206. Review of LOOT (January 16, 2014)

206. LOOT

 

 

The late British playwright Joe Orton’s black farce, LOOT, is one of those plays with a great reputation for absurdist hilarity, partly because of the author’s relative notoriety as a gay man in then zero-tolerance England (he was murdered by his male lover, who then committed suicide), but that has never been able to cash in at New York’s box offices. It has had two Broadway productions, one in 1968 that ran 22 performances after 11 previews, and another, in 1986, that caved after 5 previews and 96 performances. The only actor of serious note in the 1968 version was English star George Rose, who played the Scotland Yard inspector, Truscott, while the 1986 revival benefitted from the presence of Joseph Maher as Truscott, Alec Baldwin as Dennis, the undertaker-burglar, and Željko Ivanek as his co-burglar, Hal, and Zoe Wanamaker as Fay, the homicidal nurse. The Red Bull Theater’s poky new revival, Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, under Jesse Berger’s direction, is unlikely to alter the play’s local trajectory.

 

 

  

 From left: Ryan Garbayo, Nick Westrate. Photo: Rahav Segev/Photopass.com.
 

             Narelle Sissons’s naturalistic living room set, with its pale, fading wallpaper, plastic-covered easy chair, water-stained ceiling, and other touches of lower middle-class gentility, captures the mid-1960s English ambience well enough, as do a few of Sara Jean Tosetti’s Rolling Stones-era costumes, like Hal’s (Nick Westrate) white shirt, skinny tie, skinny black jeans, and black leather jacket. The actors, however, only one of whom (Jarlath Conroy as McLeavy) appears to be English-born and raised, struggle to find the right balance between comic realism and absurdist farce to make us care about their dilemmas in the oddball world Orton creates around them.

Mr. Berger has directed the piece almost as if it were taking place on a music hall stage; actors frequently stand in pairs and deliver their dialogue like stand up comedians, speaking their lines straight to the audience, with stage lights up bright and footlights focused to create tall, artificial shadows on the rear wall. Many of the bits do have a touch of the crossfire style redolent of music halls or vaudeville, but not enough of it is risible enough to sustain the style for long, and the approach gets thinner as the play proceeds. Despite the high energy of the performances, the timing is awry, even sluggish, and I found myself sitting stone-faced as the audience seemed to be working just as hard to support the actors as the latter did to entertain the audience. My companion for the evening fled after the first act.

LOOT revels in the kind of offbeat, racy, anarchistic, and grotesque humor we associate with 1960s British comedy, a taste of which survives on the old “Benny Hill” TV show. There’s definitely a powerful stream of subversion here,  both in the play’s epigrammatic quips and knockabout humor. It hurls satiric bolts at the Catholic Church and makes an especially nasty attack on the arrogance, stupidity, and corruption of the British police; this is an institution with which Orton had awful experiences, including a six-month jail term and a bankruptcy-producing fine for the crime of stealing and defacing library books. Orton believed his sentence was a cover to punish him for his homosexuality. The police are mainly present in the person of Truscott (Rocco Sisto), an overbearing detective whose investigation into a bank robbery leads him to enter the house of McLeavy, whose wife has just died, by pretending to be from the metropolitan water board (thus freeing him from the necessity of producing a search warrant).

           Dominating the living room is a coffin containing the remains of the late Mrs. McLeavy, whose corpse, wrapped in linens, eventually becomes a comical prop whose rudely sacrilegious treatment is intended to have the audience rolling in the aisles. Much is made as well of one of the corpse’s glass eyes (which is featured on the Playbill cover design), but despite all the opportunities for comic mayhem, the production never jells. A reading of the script reveals numerous potentially hilarious lines and bits of business, but the cast is unable to overcome the feeling that they’re swimming upstream against the farcical current.

 

 

From left: Rocco Sisto, Nick Westrate, Ryan Garbayo. Photo: Rahav Segev/Photopass.com.

The lynchpin performance has to be that of the actor playing Truscott, a marvelously written role in which Rocco Sisto is seriously miscast. Truscott has a particularly relevant contemporary edge because he reminds us of the secretive powers of the NSA, which will go to any lengths to surveil our every action and word. The quite tall Mr. Sisto, wearing a handlebar mustache, bowler hat, and dressed completely in black, towers over his fellow players, throwing the visual balance of the play somewhat off balance. His Truscott is physically menacing—the character thinks nothing of using force on those he suspects of malfeasance—but he lacks the comic imagination to wring all the ironies from the often inverted logic of his lines. Nor did Mr. Sisto’s frequent verbal lapses the night I saw the play help him very much.

 

 

From left: Nick Westrate, Rebecca Brooksher, Ryan Garbayo. Photo: Rahav Segev/Photopass.com.

As Fay, Mrs. McLeavy’s nurse, a woman who has murdered each of her seven husbands, Rebecca Brooksher looks right but works too hard at being funny, which can also be said of the rest of the other principals, Nick Westrate as Hal, Ryan Garbayo as Dennis, Mr. Conroy as McLeavy. Most of the actors perform with an arch, winking at the audience attitude (including self-conscious poses that almost require a “da-da-boom” drum beat). The lack of consistency and authenticity in the British accents is one more nail in this inadequate production’s coffin.

 

 

Jareth Conroy. Photo: Rahav Segev/Photopass.com.
 

Mr. Orton’s farce will likely remain a cult classic on the page, but, in New York, at least, whatever treasures LOOT contains remain to be discovered on the stage.