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Lost
in Translation
By
Kathryn Ceceri
Loot
By
Joe Orton, directed by Graeme McKenna
Curtain
Call Theater, through May 8
Any play can have a bad night.
When the rhythm is off—when the audience takes one beat too
many to get the joke, or worse yet, isn’t sure it’s OK to
laugh—everything can fall apart. Loot is a very strange
comedy, one that owes its popularity to its tastelessness
and shock value. That alone is enough to make it a tough sell.
On the night I saw it last week at the Curtain Call Theater,
not even director Graeme McKenna’s updating and Americanization
of Joe Orton’s biting British humor could help the cast find
its groove or coax the audience over the hump from nervous
titter to outright guffaw. But whether that’s McKenna’s fault,
or just lack of chemistry between cast and audience, is hard
to say.
The openly gay Orton was a bit of a thug, a semi-anarchist
who spent time in jail with his collaborator and lover, Kenneth
Halliwell, for pasting outrageous images into library books.
He was eventually murdered by Halliwell at the peak of his
career, at age 34. Orton loved to shock: Among the work he
left behind was a never-produced screenplay for the Beatles
called Prick Up Your Ears, a play on words on several
levels, “ears” being an anagram. (Prick Up Your Ears is
also the title both of a 1978 biography and a 1987 biopic,
which revived his fame for later generations.)
Loot’s
absurdist worldview is like a Monty Python routine pushed
beyond funny to the edge of cruel. A comely blonde nurse,
played with cool allure by Amy Lane, prepares her late employer’s
befuddled husband (Phil Sheehan) for the dead woman’s funeral,
and not coincidentally for a quick remarriage to the nurse
herself. Moving around an eye-catching set by Charles Steckler—on
which are shellacked (crazy-person style, à la Orton’s own
décor) front- page headlines about aliens and Andy Warhol,
topped by multiple framed pictures of the Pope—Lane’s nurse
can’t help pointing out how the dead woman’s faults stem from
her not being Catholic. It’s a bit of sectarian banter that,
like the throwaway lines about priests and altar boys, garnered
only an embarrassed peep from the audience.
Nor did gasps and squeals greet the entrance of the couple’s
son Hal, a stupid youth involved with the black-leather-clad
undertaker Dennis, as he stepped from the mysteriously locked
closet. We know Timothy Leonard’s Hal is stupid because he
says each word slowly and distinctly; by contrast, Kris Anderson
as greasy, sleazy Dennis plays stupid much more smartly and
convincingly. Dennis and Hal, we find out, have spent the
night burrowing through from the mortuary into the bank next
door, and as loot and corpse get roughly shifted from closet
to coffin and back again, Loot shifts gears from offensive
diatribe to simple gruesome slapstick. Meanwhile, the widower
wanders in and out, confusingly clueless.
If anything saved the evening, it was the arrival of a tall,
authoritative man from the Department of Water and Power—one
part Sherlock Holmes, one part Joe Friday, and one
part Ministry of Silly Walks. With his deadpan delivery and
insistence that he was indeed from the DWP (and not, despite
the logo on baseball cap and bomber jacket, from the FBI),
Gregor Wynnyczuk’s public servant gave the audience the relief
it craved: something safe to laugh at.
Having heard that the opening night’s audience fell right
into Loot’s brand of insanity, I’d like to give Curtain
Call the benefit of the doubt. Saturday’s missed cues, stepped-on
lines and generally out-of-sync delivery could certainly be
a reflection of audience reluctance to accept Orton on his
own terms. That the ensemble had so much trouble getting back
on its feet, though, might also be a sign that director McKenna
needed to work harder on his cast’s comedic timing. With several
talented players on board and plenty of opportunity for slapstick,
Loot was definitely not the rich haul it could have
been.
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