REVIEWS ...
Monday, December 15, 2003
Daffy farce oozes with sex
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
British sex farces come in several flavors, including classic (the great work of Oscar Wilde), madcap contemporary (any number of Ray Cooney's plays) and parody (Michael Frayn's Noises Off). Whether they're your cup of Earl Grey depends on your fondness for slamming doors, mistaken identities and intricately plotted sexual shenanigans.
But even if the genre isn't your thing, Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw -- a dark, outrageous, absurdist riff of a sex farce -- may prove a sophisticated, stimulating pleasure.
Certainly, it's easy to see why this 1969 play, published two years after Orton's murder by his lover, appealed to Joseph Adler, who has bypassed "holiday" fare at GableStage for Orton's farce. What the Butler Saw is twisted, smart, witheringly sardonic and an equal-opportunity offender.
Mind you, the sex pulsing through most of the play is verbal, though both of the women in the cast appear in their undies, and a doughy bellboy dashes about with only some bunched-up clothes covering his family jewels (but not his posterior, with its Union Jack tattoo on his left cheek).
Though the pace of the production isn't as frantic and precise as it should be, Adler has assembled some fine farceurs to deliver Orton's goods. Set late in the swinging '60s in a private psychiatric clinic (the amusing period set with its four slamable doors is by H. Paul Mazer), the play is just minutes old when Dr. Prentice (John Felix), the shrink who runs the place, asks the skinny bird applying for a secretarial position to remove her dress. And in no time at all, people are swapping clothes, donning wigs, popping pills and accusing each other of everything from rape to nymphomania.
Felix and Sandra Ives, who plays the not-so-good doctor's sexy wife, are beautifully matched in their abilities to deliver Orton's most outrageous lines to maximum comic effect. Their British accents are quite good, their ability to play farce even better. Autumn Horne is the imperiled job applicant, Michael D. Vines the randy bellboy, Peter Haig an intrusive bureaucrat and Oscar Cheda a policeman who winds up in a wig and a dress.
There is, actually, no butler in What the Butler Saw, which features both an ending ripped from Shakespeare (but with an Ortonesque twist) and a piece of Winston Churchill "statuary" that looks like it came straight (and bronzed) from a sex shop. Prudes, beware.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
