Killer Farce

If Jules Feiffer could imbue a single character with a bundle of quivering, snarling petty neuroses and massive insecurities culled from Jules Feiffer's cartoons, he might have a mate to a Woody Allen show. The play that is struggling to be let out from his plays is the saga of the urban loser, frustrated by a world he never made and powerless to control or change it. This is the proposition Feiffer refuses to admit to himself. He still sees the theater as an instrument of social betterment. That is why he writes killer farces like Little Murders and now The White House Murder Case. The thesis is that the

U.S. must either wipe out hatred, war, fear, injustice, deliberate public lies and the fatuous leaders who utter them, or these evils will wipe out the U.S.

To get this message across, he shuttles between being mad (angry) and mad (crazy), which is a little like trying to combine Marx with the Marx Brothers. Each tends to cancel out the other. In The White House Murder Case, a minor crisis of statecraft is in progress. "Operation Total Win," a maneuver launched during an undeclared war against Brazil, has suffered a slight setback. A U.S. nerve gas known as Peace Gas has floated astray and killed 750 American boys.

The Cabinet meets, and in a session of surrealistic gravity the members vie with one another to produce the mendacious explanation that will link the tragic event to the worldwide Communist conspiracy. Scarcely has this problem been resolved when another arises. The President's troublesome liberal-minded wife is stabbed to death with the headless golf shaft that held a "Make Love, not War" placard. With the election only six weeks away, the President (Peter Bonerz) has no time for grief and after another Cabinet conclave the cause of death proves to be Communist food poisoning. That's about all the plot there is, except for numbingly bathetic side trips to dying soldiers in the foxholes of Brazil.

The fun mostly lies in the zany bits of business that Director Alan Arkin has injected into the Cabinet scenes and the comically proficient acting of such Second City alumni as Paul Dooley, Andrew Duncan and Anthony Holland. Holland, in particular, has been an off-Broadway delight for several years. His knees sag with melancholy. He can throw himself on a chair as limply as a discarded bath towel and rise from it with the agitated wiriness of a berserk coat hanger. Perhaps all he needs to be truly discovered is to have Neil Simon see the show, as he did Jimmy Coco's, and then build a surefire comedy around him.

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