after all, people might talk
by
Douglas Messerli
Joe
Orton Loot / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the performance I
saw was with Howard Fox on June 16, 2019.
In
playwright Joe Orton’s comedies things usually begin bad and quickly get
worse—or at least more frenetic. The “villains” almost win out in the end, while
the pious forces of society such as the police and priests get punished, or
more often, are simply exposed for being the true scoundrels working
against the social order. Wild sexuality, homosexuality, incest, robbery, and
even murder are treated by Orton as far more fun than a life of order and
religiosity.
It is no wonder, accordingly, that his
second play Loot, which first opened in 1964, drew outrage from much of
British society. That it has been so often staged since (I’ve seen two productions
just in Los Angeles) perhaps demonstrates how morality has shifted or simply
how much fun his dark comic plays are. Certainly Orton’s version of black
comedy completely altered the theater world—far, far more than the angry young
men plays of John Osbourne and others or kitchen sink dramas of Arnold Wesker
or Shelagh Delaney.
The new production of the noted Los
Angeles theater Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, although a bit rough at moments in
its directorial (by Bart DeLorenzo) timing, did not disappoint, even in the
often audience did.
Truscott, evidently based on a real thuggish
and abusive policeman, Harold Challenor, in Orton’s topsy-turvy world is the
true force of evil in this farce, while even the sexual high-jinx of Hal and
Dennis (one must recall that homosexuality was still banned in England and the Stonewall
uprising in the USA was about five years in the future), their seemingly
successful robbery, Dennis’ determination to marry Fay (he is clearly bi-sexual
or perhaps, given his good looks, even pan-sexual) and even Fay’s murder
(evidently not her first) can’t even begin to match the open brutality, lies,
and abusiveness of Truscott.
This is a play in which you truly hope the
thieves and murderer get away with their crimes. After all, the boys need the
money to settle down together, and Fay has once more run out of funds, while
Mrs. McLeavy (Selina Woolery Smith) was quite clearly a blind, old woman
already on her deathbed, and her cliché-spouting husband certainly might
deserve a change of venue. Surely Mrs. McLeavy’s black dress, trimmed with an
emerald lining (costumes by Michael Mullen), looks better on the young Fay than
it might have ever on the old wife.
The central problem of this work is
where to hide all that delicious cash. The gay lovers suddenly perceive there
is no better place, particularly with Truscott mussing around while turning off
the toilet and beating up Hal’s highly confused old Da, that the coffin would
be perfect, but where to put the body already inhabiting that spot?
Despite Truscott’s endless attacks, they
are mostly bluffs since he seems to be the most stupid and blind chief of
police in existence, a bit like the one in Robert Altman’s film, years later, Gosford
Park, a work obviously influenced by the likes of Loot.
A lot of humor of this work exists in
its endless site-gags, some of which, despite the generally excellent acting of
the play’s characters, just didn’t quite come off. Yet the wit of Orton’s
dialogue is so infectious that even the appearing and disappearing coffin and
body, a bit clumsy at moments, doesn’t truly slow down the play much.
The problem is with any Orton work is to
speak his outrageous witty lines without any attempt to give credence to their
absurdity. This playwright’s fictions simply won’t survive with campy winks.
Orton’s writing “pretends” to be as serious as Osbourne’s tortured couples,
while all the time revealing the absurdity of their situations. The cast at the
Odyssey primarily succeeded, but, once again, there were moments when the
dialogue was perhaps slowed down a bit, or, even worse, sped up, going right
past the audience’s ability to catch up with the satire. Orton’s plays combine post-modern
wit and old-fashioned comic athleticism in a way that is extremely difficult to
portray for young actors. And despite the director’s program declaration that
Orton’s play has not aged, I’d argue that in the horrible cynicism in which we
today live, the writer’s irony has been somewhat lost.
When the country has selected a president
that behaves somewhat similarly to the policeman Truscott, making the rules up
as he goes along, and might be very willingly accept a bribe of 30% of the
loot, or even vindictively kill off the pious old coot who knows too much about
the events, it has become a bit more difficult to laugh out loud.
And as in Harold Prince’s 1970 film Something
for Everyone—another offspring of Orton’s comic outlook—it is Fay who
finally whisks away the handsome young prince, Dennis, explaining that when she
and he marry, it wouldn’t look right for him to remain with Hal: “after all,
people might talk.”
Los
Angeles, June 17, 2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2019).
