Director Bart DeLorenzo, working with a superb, mostly British cast, has given us a splendid production of Joe Orton’s Loot. The black farce has just opened at the Odyssey, where a long run is predicted. Orton, as most theatergoers know, was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, an epigrammatic comic playwright who gleefully punctured pomposity and propriety with wit as his stiletto. In Loot Orton’s satirical targets are women, male and female authority figures, government, the law, Catholicism and goodness. Death also comes in for a lot of ribbing; it takes second place to money in the importance of things. Loot’s preposterous plot involves a funeral and a robbery. The seemingly upright McLeavy (Nicholas Hormann) has just been widowed; his wife’s corpse, freshly embalmed, rests in a coffin sitting in the living room of a dowdy English household (spot-on set by Keith Mitchell). The late Mrs McLeavy’s nurse, Fay (Elizabeth Arends), a predatory and horny bitch on wheels, makes it clear she’d like to become the next Mrs McLeavy. That she’s murdered seven of her eight previous husbands doesn’t seem to bother the old duffer. We also meet the family’s teenaged son, Hal (Robbie Jarvis), who has just robbed a bank with his bisexual lover, the undertaker Dennis (Alex James-Phelps). They end up hiding the loot in Mrs McLeavy’s coffin to escape the attention of Truscott (Ron Bottitta), an overbearing investigating officer from the Water Board. What follows is an elaborate shell game in which the clueless, greedy crooks periodically toss the cadaver (Selena Woolery Smith) around, from coffin to closet and back). Orton has great fun with this setup, working it for maximum effect, especially when the characters turn on each other in an attempt to nab the loot for themselves. Orton’s bleak misanthropy makes itself felt throughout, but his favorite target is Inspector Truscott, the embodiment of male corruption and conformity. Orton nails his character in one of the play’s famous lines when, as the action turns fierce and frantic, Truscott bellows, “How dare you involve me in a situation for which no memo has been issued!” Bottitta and his fellow actors play this kind of scabrous humor to perfection, drawing laugh after laugh from the audience. Orton’s anarchic vision of the world is alive and well at the Odyssey.
