BWW Reviews: 2nd Story Offers Very ENTERTAINING MR. SLOAN

ENTERTAING MR. SLOAN by Joe Orton, the latest entry in the grim comedy sweepstakes currently going on at 2nd Story Theater in Warren, is a funny plays made with gruesome ingredients. When the audience takes its seat, it is greeted by Trevor Elliot's set--a simple, orderly middle class living room, which suggests nothing of the chaos soon to take place. Like the characters Orton created in 1964, the set is not what it first appears to be: what the audience cannot see is that the orderly living room is in a house at the edge of a dump.

The house is not what it first appears to be and neither are the characters. For the next ninety minutes, Orton leaves no stone unturned in his relentless examination of what vermin lies beneath these stones. Kath, played by Rae Mancini, is a sex-starved, lonely, off-kilter middle-aged, almost widow, who throws herself at her new lodger, the seventeen year-old Mr. Sloan, Cory Crew. Her competition for the young man's attentions turns out to be none other than her brother Ed, played hilariously by John Michael Richardson. These two reveal a lifelong animosity fueled by past competitions for lovers and some pretty harsh treatment of Kath by Ed when he forced her to give up her baby for adoption seventeen years before. Their father Kemp, played by Tom Roberts (who should enter Bryan Cranston lookalike contests), rounds out the happy family. The secret he carries, which makes him look saintly compared to his offspring, is his failure to look too closely at the murder of his employer.

Into this sunshine Orton sends the eponymous Mr. Sloan. He will serve as an objet de lust for both Kath and Ed and of menace for Kemp, who eventually recognizes him as the man who murdered his employer two years before. Sloan first threatens the old man to insure his silence before he finally realizes has to kill him, a crime for which Kath and Ed actually become accomplices by covering up the crime. What kind of family is this? What kind of people would cover up the murder of their own father for the chance to share sexual favors with his murderer? As they sing on Sesame St., "Who are the people in your neighborhood; the people that you meet each day"!

While Crew and Roberts are competent in their roles, Mancini is very funny and Richardson is terrific. Mancini's Kath is comically transparent in her attempts to seduce her young lodger, but it's not all laughs for her: either the loss of her baby and her lover has left her unstable, or she was unstable all along. She is comic and pathetic. Ed, as played by Richardson, is salacious off the charts. He wants Mr. Sloan but has to hide is desires; homosexuality was a seriously punishable offense in 1964, and Ed has to maintain a veneer of respectability for the sake of his business and his freedom. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, he has the best lines.

Ed Shea directed this piece, and it must be him we can thank for eschewing English accents. He got solid efforts from his actors and the rest of the production staff. ENTERTAINING MR. SLOAN is neither a fun filled romp nor wholesome fun, but rather represent Orton's view that things are falling apart and the center cannot hold. This is the real world--Ozzie and Harriet have left the building. Harold Pinter thought Orton a "bloody marvelous writer." Come to the 2nd Story and see why.

ENTERTAINING MR. SLOAN runs until May 31 at the 2nd Story Theater at 28 Market St. in Warren. It is presented in one ninety minute act. Tickets are $30.00; $21.00 for those twenty-one and younger.

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