Theatre in Review: Loot (Red Bull Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)"Has no one in this house any normal feelings?" So cries out one of the desperate characters in Loot. Well, it depends on what you mean by normal. In the world of Joe Orton's 1966 farce, murder, grand theft, torture, and promiscuous sex are par for the course, to say nothing of desecrating the dead. And yet rarely have you encountered such a well-spoken band of miscreants. One character is described as being so pious, "a papal dispensation is required to dust his room." A wild youth's many sins are presented in digest form because, another comments, "he simply can't be in the confessional 24 hours a day." A police detective, bearing down on a suspect, announces, "It's for your own good that authority acts in this seemingly threatening way." Even if they are, to a person, criminals and hypocrites, they certainly have a silken way with a sentence. Pity the playwright who gets branded an agent provocateur. When his or her play is first seen, the ensuing scandal is certain to obscure its real qualities. Later on, when cooler heads prevail, the wonder may be what all the fuss was about. Such has been the fate of Joe Orton, who, during his brief career, gloried in appalling West End audiences and censors with his scabrous comedies. In recent years, however, works like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and What the Butler Saw have begun to show their age, their provocativeness diminished by the falling of so many social taboos. Reasonable minds might wonder whether Orton might someday fade away altogether, a rebel deprived of his cause. Which is why the Red Bull Theater revival of Loot comes as such a happy surprise; Loot is still an outrageous work, if handled correctly, and the director, Jesse Berger, has a solid handle on Orton's illicit dramatic goods. Where other directors try to recapture the play's original shock value with sledgehammer tactics, Berger takes the opposite approach, using a light touch to reveal Loot as a gloriously macabre cartoon of middle-class British values. It's a state-of-the-nation play -- and the state is rancid with hypocrisy. Berger has engaged a cast of skilled light comedians who are firmly on his wavelength. Rebecca Brooksher is a fetching Fay, a private duty nurse whose protestations of Catholic piety clash with her miniskirts (in black, for mourning, and usually nicked from the deceased). Fay has an unparalleled knack for ushering her patients into the next world while helping herself to their savings accounts and surviving spouses. At the moment, she has her eye on the widower McLeavy, "the leading Catholic layman within a radius of 40 miles," who met his late wife "at an informal get-together run by a Benedictine monk." Played with a permanent air of pious grief by Jarlath Conroy, he is thoroughly blinded to the nefarious activity unfolding all around him. Describing his wife's funeral cortege, he says, "We set off in high spirits," before meeting a disaster that halts the procession in its tracks. Much of the trouble is caused by Hal, McLeavy's delinquent son, and Dennis, his best friend and possibly his lover (when they aren't visiting the local brothels together). Having relieved the local bank of hundreds of thousands of pounds, they have stashed the cash in a closet in the McLeavys' living room, right next to the coffin containing Mrs. McLeavy. Fearing discovery, they plan to switch the contents of the coffin and closet. Nick Westrate, dressed like a teddy boy, his face framed in a permanent pout, is a nearly perfect Hal; faced with the prospect of undressing his late mother's body, he retreats to a mirror, combs his hair in an effort to calm his nerves, and mutters, "It's a Freudian nightmare." Ryan Garbayo makes a fine partner in crime as Dennis, who, despite his protestations of innocence, yearns to be Fay's sex slave. Best of all is Rocco Sisto as Truscott "of the Yard," a ruthless and incompetent detective disguised as an inspector from the Water Board -- a term that nowadays has an even more sinister connotation than Orton intended -- who grills the others in search of indictable offenses. In truth, Sisto wasn't 100% on top of his lines at the performance I attended, but he was well on his way to creating a characterization to remember. Whether reminiscing about the Limbless Girl Killer (who subdued her victims without the use of any arms), staring at a stray eyeball through a magnifying glass Sherlock Holmes might envy, or furiously asking, "How dare you involve me in a situation for which no memo has been written?", he is exactly the fatuous spokesperson for the ossified establishment that Orton envisioned. Furthermore, understanding that Loot is pure burlesque, a spoof of British stage thrillers crossed with a sex farce, Berger has virtually choreographed his performers, carefully timing each aside to the audience and turning Truscott's interrogations into little tangos between investigator and suspect. This approach creates a level of comic detachment that allows us to revel in the wicked goings on. The production design adds another welcome level of stylization. Narelle Sissons' living room setting has all the details you would expect, including the flowered wallpaper and plastic covered furniture, and she has given the set a sterile, unlived-in feeling that suggests it is used only for special occasions; it looks like an exhibit from a museum of the British lower middle classes. Scott Zielinski blasts the room with soft, bright white light, creating the right atmosphere for farce. Sara Jean Tosetti's costumes and Brad Berridge's sound design, the latter of which makes use of the Rolling Stones, are also solid contributions. Truscott, interviewing a suspect, calls the victim's response, "a theme that, if less skillfully handled, might have given offense." Joe Orton's days of giving serious offense may be behind him, but his works, handled correctly, still pack many a coruscating laugh, as a visit to the Lucille Lortel Theatre will prove. --David Barbour 
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