Waking Joe

Belgrader on Orton's corpse comedy

by Scott T. Cummings

When Loot won the Evening Standard Award for best play of 1966, that secured Joe Orton's reputation as a British comic playwright of savage genius. The play's hard-won success triggered an all-too-brief period of tremendous productivity for Orton, one that included a screenplay for the Beatles called Up Against It. That script was rejected, but Loot was still running in London's West End on the night in August 1967 when Orton's long-time companion, Kenneth Halliwell, took a hammer and quite literally beat his partner's brains out before taking his own life with a bottle of pills and a can of grapefruit juice.

For all its gruesome violence, Orton's death still resonates in ironic ways with his life, his comic vision, and in particular with Loot, which is a play about a corpse. Starting this weekend, the play receives a welcome revival at the American Repertory Theatre, one that continues the company's season-long sampling of serious comedies. The cast includes ART veterans Thomas Derrah, Jeremy Geidt, and Alvin Epstein (how often do you see all three in one show?); relative newcomer Sean Dugan, who played the title role in last season's The Cripple of Inishmaan; and first-timer Laurie Williams.

Loot marks director Andrei Belgrader's tenth production in 20 years at the ART. Only David Wheeler and fellow Romanian Andrei Serban have directed more. On a freezing-cold morning before rehearsal, Belgrader and I huddle in a corner of the Loeb Drama Center to talk about Loot and his other work at the ART over the years. "I just love the play," says Belgrader. "I remember when I first read it, I was laughing aloud and enjoying myself tremendously. There is also some kind of creepy filthy something going on below it all that is just fascinating, but mainly I remember laughing like an idiot."

That "creepy filthy something" stems from the play's virtual necrophilia. The action takes place on the day of the funeral of one Mrs. McLeavy, who is survived by her husband, a devoted Catholic and horticulturalist, and her son, a delinquent and philanderer who has robbed a bank with his buddy, the undertaker. When the intrepid Inspector Truscott shows up, they need a place to stash the loot. Mrs. McLeavy's coffin seems like the perfect place, but what will they do with her body?

That question serves as the springboard for a farce that is as macabre as it is hilarious. In an epigrammatic style that at its best recalls Oscar Wilde, Orton skewers the middle class's mindless obedience of civil and moral authority and celebrates what Belgrader calls "a utopia of decadence." The director's admiration for the work is clear: "I think it is a superbly crafted play that doesn't need a lot of intervention from a director. It is a very basic English detective story gone somewhat berserk. Orton is a master at taking a cliché and making it happen in a new way."

Thirty-five years later, this attack on conformity and cliché is what keeps Orton's comedy contemporary for Belgrader, who lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the theater department at the University of California-San Diego. "There is a puritanical streak that is surfacing very powerfully in the last few years on the right and the left in the same bizarre ways. It is a bizarre combination of the moral majority and political correctness. I have lived in Southern California for a while, which despite its reputation, as far as I'm concerned, is predominantly a world trying to live by clichés. They are probably very different from Orton's clichés, but they are still very puritanical. People tell you all the time what to do and what not to do. What to wear, what to eat. I smoke in my own car and someone says that the smoke is drifting out of my car and polluting his life. The basic thing is don't have sex, if possible, or have it the right way, at the right time, with the right person. I've never seen a place that is so puritanical, deeply so. People just want to live exactly like everyone else. In fact, I find New England refreshingly unpuritanical, which is a very bizarre thing to say. People are shocked when I say this, but I really know what I am talking about."

Belgrader also knows what he is talking about when it comes to his directorial specialty, a certain type of broad physical comedy that stretches from commedia dell'arte to Molière to Goldoni to Alfred Jarry to Dario Fo, all of which he has directed at ART. Just last fall, he staged Fo's We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! -- which means this is the second time in his career that he has chased a Fo play with an Orton. In the mid 1980s, at the Yale Repertory Theatre, he directed the English-language premiere of Fo's About Face one season and a revival of Orton's masterpiece, What the Butler Saw, the next.

What's the difference between these two master farceurs of the late 20th century? "For one thing," says Belgrader, starting with the obvious, "One is Italian and one is English. That is an enormous difference. Then, they operate very differently. They're both anarchic types in their own way. Fo is part of a social anarchy, trying to change the world in a direct way. I don't think Orton is there to change the world at all. He comes from another angle. He is dynamiting it, but not changing it."

Loot plays in repertory at the Loeb Drama Center January 28 through March 15. Tickets are $24 to $57. Call 547-8300.