Presented by Lisa Harris and TFW Productions at the Pelican Studio Theatre, 750 Eighth Ave., NYC, April 5-29.
There are real midgets populating John Dapolito's delightfully goony "Killer Midgets," but they don't arrive until Act II. That alone should indicate what a trippy dose of absurdism this play really is. Directed by Dapolito with an ironic touch, the play's outer lunacy belies a subtle point: It's the American psyche that's small, not those "vertically challenged."
Michelle Malavet's spectacularly claustrophobic set reveals a one-room hovel piled high with newspapers. Covering everything, even the walls, they are the detritus of an eight-year interregnum during which Mike (Joseph Kamal) and Rich (George Deihl, Jr.) have effectively withdrawn from the world.
These latter-day, post-modern Collier Brothers rationalize their anthropophobia—fear of people or society—in several ways. Rich withdrew when a posse of grandmothers attacked him while working in a toy store during the Cabbage Patch craze. Mike withdrew when his self-satisfied intellectualism failed to inspire the world.
Ever since, Rich remained in the apartment. Luckily, they live over a grocery, from which they filch their eats through a trap door at night; Mike steals their neighbor's newspaper every day.
When the neighbor leaves a note warning them to stop, Mike and Rich's reaction causes Frankie (Ethan Crough), Joey (Mark Trombino), and Tommy (David Steinberg, of George Lucas' "Willow"), three pint-sized, brutal goumbas, to break in and terrorize Rich and Mike. Their goal isn't payback for years of stolen news; it's a transfusion of perspective.
Unlike the first act, where Dapolito uses squalor and Rich's fearsome hysterics to advance well articulated philosophies and observations about the world, the too-short second act (forgive me) tops the first with a far clearer emotional core.
In their performances—dressed in nearly nothing, with flowing beards—Kamal and Deihl achieve a flawless symbiosis. Deihl's hyperactive physicality is particularly mesmerizing; he's immersed himself in Rich's neuroses quite precisely. Crough and Trombino are hoots as swaggering midgets—well, they are midgets—but Steinberg edges ahead, tugging at heartstrings even as life seems heartless.