Word: schisgal
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...Murray Schisgal, sends three very modern and morose souls through a slapstick, tongue-wagging, satirical inferno of cocktail-party griefs. Under Mike Nichols' brilliantly inventive direction, Actors Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin produce constant and rib-aching hilarity...
...Murray Schisgal, sends three very modern and morose souls through a slapstick, tongue-wagging, satirical inferno of cocktail-party griefs. Under Mike Nichols' brilliantly inventive direction, Actors Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin produce constant and crippling hilarity...
Nichols is particularly close with his playwrights. He insists that they be at rehearsals at all times. "The author should be your ally," he says. "You should be whomping away at the play together." Murray Schisgal, author of Luv, puts his debt to Nichols in one short and generous sentence. "Mike's contribution," he says, "has been equal to my own in making my play work." Mike's contribution was considerable...
...characters walk offstage during one long talky interchange, then reappear, still talking, thus creating a sense of a conversation that had been going on for at least 200 years. "But Mike's main contribution, more important than those bits, was his sense of comedic values," says Schisgal. "He knew how to integrate the work of the three actors, how to move the play along and yet keep it cohesive...
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...