Review by John Angell Grant of The Berkely Daily Planet, published August 1, 2001

Talent Put Into "Loot" Doesn't Pay Off

By John Angell Grant
Daily Planet Correspondent

English playwright Joe Orton lived fast and died young. Beaten to death with
a hammer in 1967 at age 34 by his longtime gay lover, he left behind a small
body of work, including “Loot” (1965) and the posthumously produced “What
the Butler Saw” (1969).
Orton’s reputation has flourished since his death, due in large part to the
1978 biography “Prick Up Your Ears” by New Yorker theater writer John Lahr,
and the subsequent movie based on that book a decade later starring Gary
Oldman as Orton.

Still, for me, the problem of the plays remains. I have never seen a great
production of an Orton play.

Berkeley’s talented Shotgun Players are the latest to give it a go. The
company is currently running a thoughtful and meticulously staged production
of “Loot” at LaVal’s Subterranean on the Northside.

“Loot” is an absurdist, high-speed, sex-and-death farce, set in an English
lower-middle-class family living room. Here patriarch MacLeavy (Greg Lucey)
mourns the passing of his wife, who rests for much of the play in an open
coffin in the center of the room.

With a funeral imminent, the MacLeavy’s gay son Hal (Andy Alabran) appears
to have robbed a bank with his sleazy bisexual chum Dennis (Danny Wolohan).
Unexpectedly, the deceased woman’s nurse (Renee Penegor) morphs into a
voracious, gold-digging sexual predator, and before long a mysterious water
board inspector (Jonathan Gonzalez) arrives with pipe and magnifying glass
to conduct an investigation.

All farcical hell breaks loose. It’s a two-hour round-robin of hiding the
bank loot and hiding the corpse.

The acting in this production is super. Director Reid Davis has elicited
fascinating performances from his entire cast.

Lucey is comically woe-bestruck as the long-suffering, put-upon, newly
widowed MacLeavy, the most real character in a world of otherwise complete
zaniness. Renee Penegor is enticing and elusive as the pornographic,
puritanical, hooker/nurse, married seven times in ten years, and looking for
more.

Andy Alabran is fascinating as hypersexual, simpleton son Hal, filled with
dreams of opening his own brothel, and crazed with the hots for his chum
Dennis. Alabran hypnotically twists his face and sucks his lips when he has
to think.

Danny Wolohan is also mesmerizing as swashbuckling bisexual undertaker’s
assistant Dennis, enthusiastically scanning the room for money or tail.

But the problem is that these great performances add up to less than the sum
of their parts. And I think the basic challenge lies in the severe
difficulty of staging Orton’s script, which tends to be cartoony and
one-dimensional.

All of the characters, for example, speak in the same voice. And the
communications they make to each other are not thoughtful, character-based
expressions, but rather jocular, nonsensical verbal gags of the moment.
“Loot” feels like a play written on speed, without the human emotional
connections. After two hours, you’re exhausted.

To help counterbalance the characters’ one-dimensionality, director Davis
and his cast have obviously put a lot of work into creating deeper people
with backgrounds, histories, motivations, mysterious secret lives and
subtexts. This work has paid off and given the play’s characters a
fascinating richness, making them interesting people.

There is a lot going on for the actors. They have wonderful moments during
their non-speaking times on stage, communicating by eye contact or facial
expression, or scheming internally.

But, the production just isn’t that funny. “Loot” is supposed to be a farce,
but the night I attended, the laughs were few and far between. Despite lots
of effort to create a slapstick chaos, the show is missing the sort of basic
laughs that, say, Laurel and Hardy get when they start hitting each other
with their hats.

Without that, the silly story just doesn’t carry enough weight for the play
not to be funny. In the final analysis, “Loot” is dated.

When first produced in 1965, “Loot” broke a lot of taboos. It made fun of
religion, the law, marriage and middle-class sexual rules. From that
iconoclasm the play earned its reputation for shock value.

But now it’s 36 years later, and “Loot’s” bawdy religious satire, sexual
backroom hanky-panky between boys and jokes about necrophilia just don’t
offend a more jaded modern audience the way they once did.