Futz!

The inmates of the asylum of Charenton seem to be taking over the New York stage. This season Hair, Tom Paine and now Futz!, which opened Off-Broadway last week, have provided farcical variations on the mood and style of Marat/Sade. The moans and hisses of the patients have become a crescendo of grunts, screams and belches that resembles feeding time at the zoo. The naked backside of Marat seems to have emboldened a score of males and females to face the audience topless and bottomless, an unforeseen threat to costume designers. The writhings and stomping of Marat/Sade's insane have inspired a corybantic kind of choreography in which the dancers become as hopelessly intertwined as the Laocooen family. The message seems to be that sense is out and the senses are in.

Futz! is less likely to stir the senses than raise the gorge. Rochelle Owens' play is a sad saga of bestiality. Her preposterous moral is that people are beastlier than animals, particularly to a boy who prefers to make love to a sow. Cyrus Futz (John Bakos) loves Amanda, his sow, like a wife. A nympholeptic human pig gets jealous and goads the village rednecks into slaying the boy, preparatory to killing Amanda.

With so little plot, there is ample time for assorted stage business. At one point, two men simulate making love to the nympho, sandwich-fashion. At another, a mother opens her blouse to suckle her grown son. As in The Beard, there is a vivid portrayal of an oral sex act. Director Tom O'Horgan, who also staged Hair and Tom Paine, keeps his cast dancing around in a style that blends early Martha Graham with late Cotton Club.

Amanda is never seen. Presumably, no pig was willing to take the part.

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