“Orton’s plays are a flamboyant dance with the death he found in life. He liked being “the fly on the wall” who registered idiom, the lives and longings in his many anonymous subterranean encounters. Hunger and how it disguises its craving was what amused him. . . . Nobody came closer than Orton to reviving on stage the outrageous and violent prankster’s spirit of comedy and creating the purest (and rarest) of drama’s by-products: joy.” –John Lahr, from the Introduction