Word: schisgal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Murray Schisgal. Three morose souls are raining laughs all over Broadway's Booth Theater. They suffer all the fashionable ills and itches that modern mind and flesh have fallen heir to. They go through an inferno of cocktail-party griefs, a slapstick, tongue-wagging, satirical jaunt of crippling hilarity...
What Playwright Schisgal has done is to turn the theater of the absurd upside down. Absurdist plays customarily use laughter to evoke despair. Schisgal uses the histrionic pretentions of despair to provoke laughter. Immeasurable credit is due Director Mike Nichols for keeping the pace on the wing and inventing cleverly apposite bits of business. One dry jump and three wet ones are taken off the bridge, all with acrobatic finesse. The performances of Wallach, Jackson, and Arkin are models of comic acting, perfect in control and timing, flawless in witty inflection of the lines...
With the traditional conservatism of comedy, Schisgal shows that where human nature is concerned, change changes nothing. Like the classic writers of comedy, he is involved with human limits, not possibilities, and with the saving common sense that mocks self-pity and self-absorption. Unlike his characters, he refuses to keep a straight face before some of the pious obsessions of the contemporary world and stage-alienation, loss of identity, inability to communicate, homosexuality, existentialism, Freudianism, self-expression and the meaninglessness of it all. In Luv, he devastates these themes in a holocaust of laughter...
...Tiger and The Typists, by Murray Schisgal. The eupeptic pleasure with which Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson cavort through these two clever one-acters is highly contagious. The Tiger is the better play, as it hoists two enginers of nonconformist cliches on their own pretentious petard...
...Tiger and The Typists, by Murray Schisgal. The eupeptic pleasure with which Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson cavort through these two clever one-acters is highly contagious. The Tiger is the better play, as it hoists two engineers of nonconformist clichés on their own pretentious petard...