Courtroom of the Frightening and Surreal : Law: The trial of accused sniper Colin Ferguson has taken on the absurdist ambience of a Eugene Ionesco play.

The monstrousness at the center of the trial of Colin Ferguson, the accused gunman in the Long Island Rail Road massacre, is that the utter civility that inhabits the courtroom is so at odds with the barbarity of the act that brought these people together.

At the defense table is Ferguson, acting as his own attorney and looking the part in a tweed jacket and tie, referring to himself in the third person as “Mr. Ferguson, the defendant,” objecting to evidence, interrupting with such complaints as, “Judge, this witness is becoming argumentative!”

In the witness box are the battered survivors. One by one they describe their injuries and the terror and pain of having been in the line of fire on Dec. 7, 1993, when they claim the man before them, “Mr. Ferguson, the defendant,” rose out of his seat on a commuter train, pulled out a 9-millimeter Ruger semiautomatic pistol and began firing, left to right, right to left, leaving six dead and 19 wounded.

Six rows of the spectator area are taken up almost daily by the grieving families: Carolyn McCarthy, the lovely woman with her blond hair tied back in a bow who lost her husband, Dennis, and nearly lost her strapping 27-year-old son Kevin who had 10% of his brain shot off and now has a limp arm and walks with a black cane; Jacob Locicero, the baldish man shaking his head at Ferguson’s posturing, the father who lost his beloved daughter, Amy. “It’s a charade,” he said of the proceedings.

It’s more theater of the absurd if theater of the absurd is about form having no content--like a Eugene Ionesco farce or a polite dinner conversation that continues even though one of the guests is slitting another’s throat.

Ferguson, who is black, maintains another person--a white passenger who he claims snatched his gun out of his bag while he dozed--was the one firing. He has told the court that after he awoke he was wrestled to the ground by white passengers who blamed him only because he is black. “I am a political prisoner,” he told the jury during his opening statements of the trial that began a week ago.

He speaks the law like a child who has learned enough English to be in the school play but has no understanding of its meaning. The insanity that his lawyers wanted to claim for him is disguised by the built-in dialogue of the court that Ferguson has learned by watching TV shows and studying the law in the jail library.

From the start, Ferguson’s court-appointed legal advisers tried to persuade him not to defend himself and to allow them to enter a plea of insanity--that he was under emotional distress when he pulled the trigger. (When he was arrested there were notes in his pocket entitled “Reasons for This” that described several government offices and colleges with which he had had confrontations as racist.) But once Ferguson was declared competent by the trial judge, he was informed of his constitutional right to defend himself and he accepted it--a move that has infuriated the community.

At first, it’s easy to see why he could be declared competent--the way he cocks his head in that curious professorial manner and the quick, efficient way he talks with the prosecutor. But over time, reality stopped being so horrifically hidden. For example, at one point, Ferguson said his legal advisers were trying to kill him if not make him blind so he couldn’t identify the real killer; later he held up a railroad ticket and in a deep-voiced ironic tone said, “Does it say anything here about murder or killing?”

It would be poignant if it wasn’t so frightening, and if the 12 jurors didn’t have to try to unravel exactly who this 36-year-old Brooklyn man is and what he might have been doing on that train. Perhaps if Ferguson had counsel other than Mr. Ferguson representing him there would be an explanation for why he is so dissociated from the ghastliness of the 93 counts he is charged with.

Nassau County Judge Donald E. Belfi, burly and red-faced, seems a man contained. He doesn’t squirm or roll his eyes, even when Ferguson demanded to have President Clinton and former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo testify; he rules on Ferguson’s requests and assists him as he might any ordinary citizen with few resources who felt the need to tell his story in court. It’s as if the judge just wants to get through this exercise in Colin Ferguson’s constitutional right and--according to courthouse gossip--make sure the guy is locked up for life. (If Ferguson had been judged insane, he would have been sent to a state facility and over time he could have been rehabilitated and released.)

Outside the courtroom television crews set up camp and continuously fed live video back to their stations this week hoping against the odds that their tape would be good enough to preempt what they were calling “The O.J. Show.” The competition is understandable although ironic since the two trials provide such a different brand of entertainment.

The Simpson trial is an ongoing soap opera, an episodic event. To look in on Friday is different than to look in on Monday: one minute there’s Denise, the crying sister, the next day there’s the juror who goes to the same doctor as the defendant and the following day there’s Marcia Clark and the controversy over the angel pin.

The Colin Ferguson trial, on the other hand, is a set piece, a Mobius strip. There’s little doubt who did it, and there has been none since Dec. 7, 1993. So day in and day out provides the same narrative: a victim confronting the perpetrator/lawyer with the same mock formality. You need only look in on it but once or twice to understand the outcome.

The prosecution finished presenting its case Thursday. The trial resumes Tuesday and it’s Ferguson’s turn. If as Ron Kuby, one of his legal advisers, anticipates, the performance could become even more absurd and farcical than anything Ionesco or Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter might have written.

Kuby told reporters: “It would certainly fit (Ferguson’s) disorder if he were to get off the witness stand, ask the empty chair a question, referring to himself in the third person and then jump into the chair and answer it.”