Karamu's Little Murders' Blends Grimness, Hilarity

By Peter Bellamy

Black comedy of deepest dye blends with laughter and hilarity in the production of "Little Murders" at Karamu Proscenium Thea-

ter.

While the underlying mood of this Jules Feiffer mordant social satire is grim and macabre, the characters are so absurdly funny and many of the lines such delightful nonsense that the opening night audience was in frequent gales of laughter.

Director Ken Frankel has wisely kept the accent on comedy, because the implications of the play are terrifying and without the priceless gift of laughter the proceedings would be quite depressing.

THE PLAY conceives of a New York City of the near future in which power failures are a daily occurrence. women are shot at by suipers while shopping and in which there are 345 unsolved murders in six months all without apparent motive.

The entire city is paranoid

and neurotic. Conditions in New York are already close enough to it with cab, teacher and garbage strikes.

bombings and riots so as to make it almost prophetic.

As the play opens, there isn't a soul on stage for several minutes and one gets into the atmosphere by listening to sound track which emits the roar of the metropolis and the sounds of buses, cabs, private automobiles and honking horns.

LATER ONE hears constantly the sound of police and fire sirens, punctuated occasionally by the ping of rifle bullets.

The characters of the play have been so conditioned by the ceaseless strain of living in New York they are all candidates for the looney bin.

The father is an irascible, exacerbated alcoholic who thinks all of his daughter's boy friends are swish. The mother wallows in momisın. The son is a homosexual, who decamps with his sister's wardrobe.

The daughter is a dominating type, who tells her fiance, I love the man 1 want to mould you into." The fiance is a nutty, hippie photographer, who changes from a pacifist into a killer type. Then there is a

frantic Pop. a kind of psychopathic hardhat. FUNNIEST charac-

THE

ter in the show is a hippie minister who smokes pot while performing a marriage ceremony and thinks idea of "foresaking that the all others" in matrimony is a dreadful invasion of priva-

cy.

Holger Stave's apartment living om set is an effective one topped by a silhouette of part of the New York skyline. The triple locked door and meta! and blackout curthe windows add to

front

screens tains of

minder

lems

the mood of fear. The nding is chillingly grim ad insane and a reof what may happen if we don't solve the probour cities. Thank heaven for Feiffer's golden sense of the ridiculous. Marilyn Caplane plays the Victor Karp the Donald Underwood Yvonne Kilburn the

mother, father. the son,

daughter Lawrence Howard the fiance, Bob Foster the hippie inister and Jeffrey Reese the cop. All have the fires of lunacy in their eyes and symptoms of hysteria

proper