Laughing in the Dark

Stop, You're Killing Me is an apt title for a bloodstained package of three one-act plays by James Leo Herlihy, presented by the Theater Company of Boston. The title's aptness lies not only in its suggestion of homicide, but humor--each of the three is laughing on the outside while dying on the inside.

The first is a monologue in which a funky voiced blonde bitch called Gloria (Sasha von Scherler), tells about the delicious party she just gave--serving up her guests in bite-sized morsels. People exist for Gloria to hold up and put down, and she delightedly pounces on a waifish little girl somebody brought, with so much hair, she explains, "it was impossible to see its face without trespassing." The fact that the waif died of drug withdrawal the next day is merely the perfect capper for Gloria's account of the evening.

Herlihy's second play has two characters, though one of them does not utter a word. She is Lonesome Sally (Rochelle Oliver), a hooker shacked up in a motel room with a black-clad psychopath (Larry Bryggman) who calls himself Terrible Jim Fitch and robs churches for a living. Lonesome Sally is in a state of shock; Terrible Jim has already cut up her face, and during his long rant of self-justification and jaunty mockery and bewildered rage it becomes clear that her revenge will be to maneuver him into murdering her. Unfortunately, the tension and terror of the situation are repeatedly canceled by Terrible Jim's wry wisecracks about his life and times as a "churchman."

Gory Camp. Humor is no detriment at all to the third and best play of the triad. An epicene author named Kayo Hathaway (William Young), sleek as a snake and wicked as a weasel, has made a million by turning out reams of gory camp about a Commie-hating little old lady in sneakers and her homicidal gorilla of a son. Granting an interview to a worshipful young fan (Matthew Cowles), Hathaway utters the pomposity: "You get what you give." And that becomes the text for a murder that is as amusing as it is satisfying.

Playwright Herlihy, whose imaginative, sharply etched novels Midnight Cowboy and All Fall Down have been made into films starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, is a dark and savage satirist. The six-year-old Theater Company of Boston seems to know exactly what he is laughing about.

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