Meaning of home key in simple play
Title and Deed ★★★ (out of 4) By Will Eno, directed by Stewart Arnott. Until Oct. 8 at Tarragon Theatre Backspace, 30 Bridgman Avenue. Tarragontheatre.com or 416-531-1827.
Once again, a GTA-based company is transporting audiences to Eno-land.
The voice of the American playwright Will Eno is so distinctive that it can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s, and the imaginative landscapes he creates through his work too are very recognizably his: sad places full of quirky, lonely people whose observations hover between banal and profound.
And just when you think you know where you are in his work, Eno lands a flash of insight or turn of phrase so original that it grabs your attention anew.
Eno wrote this play, subtitled “monologue for a slightly foreign man,” in 2012, and local company Nightfall Theatrics produced it briefly in 2015. They’ve brought it back for a two-week run in the attic-like Backspace at Tarragon Theatre, where his play The Realistic Joneses was staged last season. Following on from this and the Shaw Festival’s brilliant production of Eno’s Middletown this summer, interest in the writer’s work is running high in Toronto, so this remount feels particularly well-timed.
It’s a very simple piece given an appropriately spare staging by Stewart Arnott. There are only a few chairs scattered around the room, along with some throw rugs and oldfashioned lamps. The lone performer (Christopher Stanton) is wandering around the space as you enter, looking vaguely pained and fearful.
During the 70-minute piece, the character, just called “Man,” talks to the audience directly, sometimes commenting on someone’s appearance or expression. He’s not menacing, though, just melancholy and vul- nerable. He introduces himself as a stranger, a traveller from a place that’s never identified.
A lot of the piece is devoted to telling us about his background and upbringing. Some of the details are startling, to put it mildly: He never took to breastfeeding so he would “kind of lap the baby formula from this widemouthed pickle jar they’d put near me on the ground.” Try to get that image out of your mind.
What it means to feel at home is a key theme, and Man is extremely, perhaps terminally, un-homely — there’s nothing really for him to go back to, but he’s not found much of a real connection here either. He courted a few women, painted some houses, made a friend named Brian. He’s still searching, without much apparent hope, for “someone to put their hand on my neck and say ‘It’ll be all right. We’ll get you home.’ ”
Eno’s vision and voice are often likened to those of Samuel Beckett, and this piece was first performed by the great Irish Beckett actor Conor Lovett. The echoes are certainly there, particularly of Waiting for Godot: Man describes his path through life as “striking out in the world, one foot in the grave, the other in my mouth.” My viewing companion, who knows Eno’s breakout piece Thom Pain ( based on nothing) found Title and Deed overly similar to it, but this should not be a concern for those who are encountering Eno’s monologues for the first time.
Stanton clearly connects deeply with this material: the words seem to come perfectly naturally to him, and the silences, too — there are some moments of seeming forgetfulness that were so believable I had a slight worry he’d forgotten his lines. It’s a skilfully subtle performance that towards its end takes an unexpected and upsettingly credible turn in tone.
If you’re already feeling low, you may want to skip this one. But if existential sadness — and great wordsmithing — resonate with you, it will be a treat.