Universal Truth In Lookingglass Theatre's 'Title And Deed'

By Melody Udell in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 2, 2015 4:30PM

'Title and Deed' at Lookingglass Theatre.

“We all look like we’ve got barely anyone left,” observes the main—and only—character in Will Eno’s oddly affecting one-man show, Title and Deed. The unnamed traveler, played by Michael Patrick Thorton, is far from home, having spent the last two months abroad. Yet home, it seems, is what this traveler thinks of the most, and he spends most of the 75-minute monologue delivering wry, sometimes bleak observations about the one he left behind.

Clad in a well-worn hoodie and a porkpie hat, Thorton, who is in a wheelchair, moves about set designer Daniel Ostling’s bare stage and addresses the audience, asking rhetorical questions and musing about his homeland, a country whose cultural customs include “reverse” weddings, a fondness for municipal parades, and the ritual drinking of something known as “skipplejick.” But Eno, a master of lyrical yet emotionally dense language, doesn’t stop there—he dives deeper, delivering fresh insights into grief, birth and death, and the familiar motifs that envelop us all, no matter our geographical origins.

Inevitably, the show’s cadence starts to slow a bit after the midway point, and the script could stand to be trimmed down by a few minutes. But Eno’s work is in good hands with Thorton (and Chicago’s of-the-moment director, Marti Lyons), whose amiability and judicious comic timing are off-set by a barely acknowledged, quiet heartbreak. In the end, it’s the audience who feels like the visitor, albeit a welcome one.

The show runs through Sunday, May 3 at Lookingglass Theatre, 821 N. Michigan, 312-337-0665 or online.