COMING ATTRACTIONS
Then there’s blunt satire, which merely bludgeons the audience with the obvious–a clown who puts basketballs under his shirt and pretends to be Dolly Parton.
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Actually, the public fascination with mass murder could be the topic of sharp satire. If you kill enough people, you can be sure someone will write a book about you. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood immortalized two ex-cons who wiped out an entire family. Helter Skelter, which chronicled the Charles Manson case, was a best-seller. Jimmy Breslin got some good mileage out of David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, who randomly blew people away with a revolver. John Wayne Gacy, the part-time clown from Des Plaines who murdered 33 young men after having sex with them, is the subject of several books.
Manny comes up with a gimmick–Lonnie will wear a skeleton costume and go up to a house selected at random. He will ring the doorbell and, when someone answers, he will shout, “Trick or treat, you bourgeois pig,” and shoot the person between the eyes.
The rest of the cast members play several small roles, many of them bizarre. Jim Reinach, for example, plays an Arab “terrorist comedian” whose jokes must be translated by an interpreter, played by Todd Foland. (“You’ve been a wonderful audience. I wish I could take you all home with me . . . in chains.”)
