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‘Loot’ @ Georgia Shakespeare
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. “Loot.” Grade: B. 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Through Aug. 19. $15-$40. Georgia Shakespeare, Conant Performing Arts Center, Oglethorpe University, 4484 Peachtree Road N.E., Atlanta. 404-264-0020; gashakespeare.org. The verdict: A little flat, but still fun.
How convenient that Fay looks so great in her form-fitting black mourning suit and veil. She’s had seven dead husbands in less than a decade, and the woman she’s been nursing has just turned up in a casket.
Thus begins Joe Orton’s zany black comedy, “Loot,” a detective-fiction send-up about a bumbling widower, a couple of small-time slacker criminals, a mustachioed investigator and one devout Catholic nurse with killer looks and an unintentionally droll bedside manner.
As played by Courtney Patterson in director Sabin Epstein’s Georgia Shakespeare production, Fay is the delightfully dishy heart of Orton’s acerbic 1965 satire of the British middle class. Laying a cloth embroidered with Biblical text over the coffin of the deceased, the pert blonde comments pithily: “The Ten Commandments — she was a great believer in some of them.”
At its best, “Loot” combines the elegant, foolproof design of an Ernst Lubitsch comedy with the deliberate outrageousness of a Charles Ludlam farce. Though Epstein and his impeccable ensemble make the most of the material, “Loot” doesn’t sustain the giddy heights of Georgia Shakespeare’s 2004 producton of “What the Butler Saw,” mainly because it is a far subtler piece of social commentary.
This is not a psychedelic, Austin Powers-style romp but a gravely funny study of politics, religion, human venality and ineffectual state of the criminal justice system. No doubt modeled somewhat on Orton himself, Hal (Joe Knezevich) is a sniveling, sexually ambiguous thief with grandiose plans for making off with his stolen cash and his accomplice-friend, Dennis (Daniel May).
The only thing that gets in his way is his mother’s coffin.
Before the corpse is cold, Fay is scheming to marry Hal’s father, McLeavy (Chris Kayser); Dennis turns up as the hearse driver and immediately takes a shine to Fay; and Truscott — an official from the “Metropolitan Water Board” played by Allen O’Reilly — drops by to stir the kettle.
Constantly preening in the mirror and combing his Beatles-era mop top, Knezevich gives a wonderfully smirky perfomance as Hal, and May is good, too, as the sheepish and befuddled Dennis. Why won’t Hal go to his mother’s funeral? “It would upset me,” he says, mincingly.
In a tweedy jacket and pork-pie hat, O’Reilly is spot on as the quintessentially hapless detective. But Patterson’s femme fatale is the true hoot of “Loot.” Patterson is not only in top form here; she’s one of the most dazzling Atlanta actresses of her generation.
With capers involving glass eyeballs, sewing dummies and an endless of roundelay of slamming doors, “Loot” possesses the machinations of pure bedlam. But Orton’s premise never fully lives up to its promise, and 40 years after its arrival, “Loot” feels a little dated and a little flat. Happily, Georgia Shakespeare gives this imperfect little play an admirable workout — and finds the fizz in its dead champagne.
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