Also this issue:

Animal Planet
Ben Woodward's zoological take on reality invades Spector Gallery.
-Susan Hagen

Broad Street Broadside
-A.D. Amorosi

Peter Jennings
-Debra Auspitz

Orson Scott Card
-Justin Bauer

Mr. Show: Hooray for America!
-Sam Adams

September 19-25, 2002

theater

Loot

by Toby Zinman

LootThrough Sept. 29, McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, N.J., 609-258-5050

“We were a laughingstock in criminal circles,” one character tells another, reminiscing about how they were caught stealing ladies’ overcoats. Well, they might have been a laughingstock in criminal circles, but they certainly are not in theatrical ones. This production of what is generally thought of as a funny, snarky play, has become tedious, and was met with only polite laughter from an audience of people who were either mildly amused or sound asleep. Polite laughter would have galled Joe Orton.

Orton, the legendary badboy of the English stage in the mid-1960s, has not aged well. Not that he himself aged at all, since his lover murdered him with a hammer in 1967 at the age of 34. But his reputation, built on Loot, What the Butler Saw and Entertaining Mr. Sloane, was for scandalous irreverence, sending up the pieties of British middle-class life: the church, the police, respect for the dead, deference to one's parents and fundamental decency.

The plot is preposterous: Dennis (Jeremy Webb) and Hal (Tom Story) rob a bank. They hide the money in Hal's mother's coffin, stuffing her body upside-down in a closet. There is a sexy, murderous nurse (Fiona Gallagher), a blathering detective (Mark Nelson) and an absurd widower (Martin Rayner). The corpse is desecrated in a variety of ways intended to be amusing and outrageous, although neither seemed to be the case.

I'm not sure why this show seemed so flat: Either irreverence in contemporary society has so outdistanced what was shocking 40 years ago, or this production, directed by Daniel Fish with a torpidity fatal to farce, is just too slow to be funny. Or both. The doors seem too few and open too rarely for classic farce, and the dialogue is delivered with a deliberate diction that seems to be aimed at a non-English-speaking audience. The final shocking, hilarious image of immorality triumphant is the only moment when the show seems really to achieve Orton's vision -- but by then it's all over.