It's acid

Words of warning

By Peter Bellamy, Entertainment Editor

NEW YORK A word of warning about the new offBroadway hit “Little Murders,” at the Circle in the Square Theater.

Advertised as "fantastically funny." this brilliantly acted and written mordant, social satire has a great deal of laughter, but its comedy is jet black. Its picture of the New York City of the future is even more frightening than it is today:

As imagined by playwright Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist As imagined by playwright Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist for Playboy and the New Republic magazines, its citizens wear steel hats to ward off sniper's bullets. A housewife is not at all surprised to find a sniper's bullet in her shopping bag after a visit to the supermarket.

A citizen is shot because he has forgotten the password to the police station. There are burglar alarms in every apartment. There are 435 motiveless murders in six months. It's no wonder the police department, under pressure from the public and newspapers, becomes paranoid.

The play pinpoints the fear or callousness that impells New Yorkers to turn their backs when a woman is being attacked or murdered. There is constant gunfire in “Little Murders." but nobody calls the police. The final scene is a nightmarish comment on lack of gun control.

It hits home the more sharply because New Yorkers of today never know when they will be mugged or assaulted.

With racial strife and rising anti-Semitism the subject of daily headlines, and strikes crippling the school and transportation systems from time to time. New Yorkers are rightly jittery. The implications of "Little Murders" are about as funny as a funeral.

The playwright has chosen some magnificently dreadful neurotics to project his bone-crushing satire. Several are as opinionated, prejudiced and basically stupid as the characters in Sinclair Lewis "Babbit." The one exception turns to tooth and claw when his wife is wantonly killed.

The comedy derives from the absurd cliches, non sequiturs and berserk emotional reactions of its mortal fools. They are played uniformly with great humanity and timing.

Representing the pacifist idealism of the younger generation is actor Fred Willard, who refuses to fight against a system he'd never miss. He has been regularly beaten up for 10 years, but as what he calls an apathist, he says, "Muggers get mighty depressed when you hum all the time they are hitting you." He's a native of Shaker Heights.

Linda Lavin, so charming in the lead feminine role of "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever" when it played Cleveland, is the exemplar of the dominating female. She admits she fell in love with the image of the husband into which she'd like to mold him.

Vincent Gardenia, as her father, thinks every man.to whom his daughter is attracted is swish, Elizabeth Wilson is the extreme of the over-possessive mother. One understands why her son, played by Jon Korkes, is a repulsive slob and homosexual.

Like the other characters, Paul Benedict is involuntarily sidesplitting as the hippy minister whose marriage ceremony emphasizes sexual permissiveness. Andrew Duncan is out of "Dr. Strangelove" as the detective who comes to shoot at anything that moves.

As an elder outraged at the lack of religion in the young, Shimen Ruskin suggests that parental stack-blowing will never be a substitute for the Ten Commandments or Christ's Sermon on the Mount.

There is some unpretty language in the play, which may be gratutitous, but it is not intended to be a pretty play.

Otherwise, the playwright and director Alan Arkin are Dean Swift and "Gulliver's Travels" come to off-Broadway.