Word: orton
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Orton...
...young musicians who have been in the business for a while, but will inevitably, once they make it big, be described as having "burst onto the scene." Moby works his magic with the blues-tinged song from his album Play, "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" Beth Orton, whose album Central Reservation made many critics' best-of-1999 lists, croons "The Stars All Seem to Weep" in a far-away childlike voice that makes you want to hand her a box of tissues and some Godiva. In a slight concession to modern pop, Christina Aguilera also gets her props...
This doesn't mean, however, that the American Repertory Theatre's performance of Loot can be sedate with Orton's story being what it is. At the funeral of Mrs. McLeavy, her son Harold and his gay lover Dennis, having robbed a bank, need a place to hide the money as the police chase after them. They stuff the body in a closet, but scheming nurse Fay (Laurie Williams) discovers their plan and demands to be a part of it. Throw in a shockingly ambivalent and corrupt police inspector Truscott (Jeremy Geidt), a series of farcical cover-ups and Orton...
Fortunately though, the second half of the play saw an amazing improvement. This was due largely to the efforts of Geidt, whose Truscott really brings out the flavor of Orton's sardonic lines. Dismissing the corruption of the British police and his own ineptitude with the same casual deadpan manner, Geidt successfully conveys the amorality of Orton's society. And that really is the true genius of Loot: that devil-may-care attitude to any sense of right and wrong or to any constancy at all. None of the characters try too hard to hide their crimes, and they very...
Physical comedy was the order of the day in Loot, and particularly rib-tickling was Fay's confession to the murder of Mrs. McLeavy, with melodrama and cheesy music in full gear, and the sorrowful admission that "Euthanasia was against my religion. So I murdered her." Of course, Orton himself objected to the use of any camp in the original productions of his plays, but in modern times, when Orton's once unprecedented criticisms of societal values are no longer so, well, unprecedented, the actors need the energy of camp to let them rip into his lines. So while...