Little Murders

Little Murders (1967), a dark comedy by Jules Feiffer. [Broadhurst Theatre, 7 perf.] The Newquists are a rather kooky Manhattan family trying to make the best of a bad deal. The father, Carol ( Heywood Hale Broun), would like to have a less feminine name; the mother, Marjorie ( Ruth White), would like to have a different family; and the son, Kenny ( David Steinberg), would like to be of a different sex. Only the sweet but spunky daughter, Patsy ( Barbara Cook), seems vaguely content, although she is in love with a thin‐skinned liberal, Alfred Chamberlain ( Elliott Gould), who thinks the best way to deal with muggers is to let them beat you. The jangle and blare around them grows increasingly hectic and menacing until Patsy is killed in her living room by a stray bullet. At that point, the Newquists decide to shoot back. Although Alexander H. Cohen's Broadway mounting failed, it was produced with great success in England by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and this led to a 1969 Off‐Broadway revival at the Circle in the Square that ran four hundred performances. Jules [Ralph] FEIFFER (b. 1929) is a New Yorker best known for his incisive cartoons about the anguish of contemporary life. Among his other plays are Feiffer's People (1968), The White House Murder Case (1970), Knock Knock (1976), Grownups (1981), Eliot Loves (1990), and A Bad Friend (2003).