Shrink Raps

For starters, there’s no butler in the
play nor is it yet another parody of Agatha Christie. The title comes
from shabby British seaside entertainments of a hundred years ago.
“What the Butler Saw” might appear above a hand-cranked nickelodeon
where the viewer could see something naughty that had been hidden from
everyone else but the servants. So from minute one, we’re being asked
to join in some voyeurism, and those we watch would rather keep hidden
what we find.

Although not performed in this part of the world for three decades, when Syracuse Stage produced his Butler
(October, 1976), playwright Orton could legitimately be called
“legendary.” A working-class, high school dropout who nonetheless won a
scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Orton produced a
string of dazzling hits before being murdered at age 34 by his jealous
boyfriend in 1967. His story is told in John Lahr’s biography Prick Up Your Ears
(1978), later filmed with Gary Oldman as Orton (1987). Temperamentally
Orton was one with the Angry Young Man generation that began with John
Osborne, and personally he was an assertive gay before there were
Stonewall-style organizations and lobbying groups. As Orton saw things,
it was just him against the straights.

The scene is Dr. Prentice’s upscale
private psychiatric clinic, a room containing a wheelchair, a dressing
screen and four doors through which to escape. Action begins quickly
with Prentice (Paul Gundersen) and his botched attempt to seduce a
prospective secretary, Geraldine Barclay (Heather Roach). His approach
is direct. He asks her to take off her clothes, first down to her
skivvies, and when she’s safely behind a screen, everything. That
Prentice is a psychiatrist, not a gynecologist, and Geraldine a job
applicant, not a patient, matters not at all. The doctor still goes
through the professional pretense by picking up a shapely, bare leg and
muttering, “Now, let’s see how this was affected by that episode with
your grandmother.” 

But Prentice’s wife (Judy Schmid) shows
up. She has just spent a night of passion with a bellboy, Nick (Matt
Nilsen), who is about to blackmail her with compromising photographs.
“When I gave you my body, it did not include reprint rights,” she
grumbles. And, lacking a dress, she puts on the shapeless leopard-print
garment Geraldine had just taken off. A running gag, the dress will
eventually appear on other bodies. 

Both are guilty parties, but the doctor
accuses his wife of impropriety. “I hardly ever have sexual
intercourse,” she defends herself, plaintively. “You were born with
legs apart!” the doctor roars back. “They’re sending you to the grave
in a Y-shaped coffin.”

Britain being the home of National (i.e.
socialized) Health, the psychiatric clinic is shortly visited by a nosy
inspector, Dr. Rance (Ted Davenport). “I represent the government,” the
bureaucrat announces, “your immediate superior in madness.” When the
naked Geraldine Barclay is found behind the screen, Dr. Prentice
invents a series of cover stories, that she is a mental patient and
that she is a he, Gerald Barclay. When Mrs. Prentice sobs to Dr. Rance
that she was almost raped in the Station Hotel, he asks if the criminal
succeeded. “No,” she answers. “I’m not surprised,” he consoles, “the
service in these hotels is terrible.”

Increasingly “normal” heterosexuality is
subverted by intimated homosexuality, as when both Geraldine puts on
the bellboy costume as “Gerald,” and Nick reappears in drag as the new
Geraldine. This leads to one of the sharpest lines in the play, from
the dim policeman, Sgt. Match (Bob Brophy): “This is a boy, sir. Not a
girl. If you’re baffled by the difference it might be well to approach
both with caution.”

Skipping over 50 pages of dialogue, we
find that all the key players have violated social norms more
flagrantly than any of them has realized. These lead to one of those
madcap long speeches, a convention in farce, that summarizes
breathlessly all that we have seen. Dr. Rance delivers this in the
longest speech, which begins, “Everything is clear now. The final
chapters of my book are knitting together: incest, buggery, outrageous
women and strange love-cults catering for depraved appetites. All
fashionable bric-a-brac.”

“What a dreadful story,” laments Mrs. Prentice. “I’d condemn it in the strongest terms if it were fiction.”

What the Butler Saw appears on
the wide stage at the State Fairgrounds’ New Times Theater, the first
production there by the venerable Salt City Center for the Performing
Arts. Director Dan Stevens, also a veteran character actor, has
selected players usually associated with other companies, such as
Appleseed Productions’ Paul Gundersen (a recent Syracuse New Times
Syracuse Area Live Theater (SALT) winner) as Dr. Prentice and Judy
Schmid, usually seen with Rarely Done. Much of the absurdist dialogue
in Butler draws comic sparks, with Ted Davenport as Dr. Rance
taking top honors with perhaps the hardest work. Sir Ralph Richardson
played his role in the original West End production. Director Stevens
is the master of several British accents (heard previously in Anything Goes and My Fair Lady) and knows how to teach them, but most of them have disappeared here toward the end of the first act.

Although this is not a traditional
door-slamming farce in the French manner, there must be nearly 150
entrances and exits. Pacing is fast, but not always precise. The
unsparing demands of the genre are that every one of them must be spot
on or we begin to feel a certain slackness, no matter how earnestly the
cast is working. Still, memorable dialogue lingers, such as Dr. Rance’s
sage advice: “You can’t be rational in an irrational world. It’s not
rational.”    

This production runs Friday and Saturday, May 23 and 24, 8:15 p.m., and Sunday, May 25, 2 p.m. For information, call 475-9749.