NORWAY — When director Tom Littlefield was choosing plays for the Oxford Hills Music and Performing Arts Association few years back, he came upon Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw” and decided that that play needed to be produced.

“’Cause when I read it it made me laugh out loud. I laughed all the way through it,” Littlefield says.

But after submitting it to the OHMPAA board, it was a no-go. One of the board members was apparently displeased by its raunchy sexual content.

“As time passed and that member left the board…” Littlefield trails off and guffaws.

Watch out Norway, because “What the Butler Saw,” a two-act play considered to be one of the finest English literature comedies, opens on Friday, July 20, at 7:30 p.m. and continues at that time on June 21, 26, 27 and 28 at the Norway Grange, 15 Whitman St. Two matinées will be held at 2 p.m. on June 22 and June 29. Tickets for opening night are $5. All other showings are $10 for adults and $8 for seniors and students under 18. They can be purchased in advance at Books N Things on Main Street in Norway.

It’s rehearsal night and actors stand in the parking lot of the grange talking about the tricky English dialog and, once inside, the play’s unnerving plot.

“I am the doctor who starts the entire chain reaction,” Elton Cole, who is also a producer of the show, says about Dr. Prentice.

Indeed he is.

The play opens with Geraldine Barclay, who is in search of a job and is apparently game for anything. While interviewing for a secretarial position at a clinic run by psychiatrist Dr. Prentice, he asks her to undress so that he may test a new contraceptive device on her. She agrees, and it seems that the head shrink’s bizarre seduction is going his way. That is until his wife unexpectedly arrives after spending the night at a hotel following a lesbian gathering. It’s as if Oscar Wilde took a pen to Sigmund Freud’s teachings about the unconscious and twisted it into an unruly farce.

“It makes me sympathetically uncomfortable,” says Rachel Leighton about playing Mrs. Prentice. “I didn’t even read the perusal script or anything [before auditioning]. I just showed up.”

Seventeen-year-old Justice Pittman, who plays Geraldine, had the opposite response.

“I love this play. I didn’t audition for it,” she says, adding that the Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School drama club director told her about it. “I have to run around in underwear a lot.”

Because she’s a minor, Pittman says that she’s wearing a bodysuit under the underwear.

“My mom came and bought the underwear for me. She actually paid for it,” she says.

Isaiah Alexander, who is going into his junior year at Oxford Hills and is playing Nicholas Beckett, says he heard about the play the same way Pittman did but, unlike his cast mate, doesn’t think he’ll go into acting professionally.

“I’m leaning toward culinary,” he says. “Those are definitely my preferred things—acting and cooking.”

Alexander doesn’t play a cook, but he’s enjoying the role of Nicholas.

“He’s cocky. I like it. He’s a seducer, that’s for sure,” he says, adding that his character does things he hasn’t experienced. “It’s a good baptism by fire.”

Steve Session, who plays Dr. Rance, says that the most difficult part of the play isn’t the sexual content but the language. It’s very English sentence structure has him worried about tripping over the language, and yet two weeks back rehearsal was progressing as it always does in community theater—the cast is readier by the moment. The actors intend to be ready even though that means becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable. Perhaps Dr. Rance best sums up the actors’ experience in words penned by the playwright himself: “Unusual behavior is the order of the day.”

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