HUMOR, BIOGRAPHY FROM A RAW TALENT : AFTER 2 DECADES, ‘LOOT’ CAN STILL STEAL A SMILE

According to Joe Orton, reality goes something like this: The innocent get nabbed, and the guilty get away with murder. Or, in the case of “Loot,” Orton’s second play, they get away with bank robbery. Whether they get the cash is almost beside the point in this venal, duplicitous world.

The venality and duplicity are oozing out of the woodwork at the Tiffany Theatre, where director Dennis Erdman’s actors have found what’s behind Orton’s creepy smile and stolen away with it.

What they’ve found is brittle, Draconian revenge on everything and anything smacking of propriety--just revenge, it seems, because it’s so effortlessly funny.

Oh, perhaps a door didn’t close on cue (or worse, another opened when it shouldn’t have) last Friday, but this is otherwise a show imbued with an unmistakable ‘60s brashness and irony, British-style. Orton wrote his own--very own--music, and Erdman’s players have it down cold.

Cold is what some might feel toward Orton and his family. But then, the satirized never do get the joke.

“Loot’s” joke starts out at the expense of dear old mum, who’s just kicked the bucket. Her bingo friends have sent a wreath in the form of a huge bingo card. Her husband, McLeavy (George Coe), and Fay, the family nurse and a good Catholic (Valerie Mahaffey), make sure it looks good leaning up against the casket.

What goes in and out of that casket over the ensuing two acts is some ultimate black joke on God, family and capitalism--at least the self-righteous kind. Like all good anti-heroes, McLeavy’s son Hal (Charles Shaughnessy) and Hal’s partner Dennis (Joseph Kell) have us pulling for them as they try to get the bank loot out of the house and past the snooping eyes of Truscott (Dierk Torsek).

Truscott, in the lightest sense, is Orton’s vision of the big British bureaucracy making a mess of it all, and somehow managing to charm everyone in the process. In the darkest sense, he’s Orton’s confirmation of Orwell’s predictions, while filling in the comedy that Orwell left out. In his green tweedy suit, he announces himself as being from “the water department.” When Truscott wants to shut off the water in McLeavy’s house, he simply does it. You’d be surprised what the water department can do.

Orton goes infinitely deeper into his characters’ capacity for nastiness, while giving them the air of friendly houseguests, than any English language playwright before or since. So when Hal (who cannot tell a lie) confesses to the robbery, it’s a mere precursor to things that follow. There’s a fight going on in the McLeavy living room (a beautiful, ultra-bourgeois set by Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio, who also did the deliberately flat lighting) for Champion Amoral Cad. Nabbing some loot is nothing. Wait till you hear what happened at the funeral.

Perhaps it’s the emphasis on the ‘60s patina (especially helpful are Dana Kathryn Silver’s dead-on costumes), but Erdman’s production makes one realize once more what safe limits ‘80s plays hover in. As if suffocated by the combined pincers of Reagan and AIDS (plus the overriding fear of scaring audiences away), today’s theater seems incapable of a farce like “Loot.” Erdman has managed not only to transmit exactly Orton’s rhythms and impish self-mockery, but also his anarchism as well.

It gets down and dirty at the Tiffany, but with a peculiarly Anglo sense of gentility. Mahaffey is smashingly good at suggesting this contradiction, knowing just what key to play at what moment to what player. Torsek is an inspired Truscott: a Kafkaesque agent in a dictatorship ruled by Peter Sellers. Shaughnessy plays Hal as pretty dim early on, but cleverly clues us in on why he’s a survivor. Coe’s McLeavy may clue us in too early, thus sealing the old man’s fate; but it’s acceptable in what is a broad sketch more than a character.

Kell’s Dennis is particularly funny when struggling with (and against) Hal over what to do with the loot, with mum, with mum’s eyeball . . . but we won’t go into that. It’s both a laconic view of young men bearing the literal weight of their parents and their own actions, and a reminder that comedy is still the most dangerous act, politically and socially, a lad can commit.

“Loot” will continue with performances Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7:30 p.m. It closes June 15. (213) 652-6165.

‘LOOT’ Joe Orton’s play, at the Tiffany Theatre. Director Dennis Erdman. Sets and Lights Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio. Costumes Dana Kathryn Silver. Fight Staging Anthony DeLongis. Stage Manager Walter Wood. With George Coe, Valerie Mahaffey, Charles Shaughnessy, Joseph Kell, Dierk Torsek, Jonathan Emerson.