Little Murders was Feiffer's contribution to a time when the arts were just beginning to popularly strip the Ozzie and Harriet façade from American society and recognize the uncertainty that lay beneath the banal. Feiffer's often pitch-black satire, written before ironic cynicism became sitcom fodder, focuses on the imminent wedding of ornery Patsy Newquist (Stacey Lind) to confirmed "apathist" Alfred Chamberlain (Roy Stanton), a man who hums dispassionately while suffering any number of muggings in a New York City gone ferociously haywire. Though its nutty cultural lampooning has aged some, the play is fairly prescient in its indictment of the dysfunctional, oblivious zombies the American populace was in danger of becoming.
Summers' production has only the zombie part down. No one on Andrew Neel's grievously underdone set is connecting with anyone else, let alone with the themes of the play. Actors stare dully at whoever is talking, then accept their cues and decide to share with the group only after much consideration. They starve you for their next line until you're ready to chew off your own foot. Surely some of this will tighten with time, but the degree to which it is happening is indicative of something worse than opening night jitters. Every now and then you can feel an incisive monologue trying to punch its way through a bad performance, to no avail. When Lind harangues Stanton with "If you don't fight, you don't feel," it drops out of her mouth with a numbing thud, and is quickly stomped under her heel as though it were a nuisance keeping her from an offstage smoke.
The dead air in Little Murders is enough to kill you.
