Satirical Sniper Fire

A Jules Feiffer cartoon is an act of aggression camouflaged by humor. Feiffer is a satirical sniper who drills lethal little holes in the feverish body politic. In security, hostility, urban hysteria are both his targets and his weapons, and all his cartoons are Little Murders, as he has titled his first full-length play.

When the play was first presented on Broadway in 1967, it was given an inept production that erred fatally by trying to be realistic. Caricatures cannot be played as people, and the jokes seemed to expire rather than explode.

The current off-Broadway production is breath-catchingly funny, surrealistic in tone and style and hair-trigger fast in pace. All this it owes to Director Alan Arkin. He shows such ready mas tery of comic tempo and zany action that Mike Nichols and Gene Saks might as well know that they have a competitor on their hands.

The central problem of Little Murders has not been, and probably cannot be, resolved. It is still a series of animated cartoons spliced together, and not an organic drama. The characters do not develop; they reiterate attitudes. One is aware of a point of view, but not of a range of life. The setting is Manhattan's Upper West Side, the people a middle-class family. From the beginning, much of the humor revolves around an inversion of sexual roles. The men, father, son and photographer-fiance, are towers of Jello. The women, wife and daughter, are ice picks. They live in what is almost a psychotic New York milieu of impending violence and the rape of privacy. There are three locks and a burglar alarm on the front door. There is also "The Breather," a telephonic intruder, who calls at odd, menacing hours to breathe and snort. At comic and not-so-comic war with itself, the family listens to sporadic rifle fire in the streets that betokens a city at war with itself.

Verbal Combat Fatigue. The plot, insofar as there is one, is to get the fiance (Fred Willard), who wants to remain one in perpetuity, to marry the daughter and then do something or other with his life. As a photographer he has specialized in pictures of human excrement, which is presumably Feiffer's ultimate comment on the state of contemporary society. But the fiance is catatonically passive. At one point his would-be bride (Linda Lavin) says with caustic distress: "See, he doesn't know how to fight. That's why I'm not winning." Finally, the pair gets married out of something resembling verbal combat fatigue, and the bride is arbitrarily killed by a stray bullet shortly after. At play's end, the family is in a state of siege, with guns at the ready.

Feiffer obviously intended to produce the blackest of comedies, but the laughs are treacherously lighthearted. What he does achieve, with the aid of a remarkably resourceful cast, is social observation that is as sharp as a shark's bite, and a highly contemporaneous sense of the unsettling transvaluation of all values.

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