Hourglass Plot

The Tiger and The Typists are a pair of one-act, two-character plays by Murray Schisgal, 36, who is handsomely helped by the husband-and-wife acting team of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. In The Tiger, an eccentrically violent postman named Ben grabs Gloria, a Long Island housewife, from a New York street, marches her captive to his cold-water lair, and pins her arms behind her. Rape? Murder? What is on the whirling mind of this kook? His room is a chaotic rubble of exposed steampipes, drying clothes, books spilling out of bureau drawers, and a blackboard chalked TODAY'S WORD.

The word for Ben, it turns out, is embittered nonconformist. While he forces Gloria to strip to her red-and-blue-flowered slip, and collects kisses on demand, he begins talking the poor girl to death on the subject of the death of the individual. His mission, he proclaims, is to be a brutal predator in this world of sheep. Then Playwright Schisgal tips his plot upside down like an hourglass. Shortly, Gloria is chatterboxing Ben's ears with lists of suburban conformities: pulling crabgrass, going bowling, bed-hopping around. While they prate of the lack of communication among moderns, each spills a major grievance. Gloria's husband is an unread clod. Ben flunked a French exam that meant getting into college. When Ben and Gloria go to bed together, and then agree to meet weekly for more extracurricular love and French lessons, a double irony is consummated. Her special pride was her fidelity; his was being a self-taught genius. The Wallachs drum a tattoo of laughs on The Tiger's hide, and just as expertly drain the comic pathos from The Typists, a tale of two office-worker mediocrities whose lives dim out like light bulbs.

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