One of the funniest performances I’ve seen in years is being offered these days by Caroline Jett as the horny alcoholic Mrs. Prentice in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw.
This Jobsite Theater production is worth viewing for lots of reasons, but even in a strong cast, Jett’s desperate housewife stands out. She's a woman who can’t stay away from booze or from any surface, animate or inanimate, on which she might pleasure herself. When we first meet her, we’re aware that she’s dissatisfied with her marriage, but by the end of the evening, her reckless appetite for sex and spirits reaches such extreme levels, she’s drinking whiskey straight from the decanter, and publicly dragging herself back and forth across the top of a bureau in search of an elusive climax.
Randy men are common enough in the theater, from Lysistrata to Brighton Beach Memoirs, but Jett graphically demonstrates that a mature woman can be just as comically sex-starved as any pimply teenaged boy. And in fact, Jett’s entire performance, from the farce’s relatively slow first minutes to its raucous conclusion, is devastatingly comic. This is fearless acting, and it packs a strong punch.
But so does Orton’s play, which has nothing to do with butlers, and everything to do with the psychopathology of everyday life. When the play begins, the psychiatrist Dr. Prentice is interviewing one Geraldine Barclay for a position as his secretary. The position he really has in mind is the horizontal one, though, and when he asks Barclay to remove her clothes,
This article appears in Jan 13-19, 2010.