[In the following review, originally published in New York Post on February 4, 1994, Barnes praises Bogosian's Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead and advises “never miss Bogosian, because the sharp-tongued, sharp-shooting Bogosian never misses you!”]

Some performers are simply a force of nature. Eric Bogosian is a force of such consummately contrived artistry that he can seem like a force of nature.

He is an actor who transforms the theater into an arena for one-on-one encounters. Every customer gets to meet a little Bogosian in the night.

This new show which opened last night at the Minetta Lane Theater for a sadly limited run of 12 weeks, is the fifth that Bogosian has offered to his startled, shocked, scared, titillated, massaged, flattered and altogether charmed New York public.

It is called Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, and it's as good a title as any, expressing something of force, something of pain, something of frustration and—as long as you're not actually trying it yourself—something of weary, wary amusement.

For the record, I didn't take to Bogosian's one-man, primal scream shows when I saw the first. Perhaps the exhibition of cult personality was too naked, too perversely obvious.

Second time around I grew to accept and admire the man's technique, then his almost uncanny writing skills—its brilliance still has me laughing in incredulous admiration—and within minutes I was buying the whole dynamite shtick.

Though he offers nothing but character sketches, each sketch is embodied into the urban psyche in an extraordinarily complex fashion. At one basic level, he is the alienated comedian whom I suspect more conventional comics, like Jerry Seinfeld, would like to be but dare not. At a deeper level he is a genuine social satirist.

And at the deepest level of all, he counter-intuitively （now there's a nice West Coast phrase for an East Coast phenomenon） mocks the liberal conscience even while he's sucking up to it.

Bogosian pretends to shock his audience, but is in fact enmeshing them in a clever conspiracy of empathy. A conspiracy where liberal-thinking layers of “us” and “them” （or rather “thems” for only the “us” is singular） are laid one upon another in intricate profusion. And the liberal conscience loves the whole complex transaction.

The present show runs the entire humorous gamut from hatred to despair! It opens with the diatribe of a right-wing radio gabfest meister, goes on to introduce us to a “super-nova of negativity,” a homeless subway person who dysfunctionally embodies every white-bread middle-class fear that made it home to the suburbs.

From then on everything you think you hold sacred is fair game. There is a young man shamefacedly repenting his maleness on a 12-step platform, there is a hometown drug-dealer from Washington Square, there is a financier, barbecuing a Dean & DeLuca steak, with his third family in the rich and guarded hinterlands, there is … well, many people you will be glad to meet only in a theater.

A gentler, kinder Lenny Bruce, he could nonetheless repeat Bruce's line: “Is there any group I haven't offended?” So, never miss Bogosian, because the sharp-tongued, sharp-shooting Bogosian never misses you!

And his best performance is kept to the last. His curtain call—an apotheosis of “I was only kidding” charm. Oh yeah! Pull the other leg, it's got bells on it.