New Recital on Broadway

An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May is one of the nicest ways to spend one. Reaching the main stem by the four-lane highway of nightclubs, record albums, radio and TV (TIME, Sept. 26), this pair, who come on stage in various roles and improvise, who glance at the life all around them and criticize, spend a great deal of their time being funny. By the end of the evening they have left tooth marks on much that is fatuous, wasp stings in much that is vulgar, powder burns on a lot that is neurotic or just human. They go at each other as a way of going at many things else: they are mamma and papa, or mother and son, or lover and mistress, or brother and sister, or monsieur and madame; they coil round each other constantly like flowers, teenagers or snakes.

On opening night their repertory--or their improvisations--came at times from the common hoard of satire and seemed aimed at the common herd. But even with phone-booth frustrations or bear-hugging mothers, with Tennessee Williams-type drama or the P.T.A., there were happy surprises. In fact, by combining the last two themes--by having Elaine act as P.T.A. chairman for an evening of Art and Mike act as the Southern playwright speaker--they reached the evening's peak. They reached it partly, perhaps, because each did a monologue in his own uninterrupted, unblurred style. When the two play together, things occasionally run together.

And in raising the ante to a whole evening's entertainment, the pair also raise a question or two about this or that brand of it. They are so talented that the stunt and show-off side of their performance--letting the audience call the tune or enacting Dostoevsky in ten seconds--seems a mistake. At times, too, there is conflict between their manner, which is essentially a freewheeling one, and their matter, which demands the foreplanning of the revue sketch or blackout. Their eye is as deadly keen as their tongue can be brilliantly sharp; but when they impersonate, when the glance counts for more than its object or the inflection means more than the actual word, they occasionally lack a final polish. Still and all, they are frequently hilarious.

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