Joe Orton

The plays of Joe Orton (1933-1967)–Loot, What the Butler Saw, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and others–rank with Oscar Wilde’s as some of the most outrageous and hilarious of our time. He was brutally murdered by his male lover at the peak of his career.

Editor John Lahr was the senior drama critic at the New Yorker for twenty years. He was the first critic to win a Tony Award, for coauthoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty. The author of eighteen books, ranging from fiction to biography, Lahr is best known for Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr (1969) and Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (1978).