LOOT
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Nurse Fay has just bumped off yet another patient in order to acquire the woman’s well-heeled husband, McLeavy: she’d like him to become her sixth mate, the first five having died under suspicious circumstances. Then McLeavy’s son Hal bursts in with Dennis; they’ve just pulled off a bank heist, and frantically hide the loot in the coffin, moving Hal’s dead mother to a broom closet. (For further shock effect, Orton throws in the mother’s dentures, her false eye, and a casket full of vital organs.) Naturally the gold-digging nurse and money-mad Hal strike a compromise, and meanwhile Dennis is struck with love for Fay, adding a marriage proposal to the dirty deal. Completing the menagerie is Detective Truscott, a very thick dick who’s as predatory as he is ignorant.
Using his trademark topsy-turvy, irreverent approach and gallows humor, Orton takes countless potshots at sacred cows–especially the police and the Catholic church–and reverses all our rational expectations. The elaborately corrupt detective, for instance, seethes with the self-pity of an unctuous bureaucrat: “How dare you involve me in a situation,” he says to Hal, “for which no memo has been issued?” Here scoundrels succeed despite their awesome stupidity, and the one innocent character gets dragged off to jail.
Though Elizabeth McGeehan’s wraparound set immerses us in the McLeavy drawing room from the instant we enter the theater, it also scatters the actors: the characters are often so widely separated it’s hard to watch their reactions to one another–always half the humor in a comedy of contradictions.
