19
Jan/14

LOOT

19
Jan/14
(photo by Rahav Segev / Photopass.com)

Rebecca Brooksher plays femme fatale Fay in Red Bull revival of Joe Orton classic (photo by Rahav Segev / Photopass.com)

Red Bull Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher St. between Bleecker & Hudson Sts.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 9, $60-$75
212-352-3101
www.redbulltheater.com

Upon the opening of his revised version of Loot in September 1966 at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, playwright Joe Orton told the Evening Standard, “I have many vices, but false modesty is not one of them. The best thing about Loot is the quality of the writing.” Indeed, the quality of the writing is once again what shines through in the Red Bull Theater’s inconsistent revival at the Lucille Lortel. As McLeavy (Jarlath Conroy) is getting ready for his wife’s funeral, her hot blond nurse, Fay (Rebecca Brooksher), tells him he must begin considering remarriage, offering herself as a potential spouse. Meanwhile, McLeavy’s son, Hal (Nick Westrate), and his very close friend, Dennis (Ryan Garbayo), have robbed a bank and must hide the stash — possibly in Mrs. McLeavy’s casket. But when the tall, foreboding Truscott (Rocco Sisto) arrives, poking around, claiming to be from the metropolitan water board, madness and mayhem take over, leading to a wild and wacky finale. The first act of this frantic over-the-top farce is fast and furious and very funny as Orton (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, What the Butler Saw) skewers the Catholic church, marriage, so-called proper society, family, the police (Orton had little respect for authority because of its anti-gay stance), and even aging. “What will you do when you’re old?” Fay asks McLeavy, who responds, “I shall die.” Her retort: “I see you’re determined to run the gamut of all experience.” But the play, directed by Red Bull founding artistic director Jesse Berger (Volpone, The Maids), slows down considerably in the second act: Numerous lines were flubbed the night we saw it, and some slapstick scenes with the wrapped-up corpse fell flat. The social satire that was so well done in the first act lacks the same poignancy in the second, the black comedy not quite as dark. Brooksher and Conroy work well together as the femme fatale and her mark, but Westrate and Garbayo never quite hit it off, and Sisto, in a role that earned Joseph Maher a Drama Desk Award for the Manhattan Theatre Club’s all-star 1986 revival (which also starred Kevin Bacon, Željko Ivanek, Zoë Wanamaker, and Charles Keating), is too often reminiscent of the kind of policemen Graham Chapman played in Monty Python skits. It’s a shame that after such a successful first act, this Loot doesn’t end up delivering the goods.