STAGE REVIEW : La Jolla’s ‘What Butler Saw’ a Wicked, Impudent Farce

Amid the bustle of deranged psyches running amok on stage in the final moments of “What the Butler Saw” at the Mandell Weiss Forum on Sunday, one line stood out above the din: “You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world,” yelled the hyperkinetic Dr. Rance. “It isn’t rational!”

If the line--and the play--provoked ripples of comic shock in 1967, when Joe Orton wrote it, it is met now, 25 years later, with yelps of recognition. Society has become Ortonesque.

The complex, inept and contrary world this impudent Moliere-from-hell was skewering has in many disagreeable ways become ever more ours. Had Orton not been bludgeoned to death at 34 by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, shortly after completing “Butler,” who knows what other cyanide-tainted bonbons he might have dropped in our laps.

Meanwhile, gleefully rambunctious productions of this play, such as the one put together here by director Michael Greif, will have to do. The staying power of this punk piece, full of impudence and lascivious derring-do, is a testament to the writer as rebel. And despite overworked moments in the final spasms of the piece, when the strands of the play tie themselves into impossible knots, “Butler” remains a wickedly pixilated satire on the rapidly vanishing point between sanity and insanity.

It follows then, with a certain amount of logic, that “Butler” is set in a mental institution--British and private. At the wrong moment, the Dr. Prentice who runs it (Max Wright) makes a clumsy attempt to seduce pretty Geraldine Barclay (Kellie Waymire), an applicant for a secretarial position.

Life becomes a series of cataclysmic mistimings and misunderstandings as he is interrupted by the quasi-simultaneous arrival of Mrs. Prentice (Kate Mulgrew) and a high-flying state health examiner, Dr. Rance (Bill Raymond).

Events unobligingly misfire as cover-up follows cover-up--hardly the right term, however, for a play in which nearly everyone is forced into states of radical undress.

The plot is thickened by the peremptory demands of Nicholas Beckett (Don Harvey), a blackmailing bellhop from the shady Station Hotel, where nymphomaniacal Mrs. Prentice spent part of the previous night with him in a broom closet. And it is thrown into terminal chaos by the arrival of Sgt. Match (Joel Brooks), a stolid policeman hunting down Beckett who is apparently wanted for molesting a whole group of schoolboys.

Flowing whiskey, identity switches, cross-dressing, misconceptions and perceptions are only the half of this scamper through minefields of mounting untruths. Orton wields language like a whip to spur the randy misdemeanors of his characters with such lip-smackers as Dr. Prentice’s claim to the right of putting a straitjacket on his wife: “It’s one of the few pleasures left in modern marriage.”

But Orton also goes on too long, and since Greif has staged the play at a peak of frenzy, this “Butler” sags under the weight of its plot complications in the second half of the second half. By the time Rance has done swinging on chains and announcing that “it’s time to call a halt to this Greco-Roman hallucination,” the frantic pace has lost some of its steam and the actors’ labors have become overwrought.

Too much still has to transpire before the piece finally implodes in neo-Shakespearean irony, with lost children conveniently discovering their true parents; before a directorially mandated helicopter descends to pluck them all up; before Winston Churchill’s private parts are triumphantly brandished in a gesture that, after all these years and across the water, has lost much of its original bite.

The company is talented and tireless, with Wright a splendidly befuddled bumbler as Prentice, while Mulgrew, hair flying and lipstick smudging in one of the toughest assignments as bewildered Mrs. Prentice, wilts like spoiled pastry before our eyes.

Raymond’s spectacularly mad professor Rance is a poisoned arrow darting blindly around the room with an accusation and theory to pin on every occasion. Pert, wide-eyed Waymire as the innocent Barclay, Harvey as the ruffian bellhop and Brooks as the uptight Bobby provide distinctive portraits and unflagging support.

Abetted by Greif, John Arnone’s set is once again a star: a clinically white torture chamber of medical equipment with ironies of its own, such as a clock whose hands stand still but whose face revolves. It’s Orton’s topsy-turvy world, full of bile and brimstone, daring us to disclaim the truth of its assertions.

“What the Butler Saw,” La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Forum, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road, UC San Diego campus. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 30. $29-$36; (619) 534-3960, TDD/Voice (619) 534-0351. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Max Wright Dr. Prentice

Kate Mulgrew Mrs. Prentice

Bill Raymond Dr. Rance

Don Harvey Nicholas Beckett

Kellie Waymire Geraldine Barclay

Joel Brooks Sgt. Match

A La Jolla Playhouse presentation. Director Michael Greif. Playwright Joe Orton. Sets John Arnone. Lights David S. Thayer. Costumes Janice Benning. Sound Jeff Ladman. Dramaturgy Elissa Adams. Vocal coach Susan Leigh. Fight direction Steve Rankin. Stage manager Lori M. Doyle.