'[Lane's line readings fail to be] vapors in a toxic fog given off by a soul rotting in its own unhappiness. ...[He fails to be the] slow-leaking human dirty bomb
[the role demands]...

...“Butley” portrays a few hours of the destructive games that its title character plays in his office (designed with appropriately oppressive squalor by Alexander Dodge), dodging tutorials with eager students; baiting friends, enemies, lovers and colleagues, and hiding from hurtful facts. A once promising scholar of T. S. Eliot, whose large photograph hovers reproachfully over his desk, Butley has become a heavy-drinking, work-shirking, barb-wielding mess who could step without missing a beat into the nasty late-night rituals of another play set in academe, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

...Mr. Martin’s production feels too visibly articulated; you can see the joints that move the action. Ideally, Butley’s sustained rant about his life — a rant compounded of bright remarks, vicious digs and recitations whose sources run from Shakespeare to Beatrix Potter — should shape the play into a sort of acrid miasma, only occasionally pierced by light.'