Lincoln Center Theater will present the world premiere of Jules Feiffer's A Bad Friend at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre this season. Jerry Zaks will direct. No cast or dates have been announced.

Feiffer, a renowned cartoonist and sometime playwright, has been absent from the stage for more than a decade. His last new play to open in New York was Elliot Loves, which starred Christine Baranksi, Anthony Heald, Oliver Platt and David Hyde-Pierce.

A Bad Friend is set in the '50s in Brooklyn, where a family with Community Party connections gets into hot water.

Feiffer burst onto the theatre scene in 1967 with Little Murders, a satiric comedy in which casual killings are committed every hour on the streets of a nonplussed, callous New York. The show ran only seven full performances, but was noticed enough to garner an Obie Award and be made into a movie. Elliot Gould led the cast of both the play and film.

Feiffer's work is typically filled with lacerating humor and breath takingly bitter arguments. In Grown Ups, a man and wife tear into each other when the man isn't busy battling the expectations of his parents. In Elliot Loves, the titular protagonist systematically sabotages his relationships with the woman he loves and all of his closet friends. A Bad Friend will be the second new play assignment in as many years for Zaks, who staged the premieres of Six Degrees of Separation and Lend Me a Tenor. Last fall, he mounted Neil Simon's short-lived 45 Seconds from Broadway.

—By Robert Simonson