Wicked ‘Butler’ Delivers Screams of Laughter

When Joe Orton saw Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” in 1967, he acknowledged in his diary that Stoppard’s riff on “Hamlet” contained “a wonderful idea . . . how I wish I’d stumbled upon it.” Orton imagined richly ironic possibilities, with Shakespeare’s graduate students yakking away while the world goes to hell.

Four months later, the most notorious English dramatist of the ‘60s was murdered by longtime companion Kenneth Halliwell. If Orton had lived, where might his career have led? More plays, more consciously outrageous? Original screenplays for Ken Russell? A decade later, mellowed or no, surely Orton would’ve snagged an Oscar, for one impudent (yet classy) literary adaptation or another. Or a historical romp slightly more subversive than, say, “Shakespeare in Love.”

An ice-cold marvel of engineering, Orton’s “What the Butler Saw” (1967) is a product of its time and a distillation of it, akin to William Congreve’s “The Way of the World” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Orton promises a jolly night out and, in an extremely sick way, delivers it. But by design (mostly, anyway) the laughter curdles, even as the play builds momentum.

Now in a solid, somewhat becalmed revival staged by A Noise Within, it’s an asylum comedy offering no escape from the asylum, even after the last line--”Let us put our clothes on and face the world”--has been spoken.

With its nasty japes about rape, incest and sexual desperation, “Butler” won’t get any easier to stage in the coming years. Set in a clinic specializing in “the complete breakdown and its byproducts,” the play relies on a violent mixture of humor and horror. Terrible things are said and done. The presiding Dr. Prentice, his frustrated wife, the visiting government inspector Dr. Rance, an extremely put-upon secretary, a hotel pageboy guilty of assaulting a busload of schoolgirls, an officer of the law on the hunt for a significant chunk of a Winston Churchill statue--everyone gets caught in the spiral.

As Orton once said about a revival of Georges Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear,” nothing can wear down a theatergoer more quickly than an unvaryingly rapid pace. A Noise Within’s production, staged by Sabin Epstein, avoids that trap. If anything, it errs on the side of caution and reserve--another trap. Also, it’s too bad Epstein and scenic designer Rick Ortenblad came up with this particular scenic solution, affording the actors only two slammable doors. (It makes hash of Dr. Rance’s query: “Why are there so many doors? Was the house designed by a lunatic?”)

Still, Epstein’s production offers plenty of verbal riches. It helps to have Michael Learned (best known as Ma Walton from That Other Medium) in the role of Mrs. Prentice. Learned may lack a certain low-comic relish--Orton’s comedy benefits from an improbable mixture of low- and high-comic impulses--but she scales her delivery cannily for the intimate confines of this stage. Words like “devilry” drop from her mouth like alto pearls.

Mark Bramhall’s Dr. Prentice is smooth and skillful, if a touch on the sit-comic “Are You Being Served?” level. The best of the rest: J. Todd Adams as the chipper, unrepentant pageboy rapist, a spiritual cousin to the bad boys in Orton’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” and “Loot.”

Orton’s shock value has lessened, thanks to countless second-raters inspired by his fearlessness but not by his ear for language. Audiences no longer react to “Butler” the way the ’67 tryout audiences in Brighton did--”not merely tearing up their programs,” as actor Stanley Baxter recalled, “but jumping up and down on them out of sheer hatred.” Popular taste notwithstanding, director Epstein can’t fully activate “Butler.” But Orton’s death cackle reverberates nonetheless.

* “What the Butler Saw,” A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. This Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; April 11, 2 and 7 p.m.; April 16, 8 p.m.; April 17, 2 and 8 p.m.; April 21-22, 8 p.m.; April 25, 7 p.m.; April 28, 8 p.m.; May 6-7, 8 p.m.; May 15, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends May 15. $20-$28. (818) 546-1924. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes.

Mark Bramhall: Dr. Prentice

Michael Learned: Mrs. Prentice

Jill Hill: Geraldine Barclay

J. Todd Adams: Nicholas Beckett

William Dennis Hunt: Dr. Rance

Richard Soto: Sergeant Match

Written by Joe Orton. Directed by Sabin Epstein. Set by Rick Ortenblad. Costumes by Alex Jaeger. Lighting by James Taylor. Stage manager Brian J. L’Ecuyer.