Joe Orton's "Loot" Is a Comedy of Bad Manners Nick Westrate, left, and Ryan Garbayo in "Loot." The comic payoffs arrive only sporadically in the new production of Joe Orton's "Loot" at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Those deliciously perverse epigrams whiz through the air, and the corpse of a beloved wife is frantically hauled about a parlor like a medicine ball being flung around at a gym. But the deadpan style that best serves these antics often slips into a kind of winking archness that announces an awareness of the inspired lunacy of it all. The production, directed by Jesse Berger for the Red Bull Theater, hits its marks with an air of studied effort that tends to put the brakes on the mayhem. Lunacy presented with a poker face is the engine driving this classic comedy, which combines satirical verbal jousting reminiscent of Oscar Wilde with the frenzied energy of farce. "Loot" famously flopped in 1965, closing on tour before making it to the West End, but it was resurrected in London the next year with a new cast and hailed as a work of distinctive brilliance. The play takes place in the drawing room of the recently widowed McLeavy (Jarlath Conroy), who is dazed with grief and smothered with brisk affection by Fay (Rebecca Brooksher), the nurse who had been attending his ailing wife and who has calmly set her sights on making poor McLeavy the next in her long line of husbands. "One a year on average since I was 16," she says. I'm extravagant you see. McLeavy, played by Mr. Conroy with a fine sense of being permanently flummoxed, cannot muster the energy to resist her officious appropriation, particularly when he learns that Fay has cajoled his wife into leaving her all her money. But considerations of matters matrimonial and funerary - McLeavy's wife's corpse, in its coffin, hasn't yet left the room - are soon interrupted by the desperate endeavors of McLeavy's son, Hal (Nick Westrate), and his pal Dennis (Ryan Garbayo) to hide the spoils of their recent bank robbery. Dennis, who has arrived to transport Mrs. McLeavy to her final place of rest (he works for an undertaker, unnaturally), has already fallen under the gimlet gaze and brutal boot of the detective Truscott (Rocco Sisto). He alerts Hal to the law hot on their trail, and they hit on the novelty of hiding the bank notes in the coffin and stuffing the corpse in an armoire. But the matter of dispensing with the body proves tricky when Truscott rings the doorbell, pretending to be an inspector from the water board investigating a problem. For all the coruscating brilliance of Orton's writing, his style can be murderously hard to pull off, particularly for American actors. Despite its dizzying comic absurdities, his dialogue draws on the conversational style of the English middle classes and does not necessarily come naturally even to skilled performers. And it is so packed with priceless, paradoxical bons mots that it can be hard to know how best to serve them: with or without quotation marks, carefully or carelessly? Mr. Berger's cast members certainly look their roles: Ms. Brooksher has a prim, delicate prettiness; Mr. Westrate looks like a genial ne'er-do-well; Mr. Sisto glowers stern and sinister as Truscott. But the labor often shows in their attempts to inhabit these splendidly amoral creatures. Ms. Brooksher, in particular, employs an accent that feels overly posh for her working-class character, and on occasion she can be found giving the audience a conspiratorial, sidelong glance that comes across as an elbow in the ribs alerting us to the sublime silliness of the language. Mr. Sisto approaches his character more forthrightly, and yet with his dark, plummy voice, there's perhaps too much Hammer Horror in his lip-smacking sinisterness and not enough Monty Python. That fabled 1970s sketch comedy is rich in Orton-esque images of the British middle-class behaving like mad folk even as they speak with utter seriousness. Mr. Westrate fares fine as the hapless Hal, who, for all his larcenous instincts, finds it peculiarly hard to tell a lie: When Truscott begins beating the truth out of Hal, he doesn't realize that Hal is only being honest when he says the money's about to be buried. Mr. Garbayo, whose Dennis hopes to make an honest woman of Fay (for the eighth time) and is dashed when he finds an unexpected and unlikely rival in McLeavy, has a sexy, easygoing swagger. Mr. Berger's production churns up some robust laughter when the plot's more farcical machinations kick into high gear, as Truscott keeps investigating the mysteries of Fay's numerous dead husbands, the missing money and the errant glass eyeball (!). But it never acquires the sense of ease that allows Orton's delicious wit to shine through entirely naturally. We are often aware that each verbal gem has been carefully polished before presentation.