Todd Allen Durkin is one crazy motherfucker, or at least he plays one on stage. He'll play anything but sane, a quirk that has rarely served him as well as it did in Will Eno's Thom Paine. Thom Paine is a one-man show in which the protagonist makes no sense whatsoever: he begins stories without finishing them, tells jokes without punchlines, and seems at all times ready to explode from ghastly internal pressure. The man wants to explain himself, to somehow rationalize his existence and explain away his foibles and let us know that he's really an OK guy. But in Durkin's hands, Thom didn't seem quite certain that the audience was willing to hear what he had to say; even his most lighthearted moments were shot through with intimations of impending doom, collapse, and failure. Thom could make us laugh, but he never laughed himself — his whole incoherent spiel was a tortured scream against alienation, and alienation isn't that funny. It's also seldom so painfully articulated in theater, and seldom so keenly felt by audiences at the moment of performance (so much so that several shows drew hecklers and sparked walkouts — some planted, many not). It was all so intense that you wondered, however briefly, if the event you were witnessing might transcend the stage and somehow magically cure the very malaise the playwright meant to address. It didn't, of course — the people departing Mosaic Theatre on those nights last summer were probably just as alienated and forlorn as the ones who'd arrived two hours earlier — but that wasn't Thom's failure, or Todd's. It was our own. We should just be glad they helped us realize it.