Artful Maneuvers

...What they do is poke fun at old people by making them look first senile and then silly...

...The husband sits disconsolately in a chair...

...Yet deep down a disturbing aftertaste lingers...

...Once this is accomplished, she decorously agrees that there should be a decent interval—say, a fortnight...

...Most recently Fay has been the nurse of Mrs...

...McLeavy (Charles Keating, also perfect) is an honorable citizen, respectful of law and propriety...

...1 am innocent...

...A JL...

...Fay, however, had decided he would be her eighth husband, and had therefore taken advantage of her position to expedite his widower status...

...In other parts I find it one of those works that give black humor a black eye by somewhat tastelessly exploiting such macabre items as corpses and coffins...

...His bureaucratic stupidity is exceeded only by his amenability to bribery...

...All she has to do now is convince him that marrying her is the proper thing...

...It reached Broadway in 1968—one year after the author's murder by his homosexual lover—and was a quick flop, although at the time New York seemed more ripe for Orton's style...

...That all the characters have Jewish names allows for some shopworn jokes about gefilte fish, but I don't suppose Bergman meant to suggest that what happens to the two couples, their 80-year-old mother, and a rich near-centenarian painter named Maurice Koenig (Stefan Schnabel) could happen only to Jews...

...What became of the seventh...

...Nonetheless, the sort of surrealistic non sequitur that flippantly treats of tragic realities soon becomes indistinguishable from a sick joke...

...Maurice Koenig, she announces, is setting her up in a beautiful apartment, and they are going off to spend four weeks on the French Riviera together...

...as he was unjustly being led away to jail...

...Two married sisters don't know what to do with their physically and mentally infirm mother, but nothing depends on the mother's Social Security payments...

...When it becomes urgent that the Heymans go off to investigate the alleged sexual exploits of their 18-year-old daughter Sarah at college, they must unexpectedly drop Sophie at the Kahns' arty Manhattan apartment...

...The other couple, Trudy (Joanna Gleason) and Martin Heyman (Kenneth Walsh), is not poor either...

...Perhaps the production (which I didn't see) was the problem...

...On the contrary, one of thesisters, Barbara Kahn (Mario Thomas), who owns an art gallery with her husband David (Ron Silver), is always ready with her checkbook...

...Loot concludes by taking a leaf from the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade— the good get punished, the bad rewarded (thanks to the corruption of those in authority, exemplified here by Truscott...

...Though hardly a laughing matter, the succinct punchline is unexpected...

...Loot's propelling force is an elegantly plundering nurse named Fay (Zoe Wanamaker, an irresistibly imperturbable young British actress whose performance is truly memorable...

...But if Andrew Bergman and Mike Nichols really believe their Social Security is a theatrical homage to senior citizens, the author and even more so the director are badly mistaken...

...When Fay opens the closet and discovers the body, she is very shocked: It is standing on its head...

...Dukakis does a rousing, albeit not too refined, vaudeville number as the born-again 80-year-old mother, and Stefan Schnabel is top-class as the suddenly rejuvenated century-old painter...

...Loo/is in parts a very good dramatic expression of the kind of unblinking and unembarrassed black humor that has characterized the Theater of the Absurd since Ionesco...

...He is utterly unaware of anything sinister going on around him...

...He then turns both of them into objects of ridicule by having Maurice swoon over Sophie while she plays the coquette with him...

...He is an accountant and the Heymans live in Mineola, where they have put up the mother, Sophie Greengrass (Olympia Dukakis) for three years...

...Let us move on to McLeavy's son, a mixture of innocence and evil transcending mere nightmarishness...

...Thus, under Truscott's eyes the body of Mrs...

...He maintains what used to be called an unnatural relationship with a bisexual undertaker named Dennis (Alec Baldwin), who covets Fay as well...

...Together, Hal and Dennis have broken through a wall at the funeral parlor adjoining a bank...

...Fay says she has had seven husbands...

...He suffered from an incurable disease...

...Directed by none other than Mike Nichols, it marks the debut of screenwriter Andrew Bergman as a playwright on Broadway...

...Whatever the case, the Manhattan Theater Club's limited-run revival of the play last winter, directed by John Tillinger, was a big success...

...Fay, being a good Catholic, does not believe in euthanasia, so she murdered him...

...In the final scene, Bergman, Nichols and costume designer Ann Roth achieve the most boisterous—and tasteless— triumph of the evening: Sophie enters without a walker, in a clownishly fancy dress...

...Nichols tries to make a farce of the old woman's difficulties in getting from her walker to the sofa, and of the old man's inability to bend his knees when sitting down on that sofa...

...And now the same superb MTC presentation is firmly ensconsed at Broadway's Music Box Theater...

...That this is executed behind a folding screen no doubt reflects a concession to the sensibilities of the audience by Orton or Til-linger...

...McLeavy...

...Hadhenotbeen battered to death at the age of 34, he might have become the British counterpart of the late Jean Genet...

...He behaves like a monster without appearing to be one, without even knowing that he is one, and is called Hal (Zeljko Ivanek, who cannot possibly make his character a totally believable human being, but at least makes him a convincing caricature...

...Orton elaborates on this grotesque construction by offering us Police Inspector Truscott (Joseph Maher renders him with subtle intelligence...

...Of course, there isn't enough room in the coffin for both the money and Mrs...

...We laugh...

...How come...

...The problem with the play as a whole, though, is due as much to director Nichols as to author Berman...

...She hasjust died and is in the coffin flanked by her old wheelchair that forms the centerpiece of John Lee Beatty's set and of Orton's inspiration...

...Hal has no scruples, except about lying—because he knows lying is sinful...

...As for the money, it's moved a lot too, some what more carefully, until it comes to rest in the arms of Truscott, inside a smaller coffin containing—or so I understood— the ashes of the dead mother's heart...

...Increased laughter...

...Joe Orton is not an easy playwright to dismiss, nor do I mean to dismiss him...

...Orton, to be sure, does this with plenty of wit, and Tillinger's dead-on timing makes for weird juxtapositions that automatically set off the audience's laughter...

...jl "new comedy" at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Social Security, displays a different sort of tastelessness without any of the somber talent or morbid genius apparent in Loot...

...Still, what I found especially difficult to swallow was the monotonous toneofMcLeavy'slastwords, "Iamin-nocent...

...Theyhavealot of money to hide, and the only hiding place they can think of is the coffin containing Hal's mother...

...The bad, in fact, end up in a peculiarly configured menage a trois: not Fay between Hal and Dennis, but Dennis between Fay and Hal...

...To begin with, the title is quite misleading...

...McLeavy, so her embalmed body must be toppled into a closet...

...Well, she killed six of them...

...McLeavy—wrapped up like a mummy and passed off as a dummy—is carried in and out and thrown hither and thither by her son and his lover...

...Nor, I presume, was this his intention when explicitly describing the bedroom performances of daughter Sarah with two students, one of them a Peruvian and neither the rabbinical boyfriend she invents for her parents...