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Loot

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A murderously funny black comedy! Joe Orton loved to make us laugh at our social and sexual taboos. When Hal robs a bank and hides his booty in his mother’s coffin, who will discover it first—the crooked detective or the homicidal nurse? Directed by comic genius Andrei Belgrader, Loot guarantees a murderously funny evening.

SYNOPSIS

Hal and his pal Dennis have just robbed a bank and need a place to stash their loot. With the police hot on their trail, the boys decide to hide the stolen cash in the coffin that contains Hal’s late mother, Mrs. McLeavy. While old Mr. McLeavy is busy cataloguing the flowers sent in memory of his wife, Hal and Dennis stuff the mommy in the wardrobe and the money in the casket. Fay, Mrs. McLeavy’s nurse, stumbles upon her dead patient and demands a cut in the action. But before the three criminals can sneak away with their booty, the notorious Inspector Truscott of the Yard starts snooping around the house and throws a wrench in their plans. What ensues is a farcical game of cover-ups and crack-ups peppered with Joe Orton’s epigrammatic style of dramatic delivery.

Performed in repertory with Full Circle.

Credits

Creative team

By

Joe Orton

Directed by

Andrei Belgrader

Directed by

Andrei Belgrader

Andrei Belgrader is well known to American Repertory Theater audiences for his productions of Loot, We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, Ubu Rock, The Servant of Two Masters, Rameau's Nephew, The Bald Soprano and the Chairs, Waiting for Godot (for which he received the Boston Circle Critics Awards for Best Play and Best Director for 1982/1983), Measure for Measure, and As You Like It. Since arriving from his native Romania in 1978, Mr. Belgrader has directed several off-Broadway productions, including Waiting for Godot, Scapin, Woyzeck, and Troilus and Cressida. At Yale Repertory Theatre he directed Molière's Scapin, which he adapted with Shelly Berc and Rusty Magee and was subsequently performed at Classic Stage Company in New York and American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. His other credits at Yale Repertory Theatre include John Guare's Moon Over Miami, The Miser, As You Like It, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Rex, the American premiere of Dario Fo's About Face, Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw, and Gogol's Marriage. At the Goodman Theatre in Chicago he directed Beckett's Happy Days. Mr. Belgrader also worked at the West Bank Cafe, where he directed Qunicy Long's Korea and Tom Eyen's The White Whore and The Bit Player, which was subsequently performed at the Edinburgh Festival and then moved to two London theaters. For the Double Image Theatre, he directed Ondine and Brendan Cole's Tenth Avenue Tales. With Shelley Berc, Mr. Belgrader also adapted Rameau's Nephew and directed the original production for the Classic Stage Company in New York. For the Norwegian State Theatre, he directed Nikolai Erdman's Suicide. Mr. Belgrader also directed several episodes of Coach for MCA Universal.

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Set design by

Anita Stewart

Set design by

Anita Stewart

Anita Stewart (Loot) previously designed the sets for We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, The Imaginary Invalid, The Servant of Two Masters, Rameau's Nephew, The Bald Soprano, and The Chairs for the American Repertory Theater. Her recent credits include scenery for Playboy of the Western World at Steppenwolf and Long Wharf theaters, costumes for Elektra at Canadian Opera Company, scenery for Waiting for Godot at Seattle Repertory Theatre, and Intimate Exchanges at Dallas Theater Center. She has designed for a number of major American theater and opera companies, and is currently the artistic director of Portland Stage Company in Maine.

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Costume design by

Catherine Zuber

Costume design by

Catherine Zuber

Catherine Zuber has created the costumes for Richard II, The Doctor's Dilemma, and over forty other A.R.T. productions including Three Farces and a Funeral, Antigone, Loot, The Idiots Karamazov, Ivanov, Phaedra, The Merchant of Venice, Valparaiso, The Imaginary Invalid, The Taming of the Shrew, Peter Pan and Wendy, The Bacchae, Man and Superman, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Woyzeck, The Wild Duck, The Naked Eye, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Tartuffe, Ubu Rock, Waiting for Godot, The Oresteia, Shlemiel the First, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, A Touch of the Poet, What the Butler Saw, The Cherry Orchard, and Orphée. Ms. Zuber's credits include work at Lincoln Center, The Joseph Papp Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, The Guthrie Theater, Mark Taper Forum, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Hartford Stage Company, La Jolla Playhouse, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Houston Grand Opera, and Glimmerglass Opera, among others. Her Broadway credits include The Triumph of Love (Connecticut Critics Circle Award and Drama Desk nomination), Ivanov (Drama Desk nomination), The Sound of Music, Twelfth Night, The Red Shoes, London Assurance, The Rose Tattoo, and Philadelphia Here I Come. Ms. Zuber was the recipient of the 1997 Obie Award for sustained achievement in design. She is the costume designer for La Fête des Vignerons de 1999, the massive Festival of the Winegrowers in Vevey, Switzerland.

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Lighting design by

Michael Chybowski

Lighting design by

Michael Chybowski

Lighting designer, Lady with a Lapdog. The American Repertory Theater's resident lighting designer (1997–2001). AntigoneFull Circle, Loot, The Idiots Karamazov, The Master Builder, Phaedra, The Bacchae, In the Jungle of Cities, The Taming of the Shrew, The Imaginary Invalid, and The Wild Duck at the A.R.T. Other: Moby Dick and Other Stories with Laurie Anderson, The Grey Zone (Long Wharf Theatre), Andrei Belgrader's production of Waiting for Godot (Classic Stage Company), Cymbeline (New York Shakespeare Festival, Delacorte Theatre), Playboy of the Western World (Steppenwolf Theatre), and the original production of Wit. For the Mark Morris Dance Group, he has designed over thirty dances, including Four Saints in Three Acts for English National Opera and Falling Down Stairs, which toured the U.S. with cellist Yo Yo Ma. Nominated for an American Theatre Wing design award for his lighting of David Rabe's A Question of Mercy and also for The Grey Zone by Tim Blake Nelson. Received a 1999 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence, the American Theatre Wing Design Award, and the Lucille Lortel Award for 1999.

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Sound design by

Christopher Walker

Sound design by

Christopher Walker

Christopher Walker has composed music and designed sound for We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, Phaedra, Beckett Trio: Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, and Nacht und Traüme, and An Evening of Beckett, and designed sound for The King Stag, Loot, The Idiots Karamazov, Ivanov, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Charlie in the House of Rue, The Merchant of Venice, Valparaiso, The Taming of the Shrew, The Bacchae, The Wild Duck, Woyzeck, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Wild Duck, Alice in Bed, Slaughter City, Buried Child, Ubu Rock, The Threepenny Opera, The Accident, Demons, Waiting for Godot, The Oresteia, Hot 'n' Throbbing, The America Play, A Touch of the Poet, The Cherry Orchard, What the Butler Saw, and Those the River Keeps at the A.R.T. Previously he composed music and designed sound for productions at the Intiman Theatre, the Bathhouse Theatre, and the Alice B. Theatre. He also scores for dance and has composed for the Allegro Dance Festival, the Bumbershoot Festival, and On The Boards.

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Hal Thomas Derrah
Dennis Sean Dugan
McLeavy Alvin Epstein
Truscott Jeremy Geidt
Fay Laurie Williams
Meadows William Smith