“What the Butler Saw”
Written by Joe Orton
Showing: Court Theater, 5535 S. Ellis Ave., through Dec. 9.
Tickets: $38-54
Contact: (312) 753-4472; www.courttheatre.org

By Web Behrens

Contributing writer

Joe Orton loved to poke his fingers squarely in society’s eyes. The British gay playwright’s output in the 1960s—full of rampant sexuality of all stripes, plus incest and violence—both scandalized and titillated repressed Western audiences. But can that taboo spirit still be captured today?

Director Sean Graney, making his Court Theatre debut, answers “yes” with his rollicking take on “What the Butler Saw,” a farce full of mistaken identities and transgender follies set in a mental institution. (It’s also the last of Orton’s works—the playwright’s crazy lover bludgeoned him to death in 1967, shortly after Orton completed “Butler.”) The top-drawer Court production features a sleek, placid set by designer Kevin Depinet that belies the insanity to come. Graney and Depinet are abetted in this process by the rest of the design team—as the play unfolds, the lighting, sound and costumes all roam further into the land of the madcap.

The cast, too, is an utter delight. As acidic psychiatrist Dr. Prentice, whose misguided attempt to seduce his new secretary sends the absurd plot into motion, Blake Montgomery gamely plays the straight man. Mechelle Moe, the dizzy secretary, manages to be both beautiful and comical as she wrestles with her own stockings; her counterpart in undressing-and-crossdressing silliness, JB Waterman, is both a studly thug and a hilariously ungainly girl. Mary Beth Fisher has a ball playing Prentice’s naughty wife, who repeatedly ends up prancing about in leopard-print underwear. Pushing them all to the max is a manic Joe Foust, upping the ante with his full-throttle portrayal of a government inspector with multiple agendas.

By the middle of the play’s second act, though, there’s a feeling that Graney and Company threw everything into the mix, turning the dial up to 11, just because. Even as the production blunders beyond the zany into the gratuitous, somehow they get away with it—after all, Orton paved the way outrageous conclusion. Trying to match the outrage level for a 21st-century audience, Graney makes the violence more pulsingly visceral, and—well, it’s hard to get more outrageous than incest, so he grabs for hilarious instead, bringing a furry fetish into the mix. He wraps it all up with a twisted portrait of a happy family, like Normal Rockwell on angel dust.

There’s an extra thrill watching this all play out on the Court stage. Will it fly with the theater’s more traditionally minded subscribers? Well, it’s not like Court’s artistic director Charles Newell didn’t know what he was getting when he invited Graney to come play in his sandbox.