Word: orton
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Like many ancient crafts, pure farce disappeared long ago; it was replaced by the machine-tooled "sitcom" or by crude, graffiti-black comedy. But British Playwright Joe Orton was not a man to ride a trend. In the '60s he wrote a cycle of extravagant farces, most of them failures on and off Broadway. Orton would not bow to the times, but circumstances eventually bent to him. His last play, What the Butler Saw, is now an off-Broadway smash. The American stage production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane lasted only 13 performances; the film version is a savagely witty...
...brief career, the only grief that British Playwright Joe Orton ever visited on anyone in the theater was his untimely death at the age of 34. Orton gleefully beat sacred cows on their way to the last roundup (Entertaining Mr. Shane; TIME, Oct. 22, 1965). He was a black-comedy farceur who could dance on a coffin and spit in the corpse's eye (Loot; TIME, March 29, 1968). It has been said that "a joke is a scream for help." In Orton's mouth, a joke was an urbane substitute for murder. He was a wild Wilde...
...zaniest play he wrote is now on view off Broadway. What the Butler Saw is basically a Feydeauan farce. Like the great French playwright, Orton recognized that a closed door is funnier, and maybe even more erotic, than an open bed. Orton, like Feydeau, understood that logic carried to its logical conclusion is madness...
Therapy Workshop. Many of Orton's jokes are the kind told in mixed company only after several drinks. But the man had a machine-gun wit that he leveled on pomposities, pretensions and do-good liberal cant of any kind. Sample burst of fire: Mrs. Prentice: "What's Miss Barclay doing in the therapy workshop?" Dr. Prentice: "She's making white tar babies for sale in color-prejudice trouble spots...
...underlying motif of the play is madness. The government is mad. The police are mad. Psychiatrists are mad. By extension, the modern world is mad. It is not such a new idea. What is wonderfully refreshing is that Joe Orton has such mad, mad fun with...