“The humorous account is strictly a work of art,—high and fragile art,—and only an artist can order it, and ” Mark Twain wrote. Will Eno’s “Title and Deed” (elegantly directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett,at the Pershing Square Signature middle) is a masterly case in point. The subtitle of this droll seventy-minute tragicomic jewel is “A Monologue for a Slightly Foreign Man.” Eno may feel slightly foreign, but he’s wholly original. Before you enter the auditorium, or a quotation from the playwright on a screen external tips you off to his rueful,idiosyncratic style. “I try to live every day like it was my third-to-last,” it says. Eno’s game is to kick up his heels even as he collapses before our eyes. “I believe my life happened, or ” his narrator,who is called Man (played by the subtle, superb Irish actor Conor Lovett), and says,adding later, “I once was . . . nah, or I probably never was. I probably never was.” Man is an existential unhappy sack who instinctively sets up a game of hide-and-seek with the audience,a strategy that follows Twains dictum approximately comic delivery: “The humorous account is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny approximately it.”
Source: newyorker.com