ORTON’S ‘MR. SLOANE’ AND ‘LOOT’ IN SURE HANDS AT THE TAPER

Some plays are earnest, some literate, some zing you where you live. Those of Joe Orton are unabashedly perverse. They let you hear logic where you thought none existed, make you laugh in the blackest of contexts. You emerge at the other end limp with a sense of the familiar as you never remember having heard it before.

Can anything be more outwardly absurd than “Loot,” Orton’s comedy about an unconsummated funeral linked to a bank heist, with exploding physical remains, a serial killer nurse and an inspector of the Pink Panther school relentlessly tracking the whole insane affair?

Not much. The play has been running successfully at the Tiffany since mid-May. The production that opened at the Taper over the weekend (in repertory with “Entertaining Mr. Sloane”) simply demonstrates again the reasons why Ortonesque has become part of the English language. The word describes a diabolical irreverence made irresistible and disarming by a jovial adherence to the truth. Do people really behave in this manner? They really do. Listen:

Nurse Fay, placing a frame on the dear departed Mrs. McLeavy’s coffin: “Here. The Ten Commandments. She was a great believer in some of them.”

Such stating of the obvious is rife, yet mild by comparison to the nefarious goings-on Orton has planned: a corpse chased from casket to closet to casket in a farcical Feydeau scramble to hide the ill-gained “loot”; a glass eye, lost, found, sniffed, even tasted to find out who it belongs to so it can be returned to sender; accomplices gained and easily multiplied when the opportunity for a share of the pillage is offered. (In Orton’s plays only the good get punished.)

Most amazing is that the play is more broadly contemporaneous, now that life has caught up with it, than it was in 1965-66 when it was written. Its ability to shock then was new and its truths less evident or willingly acknowledged. Today they’re as visible as the polluted air we breathe and punctuated by the regurgitation of distorted logic in the Iran- contra hearings. They’ve updated this comedy Ortonesquely.

(“How dare you involve me in a situation for which no memo has been issued,” thunders Truscott, in a line that sounds lifted from the recent daily television diet.)

Director John Tillinger has a clear understanding of those reverberations and a crackling good sense of the momentum needed to achieve a kind of unstoppable frenzy of outrageousness that, after a while, is comfortably propelled by its own illogic. On stage as in life, with good timing and good actors (both of which Tillinger has), even the macabre can be neutralized by persuasive argument. Plausible deniability is a phrase Orton would have relished inventing.

Tillinger’s top-notch company would be an asset to any show, but essential to the contradictory fabric of this one. The rubbery Peter Frechette is outstanding as the placidly incompetent son, Hal, who cannot tell a lie, won’t attend his mother’s funeral because it might upset him, but has no trouble dumping her body in the closet when it’s the practical thing to do.

Similarly, Meagen Fay as the serenely homicidal nurse sees no problem with doing-in the late Mrs. McLeavy since she was planning all along to provide a replacement--herself. Fay has adopted a self-satisfied, empty-headed look, and a gait of tiny steps subliminally designed to reflect the maximum stretch of her mental capacities.

Richard Venture has a harder go of it as the unhappy widower, McLeavy, who ends up getting the brunt of everyone else’s troubles and who, at Sunday evening’s performance, seemed to be having some of his own with occasionally mistimed comic inflections.

Julian Barnes has a cameo as a proper Bobby, and Maxwell Caulfield gives a ruddy if unexceptional image of the working-class bloke, Dennis, a conspirator in the bank job, but “Loot’s” acting laurels go to them that’s flashiest: Joseph Maher as Truscott of the Yard.

It is one of those performances that makes using every trick in the book suddenly acceptable in the audacious context of the piece. In another play the bombast, the side glances, the quick looks, the raised eye-brows, the calculated inflections, would seem pure exhibitionism. Here they add up to memorable bravura. It is “Loot’s” star turn and Maher, polished and seasoned and skillful actor that he is, delivers it in spades.

The set and lights by John Lee Beatty and Martin Aronstein, respectively, re-create the stifling lower-middle-class environment Orton required. The actors do the rest. This “Loot” is a hoot.

‘ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE’ and ‘LOOT’

Two plays by Joe Orton, presented by the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum and performed in repertory. Director John Tillinger. Designer John Lee Beatty. Costumes Bill Walker. Wigs for “Sloane” Paul Huntley. Wigs for “Loot” Bill Fletcher. Hair styles Jeffrey Sacino. Lighting design Martin Aronstein. Dialect coach Robert Easton. Production coordinator Frank Bayer. Production stage manager James T. McDermott. Stage managers Mary K. Klinger, Caryn Shick. Acting company Julian Barnes, Barbara Bryne, Maxwell Caulfield, Gwyllum Evans, Meagen Fay, Peter Frechette, Joseph Maher, Richard Venture. Performances in repertory (call theater for schedule) run Tuesdays through Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. until Aug. 23. Tickets: $17.50-$23.50; (213) 410-1062 or TTD (213) 680-4017.