Lay It As It Plays.(Theater review)

In 1967, the year his boyfriend beat him to death with a hammer, the British playwright Joe Orton wrote "What the Butler Saw," a brilliant deconstruction of farce, which broadened the expressive boundaries of the genre, pushing it toward the kind of comedy that Ionesco called "a theatre of violence: violently comic, violently dramatic." "As I understood it," Orton wrote, "farce originally was very close to tragedy, and differed only in the treatment of its themes--themes like rape, bastardy, prostitution." His self-proclaimed theatrical mission in "What the Butler Saw" was to create "a seismic disturbance," using a traditional boulevard form to attack the audience's received opinions, especially about sexual identity. Homosexuality was, for the most part, decriminalized in England that year, but the bias against it was far from banished; Orton, in the vindictive spirit of his comedy, wanted to put it to the "norms," as he called them. While he was working on his new farce, he heard about the antics of the experimental group the Living Theatre, in America, and he made a note to hot it up. "Much more fucking and they'll be screaming hysterics in next to no time," he wrote.

"What the Butler Saw" was a comic watershed; its ambition and invention had an immediate influence on American playwriting, notably on John Guare's "The House of Blue Leaves" (1971) and on Terrence McNally's 1975 bathhouse farce, "The Ritz" (now in revival at Studio 54, under the uneven direction of Joe Mantello). "The Ritz," which was later turned into a movie by Richard Lester, was a hit. But, where Orton's humor had been dedicated to kicking down the walls of sexual discrimination, McNally's pre-AIDS romp, eight years later, was more or less pushing at an open door. By then, the love that could not speak its name was giddily shouting it across the footlights. The novelty of gay liberation--and the accompanying spectacle of pecs, poppers, and packages--is the only possible explanation for the original popularity of this lame show. "The Ritz," which is a cartoon of carnality, has all the external accoutrements of farce--doors, desperation, delusion. What it lacks almost completely (in addition to wit) is an internal design--the farce's madcap spiralling of rigorous logic, which carries both plot and personality to the point of disintegration. When the sight of a man in a towel holding a can of Crisco is what brings the house down, you know you're in trouble.

In the closeted past, the boundaries of respectability lent a sense of daring and delight to the wink of high camp. In Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" (1895), for instance, the term "bunburying" sent a subversive message all its own to the Victorian gayim. Noel Coward, in "I Wonder What Happened to Him" (1944), a satirical song about pukka British military nostalgia, made the unacceptable irresistible, in a verse about a British officer leaving the Army in India, with the witty deployment of a single stressed adjective: "For apart from his mess bills exceeding his pay / He took to pig-sticking in quite the wrong way." Cole Porter's 1948 song "Tom, Dick, or Harry," from "Kiss Me Kate," even slipped a gay note into a heterosexual hymn of matrimony. "A dicka dick, a dicka dick / A dicka dick," the chorus sang. Once gender barriers began to break down and the taboos lifted, however, high camp lost some of its combative mischief. License bred laziness. "The Ritz" could be cited as Exhibit A.

The play opens at a family deathbed vigil. Old Man Vespucci (Teddy Coluca) is suffering, I guess, from Italian Alzheimer's: he has forgotten everything but his vendetta. "Get Proclo!" are his last words; Proclo (the charming Kevin Chamberlin) is his daughter's loving husband, whom he wants whacked. Why? There is no reason. There is no context. McNally merely catapults us into the middle of a maelstrom in which Proclo, the day after his father-in-law's funeral, takes a detour to a bathhouse--where he figures no macho Italian hit man will find him. (He's obviously an innocent.) We don't believe this premise or the people trapped in it for ...