Theater: The Filthy Five at Play

The Playroom is a morbid, two-hour, sadistic drip-tease. The drips are a revolting quintet of teen-age boys and girls who call themselves “the Filthy Five,” and hang out in a surrealistically appointed turret room of a quaint Manhattan apartment building. These kids are not remotely real, but they have most of the commercially fashionable maladjustments from homosexuality to reefer-dragging, though Playwright Mary Drayton permits one youngster to be merely obese.

The girl leader of the gang, played with edgy, neurotic menace by Broadway Newcomer Karen Black, has a “ather fixation and consequently a poisonous hostility toward her new stepmother. The girl eggs the gang into kidnaping her ten-year-old stepsister, and it is made to seem as if the Filthy Five will go as far as Leopold and Loeb. The rest of the play consists of sick witches while the stepmother is goaded Hit of her wits.

The Playroom was purchased by Holywood before it opened on Broadway, “hose movie merchants always did have pretty sharp eye for junk.