Fizz and Fury

By T.E.K.

COMING ATTRACTIONS by Ted Tally

Some people feel that college humor should be quarantined on campus.

But if the playgoer approaches this satiric farce at off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons Theater in a slightly carbonated frame of mind, he will find that the evening fizzes with pixilated laughter.

However, the mirth is only the means to a more serious end. Ted Tally, who wrote a somber tribute to the moral courage of polar explorers in Terra Nova, now explores the contagious terrain of venality. He asks, in effect, How do creatures such as David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam"), Jim Jones and Gary Gilmore, men who occupy an appalling moral void, arc to celebrity status save for the vulpine collusion of the goldbugs -- agents, publicists, the press, TV and films?

On first view, Lonnie Wayne Burke (Griffin Dunne) is a criminal street urchin who almost seems afraid of his $2 handgun. A scruffy pressagent, Manny Alter, played with drooling opportunism by Larry Block, sees the chance to turn Lonnie into a lethal hot property. Decking the punk in a skeleton suit and dubbing him "the Halloween Killer," Manny starts Lonnie on the garish glory road to 27 murders. The tabloids swiftly pick up the scent (THE HALLOWEEN KILLER STALKS JACKIE O.). Smarmy talk-show hosts fawn on him, paperback offers and film rights proliferate, and Lonnie makes big bad bawdy whoopee with Miss America. Christine Baranski zeroes in on this character's vacuous dedication and chews her words like stale gum. Griffin Dunne has a sensitive trigger finger on his role throughout.

It may be argued that Tally's targets have already been amply peppered, but that objection will not suffice. The perennial aim of satire has been to reiterate the obvious in order to awaken us from abject moral slumber.

-- T.E.K.

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