trenchant social critics, a writer and performer often (and justly) compared to Lenny Bruce for the outrageous intensity and moral seriousness of his work.

Bogosian was born April 24, 1953, and raised in Woburn, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb he describes as “comatose, a dying factory city.” (Woburn is notorious as the site of the water pollution case dramatized by the 1998 film A Civil Action.) Bogosian’s interest in theater began at Woburn High School, where he acted in school plays. He started college at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1971 but had dropped out by the spring of 1973. After a stint as an assistant manager of a Gap store, Bogosian decided to give college another try. He recalls thinking that “since I was doing nothing with my life anyway, I might as well do nothing in college. And since (this was my reasoning) college was pointless, I might as well be doing something pointless I enjoyed.” He transferred to Oberlin College, where he majored in theater.

After graduating from Oberlin in 1975, Bogosian relocated to New York City, where he took a job as a director’s “gofer” at the Chelsea Westside Theater and began to immerse himself in the vibrant SoHo art scene. Bogosian next found work directing dance productions at The Kitchen, a venue for performance art, video art, and new music. In 1977, he debuted in Careful Moment, his one-man show at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church that featured an array of colorful urban characters. In 1979, Bogosian invented a persona: Ricky Paul, an insufferable “comedian” who had, in his creator’s words, “nothing positive to say about anybody or anything and reveled in the paranoia and decay of the modern world.” As intended, The Ricky Paul Show provoked audiences, sometimes to the point of rioting, and Bogosian recalls that he “began to understand the power of the spoken word, especially when uttered in the face of the fragility of people’s beliefs.”

After several years of performing in various one-man shows, Bogosian wrote, directed, and performed in The New World, a three-act, avant-garde play involving “sixteen scenes and fifteen actors” that flopped, landed him in debt, and prompted a return to solo performances, which were inexpensive to mount. Bogosian wrote and performed Men Inside, a fast-paced, eclectic collection of short character sketches of American males that featured a sideshow barker, a querulous black boy, a menacing street punk, a discouraged yuppie, a lusty cowboy, and a tired working man. His next solo project, Voices of America, parodied the frenetic silliness of advertising discourse. With FunHouse, another wide-ranging set of character sketches, Bogosian presented disturbing but often hilarious portraits of twisted contemporaries: a rubber fetishist, a desperately aggressive insurance salesman, a ranting bowery bum, a military torture specialist, and a fascistic preacher. The show had a healthy run, and critics began to take notice.

Bogosian solidified his growing reputation by writing and starring in Talk Radio , a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway play that focuses on an angry, articulate late-night Cleveland “shock jock” named Barry Champlain who vents self-hatred by frequently humiliating his callers. After scraping by for most of a decade, Bogosian began to pull his family—he married theater...