Title and Deed / Oh, the Humanity and other good intentions

by Will Eno

"A haunting and often fiercely funny meditation on life as a state of permanent exile... The marvel of Mr. Eno’s voice is how naturally it combines a carefully sculptured lyricism with sly, poker-faced humor. Everyday phrases and familiar platitudes—‘Don’t ever change,’ ‘Who knows’—are turned inside out or twisted into blunt, unexpected punch lines punctuating long rhapsodic passages that leave you happily word-drunk." —Charles Isherwood, New York Times on Title and Deed

" Title and Deed is daring within its masquerade of the mundane, spectacular within its minimalism and hilarious within its display of po-faced bewilderment. It is a clown play that capers at the edge of the abyss... Eno’s voice is unique; his play is stage poetry of a high order. You can’t see the ideas coming in Title and Deed . When they arrive—tiptoeing in with a quiet yet startling energy—you don’t quite know how they got there. In this tale’s brilliant telling, it is not the narrator who proves unreliable but life itself. The unspoken message of Eno’s smart, bleak musings seems to enjoy the nothingness while you can." —John Lahr, New Yorker

"Eno is a supreme monologist, using a distinctive, edgy blend of non sequiturs and provisional statements to explore the fragility of our existence... There are a lot of words, but they are always exquisitely chosen... Oh, the Humanity reveals that we are beautiful walking tragedies blinking with absurd optimism into the camera lens of history." —Lyn Gardner, Guardian

Known for his wry humor and deeply moving plays, Will Eno's "gift for articulating life's absurd beauty and its no less absurd horrors may be unmatched among writers of his generation" ( New York Times ). This new volume of the acclaimed playwright's work includes five short plays about being alive— Behold the Coach, in a Blazer, Uninsured ; Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rain ; Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently ; The Bully Composition ; and Oh, the Humanity —as well as Title and Deed , a haunting and severely funny solo rumination on life as everlasting exile.

WILL ENO lives in Brooklyn, New York. His plays include The Flu Season, a tragedy, a problem play, and Intermission. His plays have been produced in London by the Gate Theatre and BBC Radio, and in the United States by Rude Mechanicals and Naked Angels. His play The Flu Season recently won the Oppenheimer Award, presented by NY Newsday for the previous year’s best debut production in New York by an American playwright.

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2013

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short plays about the rich inner life of slightly sad, slightly lost people. "Title and Deed" is about a man from somewhere else relating what it's like to be from somewhere else. "Oh, the Humanity" is comprised of five short plays - a coach describing the season, people recording dating profile videos, people posing for a picture, among others. Though light on plot, the plays are heavy on big ideas and word play. All of the pieces are about people reaching out and trying to communicate in a sometimes bewildering world.

(I was lucky enough to see excellent productions of both of these and glad to see the writing holds up on its own. It's a book I know I'll re-read every so often.)

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glad I read the whole thing, although I greatly preferred some of the short pieces in "Oh, the Humanity..." to "Title and Deed's" monologue. As for T&D, plenty of interesting things there, even in the spareness of it, and I'd love to see the direct audience engagement bits live, but it still didn't add up for me to come near Eno's best. There are, on the other hand, at least two stellar bits from OTH (interestingly, perhaps, first staged in 2007 with Marisa Tomei). "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rain" had, for me, strong echoes of Eno's excellent "The Realistic Joneses" with its heartbreaking cross-talk of two characters trying to only connect. "Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently" is the crown jewel here, a hybrid of Laurie Anderson's "On the Air" and an Onion article with each joke replaced by ten throat punches.