Review: Title and Deed

© Joan Marcus

Good luck searching for meaning in Title and Deed, Will Eno’s latest Rorschach test of a play being presented by the Signature Theatre. This monologue related by a nameless figure about his travels both literal and existential is so vague and amorphous that it remains elusive from beginning to end, which mercifully comes after only 70 minutes. It does, however, serve as an effective measure of the effectiveness of whatever stimulants you may be taking.

                  

“I’m not from here,” announces the nondescript man from an unspecified country. After presciently asking us not to walk out on him and if so to do it quietly, he proceeds to ramble on in shuffling, stammering fashion, resembling a stand-up comedian as conceived by Samuel Beckett.

 

And like so many stand-ups, he begins with an account of his encounter with airport customs, to which he declares that “I’m here to save us all.”

 

Not the audience, unfortunately, who are forced to glean whatever nuggets they can from the shambolic proceedings, which involve such matters as the deaths of the narrator’s parents and his friendship with a local family.

 

Eno gets off some good one-liners, some of the punning variety—the narrator describes love as “a many splintered thing”—and others of a vaguely philosophical nature. I do have to admit that I moved by one line towards the end of the play: “Don’t get too lost for too long,” the man advises. “They’ll stop looking, eventually.”

 

But it won’t be long before you simply settle into your seat for a nice quiet nap, aided by the non-existent staging of Judy Hegarty Lovett and the banal, deliberately matter-of-fact delivery by actor Conor Lovett (a veteran Beckett actor, by the way).

 

Eno, the author of such works as Thom Paine (based on nothing) and Middletown, is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Horton Foote Prize winner whose work has been inexplicably championed in certain circles. This latest work, presented in a production by Ireland’s Gare St Lazare Players, will once again leave you wondering why.

 

The Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. Through June 17. 212-244-7529. www.signaturetheatre.org.