Westport Playhouse’s ‘Butler’ Can Still Do It

John Tillinger understands that the best way to stage a subversive, perverse 1960s farce about controlling sexual openness and outrageous doctor/patient relationships is to play it straight.

Not in the heterosexual sense of “straight,” obviously. Joe Orton wrote, candidly and comically, about gay issues at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offense in the U.K. His art was to take hoary stereotypes of old British sex comedies — randy old men, horny young men, frigid wives, innocent virgins — and take the jokes several salacious steps further.

The last play Orton wrote, “What the Butler Saw,” is getting a respectfully riotous revival through Sept. 10 at the Westport Country Playhouse.

The results aren’t just fresh and funny. Orton’s script is still able to send up the old theater comedy styles as being empty and unrealistic. His impatience with Old World values is still visceral.

When a man is caught wearing a dress in an old-school British “Carry On” comedy movie, that’s the whole joke. In “What the Butler Saw,” the reactions are “So what?” and “What next?,” and the next thing you know, a different man is in the same dress and a woman is in a man’s uniform.

People get naked as well. There’s a running joke about a body part of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

John Tillinger’s an acknowledged Orton expert who directed influential New York revivals of “Loot,” “What the Butler Saw” and “Entertaining Mr. Sloane” in the 1980s. At Westport (where he’s done more than a dozen other shows over the years), he’s assembled a reliable cast that knows when to speed up the action and when to pause for laughs. Paxton Whitehead (as the stuffy psychiatrist Dr. Rance) and Sarah Manton (as the constantly inconvenienced secretarial candidate Geraldine Barclay) worked with Tillinger on a West Coast production of “What the Butler Saw” a couple of years ago. Robert Stanton is the ever-scheming Dr. Prentice and Patricia Kalember is his red-lingerie-clad wife. Julian Gamble pratfalls gracefully as a lumbering policeman.

For those who thought Chris Ghaffari made a sexy Romeo at Hartford Stage last season, there’s more of him to see here. Ghaffari takes easily to the sort of adorable hoodlum role that Orton specialized in writing.

Many productions of Orton’s plays, such as a 1996 “Loot” directed by Bart Sher at Hartford Stage, suffer from an overabundance of silliness, with over-the-top British accents and physical shtick. Others, often found on college campuses, can be unnecessarily dark, unable to restrain from commenting obliquely on the tragic circumstance of the playwright’s own life. (Orton was murdered by his longtime lover and erstwhile writing partner Kenneth Halliwell in 1967, shortly after completing “What the Butler Saw.”)

Tillinger doesn’t let things get somber or ironic or arch. He doesn’t treat Orton as if he were Harold Pinter. He sets a rather leisurely but still frenzied pace that lets you savor sight gags and clearly hear every Oscar Wilde-level quip:

“Boys can’t be fertile. It’s half their charm.”

“She is harder to get into than the Reading Room at the British Museum.”

“I’m married to a mistress of the fraudulent climax.”

If the plays of Joe Orton were known only for their shock value, we wouldn’t still be enjoying them so much today, half an enlightened century after they were written. There are lines in the play that were considered scandalous in the ’60s but are perfectly acceptable now. There are also bits that stand out now as simplistic and sexist. The play lives and breathes. Audiences respond to it honestly, mostly by laughing.

At the Saturday night performance, some of those laughs resembled wails and whoops and heavy breathing. Entirely appropriate.

“WHAT THE BUTLER SAW” by Joe Orton, directed by John Tillinger, is at Westport Country Playhouse, 25 Powers Court, Westport, through Sept. 10. Performances are Tuesday at 7 p.m., Wednesday at 2 and 8 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $70. 203-227-4177, westportplayhouse.org.