[In the following review, Feingold asserts that although Bogosian's Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead is the same as his previous shows, there is enough difference to keep from limiting him.]

A great actor-playwright once said of his profession, “The best in this kind are but shadows,” and Eric Bogosian must agree, since he starts his new show [, Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead,] as a magnified shadow on the upstage wall—a right-wing crank, waxing nostalgic over how perfect America was in the '50s and how lousy it is now. Then he's on, too quick for you to applaud, as the crank's antithesis, a capering subway lunatic high on his own dementia, reveling in the many revolting ways he spreads his diseased “molecules” among the respectable. “I am the captain of this subway train,” he says, flinging his arms wide, “and I'm taking everybody for a ride!”

So Bogosian does, and if the ups and downs of the ride are like those in his earlier shows, the ride itself is the same only different. You'd expect this to limit him, but, weirdly, it never does. The lean body may not have infinite modes of gesture, the firm, husky voice may lack the colors of the Gielgudian rainbow, and yet you leave Pounding Nails, as you've left his previous shows, amazed at the multitude of people he seems capable of being. His characters impose on your memory as living presences: The stage appears to have been crowded with people, and you begin to understand why Kenneth Tynan insisted that Ruth Draper had to be spoken of in the plural. Eric Bogosian—to recycle Tynan's witty compliment to the woman who made monologue an art form—are now at the height of their career, and you have only 11 weeks left to see them.

Bogosian has added a new fillip that would not have occurred to Draper: As befits a good post-modernist, he's developed sections in which he plays himself instead of a character. Or rather, he plays a character who happens to be himself, as if someone else had written a play in which a solo performer, having rendered some rebarbative types, reveals the same prickly attitude toward his public that his creations show to the imaginary folk they address. “I've never really been a likable person,” he says, “and maybe you're a likable person and, you know, you feel superior to me because you're, you know, easy to get along with and I'm not. I don't really care what you think.”

This character too is a fiction, of course; the interesting point is that he's a fictional Bogosian, as opposed to the show's other characters, who are pure fictions. He's Bogosian's parody of himself, embodying and ridiculing his ambitions as an artist, his wary attitude toward crowd pleasing, his discomfiting sense that being a success with the monied crowd is always a kind of failure, reducing the work of art to a fashionable object of conspicuous consumption, like the radicchio and chardonnay that not-Bogosian accuses the audience of having dined on before they come to see him.

Really his attack is a kind of self-laceration: The guilty feeling that his work may only be an easy way for affluent liberals to go slumming mingles with the paranoid hint that, being timely, it isn't for all time. Later, he objectifies this fear in a memorably creepy figure, a young solo performer who comes backstage to idolize him, but remains to say everything an established artist doesn't want to hear, from “I'm closer to the cutting edge” to “Would you bring your agent to see me?” Like the self-parodies, this piece is great because it bears the scars of a personal agon: Bogosian doesn't sit around inventing riffraffy grotesques to shock us; he wants his work to mean something, is panicked that it might not, and—good man—isn't afraid to make fun of his own panic.

Of course, the riffraffy grotesques, and their contorted dialectic with the affluent liberal audience, are the meaning of his work. His aim isn't to taxonomize contemporary weirdness but to explore what it seems to have that our radicchio-and-chardonnay society lacks. Because it does distinctly seem to lack something, or why would people mythologize the anodyne '50s, that era of HUAC blacklists and segregated drinking fountains? That civilization and its consequences have somehow dislocated us from our humanity. We can't go back, and there apparently isn't any forward; thanks to technology we increasingly comment on our lives instead of living them. And the have-nots and newly-gots, whose comments are less inhibited, seem to be having much more fun. Art can't change things—it's a pointless, painful activity born of frustration, like pounding nails in the floor with one's forehead—but an artist who didn't face the disaster would be a sorry specimen.

So Bogosian's show becomes a meditation on our sorry state, including the limits of his own role. All the symptoms of disaster we fret over or studiously ignore—drugs, violence, AIDS, poverty—add bits to his mosaic. As before, he knows how to twist his themes to show us our own hypocrisy, the links between what we turn away from and what fascinates us. The new show's apex is a frizzed-out coke dealer's rhapsody about sex while stoned, but the joke isn't his obsessiveness or the razz he gives nonstoned activities; it's the imagined reactions of his unseen listener, a yuppie stockbroker come to buy the makings of his own private rhapsody. Part real and part put-on, the dealer's spiel is also part sales pitch; he's broker making it in the money world too, however loud his sneering.

Similarly, the calm, reliable-looking doctor, explaining to a patient the horrific side effects of what sounds like AZT, is getting off on the agony his description causes, even while he pulls sympathetic faces. Whether the cure's worse than the disease—or whether a few snorts of the dealer's white powder might be a wiser alternative—Bogosian leaves us to decide. His right guys are either epic fakes, like the self-help peddler who puts you in touch with your inner baby or moonstruck goofballs, like the wimp who frets over the injustice of using a male pronoun to describe his penis. Bogosian's wrong guys, his dropouts and freakouts and fuck-everyone misanthropes might not be so much smarter, or any less ensnared in the system, but they lie less about it: they open doors the rest of us keep closed, and you leave exhilarated, if slightly winded, by the many doors you've been hurtled through that you always thought were nailed shut.