MASS MURDER
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Unfortunately, Ed’s not one of the dozen multiple murderers profiled in Prop Theatre’s Mass Murder. But there are plenty of kindred souls present: Gibbering grotesques like David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam murderer, who claimed to get demonic messages from his neighbor’s dog. Dark angels like Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, who seems to have considered himself a kind of nocturnal spirit of predation. Snapped cords like James Huberty, who carried out the McDonald’s massacre.
Some of them are depicted as out-and-out meshuggeners. Dressed in a hospital smock and scraping the cream out of an Oreo cookie, Jonathan Lavan’s Berkowitz goes into pseudobiblical paroxysms over his “apartment full of demons,” his pursuit of “blood for Sam,” and his own Moloch-like identity: “I am War, I am Death, I am Destruction. . . .” Janet Van Wess renders Winnetka child assassin Laurie Dann as a child herself: a psychic puddle, simpering about shopping and money from Daddy, about who loves her and whom she hates. Playing Kenneth Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler, Cullen Reilley makes a show of falling into and out of three distinct personalities.
