BUTLEY
Center Theater
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From the first moments of the play, when Butley blows into his office, throws his raincoat carelessly over his paper-strewn desk, takes a smashed banana out of his coat pocket, and sits down at his office mate’s utterly clean desk to eat it, he’s clearly a man in great pain. But LaMorte doesn’t stop there. He deepens his interpretation by constantly playing one channel of communication against another, so that every message he delivers contains its own contradiction. When Butley’s dialogue is bullying and cruel, LaMorte’s body language says “Don’t leave me.” When Butley’s dialogue turns vulnerable and sad, as when he and his wife discuss their faltering marriage, LaMorte spits his lines out.
LaMorte takes Butley’s ambivalence–the source of his wittiest lines, including his quip “I’m a one woman man and I’ve had mine, thank God”–and raises it to an almost Sondheim-esque pitch. You’d have to be a Butley yourself not to feel pity as you watch him slowly screw up his life.
I felt a similar dissatisfaction with Profiles Performance Ensemble’s take on Alan Ayckbourn’s farce How the Other Half Loves. The story concerns three couples from different economic classes whose lives become entwined when the wife of the wealthy couple begins carrying on with the husband of the middle-class couple. That they all know each other, work for the same firm, and on successive nights have dinner together only complicates the farce.
