[In the following review, Scheck states that “Bogosian's success has not dulled his sharpness, but it has instead presented new situations and characters to skewer” in his Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead.]

Eric Bogosian may be maturing, but he is not getting any less angry. The title of his latest performance piece, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, is a testament to that. This edgy, wiry, black-clad monologist is the Lou Reed of performance art, chronicling urban lives of disaffection and alienation.

Pounding Nails is the fifth solo Bogosian work, and it offers no stylistic surprises. Like his earlier works, it presents a series of characters who express their angst with varying degrees of articulation. Ranging from a homeless person begging on the subway, to a drug dealer going into graphic detail about his sex life, to a suburbanite proudly describing the expensive filter on his pool, Bogosian's characters do not project a pretty world view.

The horrors of modern life are presented all the more chillingly in a monologue in which a doctor casually presents his patient with a long list of side effects for the new drug he is prescribing. The doctor ends up asking for a multithousand-dollar deposit.

Bogosian's success has not dulled his sharpness, but it has instead presented new situations and characters to skewer. One of his most insightful pieces depicts a sycophantic would-be performance artist who suddenly turns hostile when the object of his affections is less than gracious.

For the first time, Bogosian is one of his own characters, visibly grappling with ambivalence between the desire to be appreciated by his audience and antipathy toward them.

There is always an underlying complexity in his work. The show begins with the performer speaking from the wings, with only a shadow projection of his face appearing on the back wall （he is, by now, famous enough to get away with this）, speaking about the disparity between good times enjoyed by his father's generation and the mess that the world has become. His presentation of the past initially seems idyllic. But as he rambles on about how perfect the 1950's were, with a booming postwar economy and no traces of race riots, we become aware of the basic falsehood of that idealization.

Sometimes Bogosian's own discomfort with almost every aspect of human behavior seems so acute that one can sense how difficult it must be to go through life with such an exhausting and cynical sense of observation. After the litany of brutalities presented in Pounding Nails, the streets of New York were almost a relief.