Theatre in Review: Title and Deed (Signature Theatre Company)

It happens to everyone, sooner or later. A playwright is received with acclaim, hailed as a fresh voice and the wave of the future, and you are left, purely and simply, baffled. While others are composing rhapsodies, you stand outside, looking in, wondering what the party is about. It's unavoidable -- one cannot be all things to all playwrights -- but it's certainly a dull place to be.

For me, that playwright is Will Eno. In 2004, he ended up on the Pulitzer shortlist for Thom Pain (based on nothing), a piece that tested my willpower to its very limit. Last season, there was Middletown, which, while hardly an agony to sit through, struck me as remarkably coy and pointless. Now comes Title and Deed, which has earned glowing notices from the Times and The New Yorker, but which to me appears to be nothing more than a collection of random scribblings on the theme of displacement. Is there anything there? Don't ask me; I can't see it.

Eno isn't interested in plot, conflict, or rising or falling action. He is interested in loneliness, of a cosmic kind; his characters -- if you can call them that -- like to muse on their solitary status in a bleak and unforgiving universe. All of this may remind you of a writer known to his friends as Sam, and, in many cases, flattering parallels have been drawn. But if Eno is another Beckett, he is designed for audiences who like their existential despair cut with a little ice and ginger ale; it goes down more smoothly that way.

Title and Deed gives us a nameless man who, it would appear, is a permanent refugee. "I'm not from here; I guess I never will be," he tells us upfront, before spending the next 70 minutes or so musing on his state of not belonging. In a way, it's all about his attempt at connecting with us, an effort that is doomed to failure; one suspects the author feels that way about any sort of human endeavor on this bleak and loveless rock we call home.

It's largely an evening of free association, and, time and again, Eno grabs one's attention with a few words that suddenly crystallize the man's sad dilemma. It happens when he describes a public sign written in "your local government font;" or when, noting the importance of language, he says, "Thank God we invented words to huff and puff and give the whole thing some shape;" or when, recalling a funeral, he fixates on "the survivor's veiny hands." But even at their best, the words are a pastiche of Beckett, as written by the smartest student in the class. (Also, like Beckett, Eno's most beautiful and emotionally engaging phrases are, paradoxically, put to the use of stripping language of its meaning, exposing it as a threadbare device for distracting us from the void. Typically, he sees words as "the long and trembling hiss of those little sounds made up of nowhere.")

Left to his own devices, Eno all too often mines a vein of whimsical wordplay that courts cutesiness. For example, he notes that love is "a many-splintered thing." Other comments, like "I went my separate ways," or "They brought me into the world and taught me the difference between right and left" feel cribbed from the "humorous" posters found in office cubicles. There are also allegedly amusing references to the strange (and unnamed) culture from which the man hails. "It's like when they make you gargle with sand for your second birthday," he says, drawing a comparison with I know not what. Certainly, Beckett would never have stood for the sentimentality rife in the man's admission that he wants "someone to put a hand on my neck and say, 'It's okay. We'll get you home.'"

All of this and more is delivered with rare by aplomb by the Irish actor Conor Lovett, who, like his director, Judy Hegarty Lovett, is a Beckett specialist -- very possibly the best training for taking on an Eno play. (The two Lovetts are joint artistic directors of Gare St. Lazare Players Ireland, whence this production comes.) In any case, Conor Lovett finds more colors and degrees of shading in the text than I would have ever thought possible. His concentration is a thing to behold; at the performance I attended, he stayed on point and in character in the face of two walkouts, two rogue cellphones, and an audience member who worried a candy wrapper until I thought my nerves would scream. If the actor had mowed down the audience with a howitzer, no jury would have convicted him.

Christine Jones' setting, a collection of wooden panels -- some of which look like coffin lids -- that appear to have been arrested in free fall, provides the production's main point of visual interest. Ben Stanton's lighting and Andrea Lauer's costume are, within their narrow limits, perfectly fine. There is no sound design.

Watching Title and Deed -- an ironic allusion, I guess, to the man's landless existence -- it occurred to me that the alienation I was feeling was not unlike that being depicted on stage. If so, it wasn't a cause for communion. More often than not, my mind wandered. And why not? So does the author's.--David Barbour