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by Will Eno, directed by Stewart Arnott

Nightfall Theatrics, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto

November 18-December 6, 2015;

Tarragon Workspace, 30 Bridgman Avenue, Toronto

September 19-October 8, 2017

“Don’t get too lost for too long”

Christopher Stanton is currently presenting the Toronto premiere of Will Eno’s Title and Deed from 2012.  Toronto has previously seen only two of Eno’s works – Thom Pain (based on nothing) in 2006 and Tragedy: A Tragedy at SummerWorks this year.  The vast majority of American plays we see in Toronto deal with current events, identity politics, personal relationships, the “American Dream” or some combination of these.  It is reassuring therefore to know that there is an American playwright like Eno who is willing to forego the usual naturalistic trappings of drama and to engage with the more universal topics of language, existence and purpose.  In 2004 the New York Times called Eno “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation”, a typically glib remark, but one that at least suggests that Eno deals with the most essential philosophical questions in an achingly funny self-deprecatory manner. 

So it is with Title and Deed, subtitled “monologue for a slightly foreign man”.  In it a character simply named Man (Christopher Stanton), introduces himself to us and tries in the next 60 minutes to explain what being a foreigner is like.  What he has to say is not very complicated.  Basically, it is something like, “I am not from here, so we have differences.  Yet, we also have similarities and that is what helps us to communicate with each other”.  The humour and the mystery of the play come from the great difficulties the Man has in saying even the simplest things.

The difficulties do not stem from language differences.  Eno’s description of the characters in the text is, “just a man; ideally, he is slightly foreign to his audience, though a native speaker of English”.  The only problem is that the Man is not always sure that the idioms common in the English of his small, unnamed country are the same as they are with us.  What trips him up more is the very nature of language itself.  He marvels that he, though foreign, can still communicate with us and that sounds like “lamp” and “horse” mean the same things to us as they do to him.  Often in the middle of speaking he will become aware of speaking itself and making sounds while wondering how those sounds came to have meaning.  Etymologies apparently can make him weep. 

In looking for commonalities between us and him, he starts out with with rather too general similarities: “You all have mother and fathers, yes?”  When he speaks of the “human” term for “chair” or when he he speaks of “here” as Earth, we begin to wonder where exactly his “there” is.  How alien is he to our “here” or is he so far gone in loneliness and desperation that even the most common things of our “here” seems unusual to him.   

His alienation combined with his hyper-awareness of language is part of a trait he shares with Eno’s earlier Thom Pain – extreme self-consciousness as he judges everything he says, comments on it and even comments on the comments, sometimes only to himself.  As a fundamentally meek person the Man hilariously gets caught up in spirals of self-referentiality from which he barely can escape. 

As the Man speaks of immigrating to “here”, wherever that is – presumably the United States in the original production but never specified – the question grows throughout the monologue of why the Man has left the “there” of his homeland.  The Man is rather intent on portraying his homeland as a happy place, always holding parades for the smallest event like a child getting its braces off, except when they have to stop because of ambulances going to the hospital.  In fact, all of the Man’s anecdotes about how happy his life was back “there” are undercut by something unsettling.  He notes that “here” we have birth stones, whereas back “there” they have “birth clouds”.  He says they both come to the same thing.  Stones suggests rigidity and burial in the earth while clouds suggest momentary appearance and gradual disappearance. 

The one sight that decided him on leaving his homeland was the idyllic scene of sheep standing in in a field just when it started to snow.  The problem is that the sheep had been shorn to soon.  He doesn’t finish because the implication is obvious.  His homeland, however happy it supposed was, is imbued with death.  Eno has taken the typical phrase used by immigrant of seeking a “new life” in a another country literally.  The Man is clearly in the midst of an existential crisis and has thought that starting a “new life” will help him.  As he speaks, however, he becomes all too aware that his new life “here” is not going to be much different than his old life “there”. 

As the monologue nears its end the Man’s desperation increases as the very pointlessness of immigrating starts to dawn on him.  He has changed countries but has not changed bodies or selves and is now without even the comforts of the old ways of his homeland, uncomforting as they may have been.  As he says, “ I have this little hopeless glimmer of hope that I might somehow with a change of scenery change”.  Hopeless, however, is the operative word.  By the end the comedy and the tragedy of the Man’s life are so intertwined that we are caught between laughter and pity. 

He says that back “there”, his parents brought him up by making him face the essential questions of life – “Who do you you think you are?” and “What do you think you’re doing?”  These common parental reprimands the Man has taken as philosophical imperatives, and his speech to us is, in part, an attempt to give his answer to these questions.  Comically, sadly, the longer he speaks to us the more he comes to realize he doesn’t know. 

Staged at the Artscape Youngplace in what was formerly a classroom, Stanton performs for an intimate audience of only twelve.  In such close proximity Stanton makes us see how the Man struggles to keep a calm and cheery façade despite his increasing inward turn toward depression as all his reference points of “there”, his life and even words become meaningless even as he speaks of them.  Stanton portrays the man’s inner battles and his crippling self-consciousness perfectly in a very compassionately drawn portrait of a fellow being in crisis.  Stanton knows how to bring out the poetry of Eno’s prose, a kind of poetry of hesitation and discomfort.  Director Stewart Arnott has had Stanton make use of the entire space of the room weaving in among the audience, speaking directly to us, as well as suddenly turning his face to the wall to cover his emotions. 

Eno has given his “slightly foreign man” a homeland with some very bizarre customs – the sand-gargling ceremony for two-year-olds, reverse marriages, out-of-tune serenades – but that is the absurdist strain in the monologue.  What is more significant is that the Man has come to feel alien to himself, to the world around him and even to language itself.  You can only feel at the end of the show that we get by in daily life by not thinking of the very things that so obsess this foreigner, not that not thinking of them means they don’t exist. 

The title Title and Deed suggests ownership of property and proof of it.  Ironically, that is exactly what the Man, and by extension all of us in our evanescent lives, do not have.  This is a subtle, impeccably performed philosophical comedy.  Anyone who wants to get to know one of the more profound and distinctive voices in contemporary American drama should make certain not to miss it.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: Christopher Stanton. ©2015 Bonnie Anderson.

For tickets, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2342041.