The Nichols Touch

The script says that when the curtain goes up the character called Harry is standing on the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge looking suicidal. He removes his coat. A friend he hasn't seen for 15 years comes up to him just then. He quickly puts the coat back on.

As the actual play--Broadway's new smash comedy Luv--begins, Harry is up on the railing of the bridge, teetering and ready to jump. When his old friend walks up to him and says, "Is it? --No! Harry Berlin! . . . How've you been doing, Harry?" the emphatic incongruity of the moment touches off a wave of mad laughter. The tone of the play has been perfectly set.

Happened In. It was Mike Nichols, the director, who put Harry up on the railing. Nichols deals in exaggerated probabilities, and his touch has made hits of all three plays he has directed so far--The Knack, Barefoot in the Park and Luv. He may be one of the more gifted and promising new directors to take his place in the American theater since Elia Kazan left Constantinople.

A Nichols play is a busy, gymnastic comedy of the absurd. Characters grunt and wheeze, climb stairs, assemble rusty iron beds, ride motor scooters, lose their pants, leap off bridges, throw knives. But the procession of sight gags only emphasizes the drift of the dialogue, supporting and not replacing the language of the playwright. As he approaches character from several directions, Nichols apparently feels particularly comfortable in a tenor of intelligent slapstick.

Nichols developed his sure eye and ear for comedy honestly. In partnership with Elaine May, he emerged as one of the outstanding comedians of his time. The improvisations he has long done with her are of the same fabric as his work as a director. Their old act continues--TV appearances, occasional concert performances--but both Nichols and May are expanding in their individual directions. Elaine is at work on her second play. Mike, who last year just happened into the Barefoot job at the suggestion of Producer Saint-Subber, says that "as soon as I started rehearsals, I knew I would never want to do anything else."

Cohesive Movement. Now 33, Nichols is the sort of director whom most writers and actors only meet when they are asleep and dreaming. Actors agree he is their ideal one-man audience. He sits in rehearsals and howls and chuckles until the actors get delusions and stare across the footlights at 1,500 Mike Nicholses. He lets them invent and improvise on their own. When in doubt he says, "I don't believe it, but try it."

He has guiding precepts. "Let the laughs go and play the people," he says. When he makes a mistake, he is the first to acknowledge it. "Mike is the best director I've ever worked with, and that includes Gielgud and Peter Brook," says Brian Bedford of The Knack. "Mike has the patience to wait until the part slowly emerges. I'm sure he does guide you, but so subtly you think everything comes from within yourself."

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.

Borrowing a moment from Tea and Sympathy, for example, he achieved the evening's most uproarious moment by having his heroine take the hand of her shy and inhibited hero and jam it inside her mink coat. With splendid originality, he had two 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."

Unlikely Wish. In Barefoot rehearsals last year, Nichols played Alphonse to Playwright Neil Simon's Gaston.

"Let me restage it," Nichols would say when they hit a foggy patch. "No, let me rewrite it," Simon would insist. Next month Simon and Nichols will be working together again, on Simon's new play The Odd Couple, which will star Art Carney and Walter Matthau. "It's about two guys who are having trouble with their wives," says Nichols. "You never see the wives; you just see the other girls, just like in real life."

When he finishes that one, Nichols is going to direct a couple of movies, The Public Eye for Universal and The Graduates for Joe Levine. He never wants to give up directing plays on the stage, and he has ideas he would like to implement. He thinks Samuel Beckett, for example, is a great comic playwright who is too often treated solemnly and reverentially. "Endgame" he says, "is a fall-down laugh riot," and he would like to prove it. But if he is ambitious, he also has a sense of limit. "The theater properly belongs to the playwright," he says. "A good theatrical director is one who gives the playwright what he deserves. In fact, I get a little edgy at theatrical directors being too celebrated, and I hope it stops with me soon." He is unlikely to get that wish.

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