Title and Deed

David Lee’s Eno interpretation stuns with existential intensity

Orlando Fringe, Orlando, Florida

From The Orlando Weekly, May 14, 2018

David Lee is no stranger to Fringe success. He won the Critic’s Choice award for best male performance in 2015, a Fringe Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016 and a Patrons Pick prize back in 2011 for Thom Pain (based on nothing). So he’s returning to Fringe with perhaps the highest expectations of any performer not named Chase Padgett. Lee does not disappoint.

This year Lee is again embracing the existential work of New York playwright Will Eno, who also authored Thom Pain, a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Price in drama. Title and Deed, which made its Off-Broadway debut in 2012, focuses on an oddly haunted man who describes himself as a foreigner, a newcomer to our country (or perhaps our plane of existence), a “celebrant” and a “homesick orphan fuck.” Not wholly familiar with our language, this stranger strings words together like bedraggled tinsel garlands on Samuel Beckett’s Christmas tree. The result is a prose that’s not easily understood but always appreciated.

It’s tough to imagine any Orlando performer more suited to the monologue than Lee, whose nearly unbearable intensity – almost too much to bear for him as well as us – will again make him a contender for a Fringe award. Though the material demands patience, Lee (who also directs) brings it fully alive as if he were inventing the sometimes absurdist, sometimes stream-of-consciousness script on the spot.

“Don’t walk out on me,” Lee asks the audience in one of the play’s many meta-theatrical moments. “Don’t hate me.”

Don’t worry, David. There’s no chance of that.

 

Title and Deed
Margaret Nolan/Kangagirl Productions, Winter Park, Florida
13 & Up – Mature Themes
60 Minutes
Yellow Venue
Friday, May 18, 2018, 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 20, 2018, 4 p.m.
Tuesday, May 20, 2018, 8 p.m.
Thursday, May 24, 2018, 5:15 p.m.
Friday, May 25, 2018, 9 p.m.
Saturday, May 26, 2018, 5:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 27, 2018, 11:30 a.m.

 

© 2018 Orlando Weekly / MeierMovies, LLC