POUNDING NAILS
St. Louis Post-Dispatch review
Reviewed by Judy Newmark

Vulgar, angry and outrageously funny, Eric Bogosian’s “Pounding Nails In The Floor With My Forehead” is essentially a series of character studies, concentrating on men who range from the seriously troubled to the positively repellant.

Originally, Bogosian played them all. Now Joe Hanrahan, starring the short one-man show, demonstrates that you don’t have to be their author to bring these characters to aggressive life.

He opening sequence, “Molecules,” gets the evening off to a loathsome, but powerful, start: A bum in the subway is talking in amazing detail about his bodily excretions. “Molecules” is one of the very few scripts capable of triggering the gag reflex all by itself. In opening with it, the author no doubt intends to slap the audience into an awareness of his phenomenally anti-bourgeois sensibility, and he certainly succeeds. Luckily, after that the aesthetic climbs out of the gutter, although the language remains coarse throughout, with a lot of vivid talk about sex, drugs and violence. The show is not for the gentlefolk.

Hanrahan, whose slurred speech and bent gait suit the bum very well, cleans up nicely for the characters to come, among them a guilt-ridden suburbanite, a doctor prescribing he worst medicine in the world, and a “recovering male” who confesses his shame to fashion models in magazines because of the fantasies he harbors about them.

With its deep-seated anger, and the author’s anguished swings between the longing for numbness and the desire to feel something, monotony is never a problem in this show.

Riverfront Times review
Reviewed by Bob Wilcox

Eric Bogosian reports from the front lines of the wars being waged all around us. His characters vent their anger and frustration at society for its corruptions an cruelties and at themselves because they haven’t been corrupt and cruel enough to succeed in our society.

Most of the guys who appear in the eight brief monologues that make up the hour-long “Pounding Nails In The Floor With My Forehead” we have met before, from the naïve 12-stepper to the convolutedly self-aware artist. Bogosian pushes them a little further, then adds his own twist. What the Alcoholics Anonymous type confesses is that he is a man, guilty of not having an addiction but of having a penis, driven by his gender to do awful things – “sometimes I feel like a human being trapped in a man’s body.” A subway bum spins an ingenious theory that makes the molecules of his excrement the source of the spreading disease of fear in our culture. Sometimes, though, as in a doctor’s description of the side effects of the medicine he’s prescribing, the satire barely moves beyond the familiar and predictable. And sometimes, as in the final piece, “Blow Me,” Bogosian fails to lift his character’s obsession with obscenity to the level of poetry he’s straining for. But always he packs his writing full of smart, nervous energy.

“Pounding Nails” is the third Bogosian solo piece Joe Hanrahan has performed. I think it’s Hanrahan’s best. He usually has a characteristic quality, rhythm and inflection – or lack of inflection – in his voice that has in the past limited him in expressing the full range of Bogosian’s characters. I rarely heard that Hanrahan voice in this show. Probably David Wassilak’s direction has helped Hanrahan give the pieces such satisfying shapes. Though we see only the one character that Hanrahan is playing, the person he’s talking to is also crystal clear. Sometimes we in the audience are that person, and the performance space in the third-floor gallery at the Forum For Contemporary Art makes it an intimate conversation. “Pounding Nails” keeps you awake and alert and a little more alive than usual.