The Burning House Group
Review: "What the Butler Saw"
How to Bed the Birds in the Cuckoo's Nest
Seeking
asylum in a sex farce of the '60s
by Quinton Skinner, City Pages
When Joe Orton wrote What the Butler Saw in the late 1960s,
sexual repression, the
gender wars, and psychiatry were hot entrees on the banquet
table of social
controversy. (Back then, Orton's own homosexuality registered
as a mental pathology.)
So he set his farce in an institution for the insane, and loaded
it up with enough lust and
misunderstanding to convincingly indict his times. What this
show represents today,
though, is a bit of a mystery—and a challenge for the
Burning House Group.
The action opens in the office of Dr.
Prentice (Matt Guidry), who has just inaugurated a
job interview with prospective secretary Geraldine (Sara Richardson).
The doctor, after
a few slugs of scotch to fortify his courage, persuades the
lovely girl to strip off her
clothes and lie down on a pink sofa bed he keeps behind a surgical
curtain for just these
occasions. Things are looking shagtastic for Prentice until
his wife (Carolyn Pool)
arrives unexpectedly early.
Guidry, with a lip-hugging moustache
and criminally violet cravat, is unctuous from the
start. He alternates between a heavy-lidded torpor and the
wide-eyed gaze of a man
looking for whatever opportunity presents itself amid a failing
marriage. We're soon
informed that the missus is a nymphomaniac: At one point Prentice
tells his spouse:
"You were born with your legs apart. They'll send you
to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin."
As a result, she is in the process of being blackmailed by
a young man (Erik Hoover)
with whom she shared a sexual adventure the night before.
Director
David Allen Baker Jr. pitches this stuff pretty much like a
randy episode of
Fawlty Towers; there's plenty of sex talk, but the real business
is men and women in
various states of perusal, evasion, and marital bickering.
Orton throws a crucial new
element into the script with the arrival of Dr. Rance (Randal
Berger), a government
official who has come to document that things are on the level
at the institution.
Naturally, things aren't. Prentice, desperate
to hide his attempted seduction of Geraldine,
follows the bombastic Rance's demand to have the girl committed.
(Richardson's big
eyes get stuck comically agog as her character tries and fails
to explain herself.) Mrs.
Prentice's suitor (Erik Hoover) appears in his hotel porter
outfit, followed soon by a
policeman (Joel Liestman) looking to arrest him for another
dalliance (this one with a
number of young schoolgirls. Their headmistress, whom he neglected
to service, turned
him in to the cops).
From here on out it's
all slamming doors, men disguised as women and vice-versa,
a
tremendous amount of boozing, and some unintentional drug use.
You get a sense of
Orton laughing and rubbing his hands together as these generally
unlikable characters
churn and spin amid their own lies, resentments, venality,
and grandiosity.
Berger, stamping his feet, shouting, and brandishing
an oddly paralyzed arm, gives a
performance utterly devoid of subtlety. It seems a fine way
to play his character—a man
who is utterly worthless at understanding anything around him
yet envisions fame and
fortune from writing a book about the imagined perversions
in his midst. Pool is
positively frightening, her lips thrust out, her character
coming to life in a black slip,
aroused only after being slapped around.
Orton's ending is
cynical beyond belief, a repudiation of any dramatic concept
of
emotional payoff, and Pool brilliantly sells it with an exclamation
to her newfound twin
children (don't ask) that comes off like the most sincere thing
anyone has said onstage
all night. I can't proclaim that this is an evening without
tedium—the machinations of this
farce start to grind a little—but the Burning House Group
keeps turning the crank with
energy. It's also a chance to see the play that Orton himself
never enjoyed, having been
murdered by his lover before it opened. Social mores may change,
but love is timeless
in its knack for irony.
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