Playwright: Joe Orton. At: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis . Phone: 773-753-4472; $38-$54. Runs through: Dec. 9
Fans of Chicago storefront theater surely know of the consistently fine work of Sean Graney, artistic director and founder of the 10-year-old troupe The Hypocrites. So it's a natural progression to see this dynamic director being invited to strut his staging stuff on a professional Chicago stage.
Building upon his Chicago Children's Theatre's success with Honus and Me, Graney more than manages the twists and turns of What the Butler Saw for Court Theatre. There may be a few inconsistencies in Graney's modernization, but the plusses outweigh any excessive directorial decisions.
What the Butler Saw was the last play penned by gay British playwright before his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, bludgeoned him to death in a murder-suicide in 1967 ( dramatized in the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears ) . There is no butler to be seen since the title is taken from a late 19th-century penny-arcade peep show.
And what a peep show What the Butler Saw is. Things rapidly spiral out of control when a psychiatrist must cover up his attempt to seduce a prospective secretary in his antiseptically modern home office ( a multi-door fluorescent enclave by designer Kevin Depinet that gets trashed and splattered by blood by the end ) .
With What the Butler Saw, Orton takes unrelenting potshots at the stereotypical British sex farce, Freudian psychobabble and tidy melodramatic endings. Orton also inserted shocking-for-the-day revelations of gay-for-pay sex, incest and a playful dose of cross-dressing and nudity.
Graney takes things a step further by updating the setting from the 1960s to today ( allowing him to add a not-entirely-justified plush animal sexual fetish ) . Graney's updating works for the most part, though occasional lines in the script don't jibe ( references to secretarial shorthand and an unbelievably cheap rent-boy rate ) .
Thankfully, those inconsistencies are easily brushed over by the expert comic cast, whose exasperated running around and mistaken identities win a constant string of laughs.
Blake Montgomery and Mary Beth Fisher make for an wonderfully adversarial married couple of Dr. and Mrs. Prentice, what with his botched secretarial seduction and her dabbling with lesbian intellectual societies and hotel porters.
As the couple's frequently undressed sexual playthings, Mechelle Moe is hilarious as the not-so-bright secretary Geraldine Barclay, who mistakes a bodily examination as a regular psychological procedure. JB Waterman is a looker as the tall blackmailing porter Nicholas Beckett, which makes his drag transformation all the more comical.
Joe Foust gets the lunacy just right as the officiously deranged governmental inspector Dr. Rance, while Eric Slater's down-to-earth take on the butch Sgt. Match wins hearts when he gets dragged into this web of deceit.
Though not perfect, Graney's What the Butler Saw is a zany joy of theatrical naughtiness. Let's hope that Graney has more opportunities to show off at Court and other professional theaters in the future.