“We all come from blood and saltwater and a screaming mother begging us to leave.” Given what we know about the origins of the species, and the rarity of even the most enthusiastic birthing mother looking to prolong the miraculous but less-than-relaxing process, this is a pretty noncontroversial observation about our common origins. It’s the kind of starkly philosophical phrase you really don’t hear every night at the theater, or on television, or spoken at your local suburban chain restaurant over the unlimited breadsticks.
But in a play by Will Eno, well, such observations just flow out like lava. One can say many things about Eno, the quite singular author of such plays as “Middletown” and “The Realistic Joneses,” which starred Michael C. Hall on Broadway and was a memorable play wherein a Jones had special affinity. But few comments are as accurate as the observation that Eno loves discussing the beginning and the end of life: “the human cannonball feeling at the beginning; the sickening thump at the end.”
If that’s all the brutal truth you can take about life’s contrasting entrances and exits, then “Title and Deed,” the current show at the Lookingglass Theatre Company, is not your kind of show. Lookingglass may be known for Mary Zimmerman-style shimmering imagery, but there is nothing whatsoever spectacular about “Title and Deed,” which is directed with an exceptionally sure and humanistic hand by the rising and talented young director Marti Lyons. There is no Alice cavorting on a trapeze, no celebrity chef. Not even a literary adaptation.
There is just one Chicago actor, Michael Patrick Thornton, delivering an observational monologue for about 75 minutes. He does so on a mostly empty stage. His character, who does not tell us where he has come from — beyond intimating that it does not appear to be anywhere on planet Earth — does not even have a proper name. In the playbill, he is known as Traveler. He can, at least, take solace in the uppercase title. Such small victories are to be savored.
To be more accurate, Dan Ostling’s set, which looks a bit like the first tee on the golf-course of life, has a gentle rise in its back, a small hill up which Thornton, who is confined to a wheelchair, must climb. That first image — of an extraterrestrial in a bowler hat, pushing himself up a hill; coming, he says, not to judge or complain but to note differences between his world and ours — is not an easy one to forget. It’s emblematic, really, of what Thornton consistently brings to the Chicago theater.
Eno did not write “Title and Deed” — which has already been seen in New York, — for an actor in a wheelchair, but for an Irishman who employs no such conveyance. Yet Thornton makes you swear otherwise. This remarkable actor, whose no-nonsense, Chicago-style truth-telling is his biggest asset, seems to have an immediate way into Eno’s neo-Beckettian style, a sense of Eno’s wry humor, a feeling for Eno’s way with words and a propensity for heading directly to the emotional jugular.
To some extent, I think, the Traveler is pleased to see earthlings gathered together — a “little clump,” he calls it — rather than isolated with their electronic devices. He’s a quizzical fellow, inclined both to beat himself up and to tell jokes, to admire and critique, to empathize and provoke. As penned by Eno and played by Thornton at some cost to himself, he is a most welcome visitor, a provocateur with deep thoughts, an outsider who helps us see ourselves.
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
3.5 STARS
When: Through May 3
Where: Water Tower Pumping Station, 821 N. Michigan Ave.
Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes
Tickets: $40-$60 at 312-337-0665 or lookingglasstheatre.org
