THE RUFFIAN ON THE STAIR
Profiles Performance Ensemble at Red Bones Theatre
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Ruffian concerns a pair of losers: an ex-prostitute and a petty thug, Joyce and Mike, flatmates who sometimes share a bed and who treat each other with that odd combination of dependence and bored contempt that typifies Pinter’s couples. Into this Pinter-esque purgatory steps Wilson, a young hoodlum bent on revenge for the (perhaps) accidental death of his brother, which he blames–justly as it turns out–on Mike. As in Pinter’s early work, barely suppressed violence lurks behind every line of laconic dialogue, and even the most innocent comments contain subtexts bristling with rage: “Are these some kind of carp?” “No. Just goldfish.” “You can catch germs from them, you know.”
But for all its Pinteresque ways, The Ruffian on the Stair is still very much an Orton play. Unlike Pinter, Orton has a punky interest in shocking his (pre-Stonewall) audience and assaulting their prim, hypocritical middle-class sensibilities. Put another way, what Pinter conceals Orton reveals–loudly, clearly, unambiguously. Pinter may hint at the cruelty, neurosis, and polymorphous perversity bubbling just beneath society’s bland exterior, but Orton revels in it. At the top of the show, Mike tortures Joyce by joking about his clandestine liaisons in the toilet at King’s Cross station. And Wilson tries to shock Mike by admitting to an incestuous homosexual relationship with his brother.
Ironically this failing has the effect of making Orton’s play seem stronger and more stylistically consistent than it is. But by the end nothing can disguise the fact that this is two, two, two plays in one.
Even by the Playwrights’ Center’s rather abysmal standards, this play, with its sub-Bazooka Joe wit, is a mess. Of course it doesn’t help that there isn’t a decent performer in the whole acting-impaired cast. Or that director Timothy Mooney doesn’t have a clue, and so has created a production with more embarrassing, awkward moments per minute of stage time than any play I’ve seen in a long, long while.
