“Producers Shawn Abramowitz and Jerome Elliott Moskowitz have interestingly chosen a vintage British mystery/comedy to start Desert Ensemble Theatre’s new season of plays at the Palm Springs Cultural Center: Joe Orton’s Loot (a great word!).
I saw my first British mystery/comedy in London, where The Mousetrap had already been running for 27 years at that point—27 years! It was inconceivable that a play could run that long. I mean, a few performances of a play were all we ever did. (The Mousetrap is still running; in fact, it is the longest-running play in the world, and has been on the West End continuously since 1952, other than a 14-month COVID-19 break.) It established the format that still exists for this kind of show—and it’s clear The Mousetrap influenced Orton when he wrote Loot, a dark-comedy farce that premiered in 1965.
The play—both acts (and yes, there is an intermission)—takes place during a day of mourning for the upper-class McLeavy family; the wife/mother of this small but elegant clan has passed away and is about to be buried. We meet the late lady’s nurse, Fay, who wears a ghastly blonde wig and is trying to manipulate the now-bereaved husband into either letting her go or marrying her. We discover that she has been … how shall I put this … married before. Like, seven times in the last decade…”
[Read the full article at cvindependent.com]