Telepathic Wit

By Gerald Clarke

Tonight they improvise

Paint their names on a solid oak door and they could be a Wall Street law firm: Monteith & Rand. Put them on a busy street and they would scarcely be noticed: John Monteith, 29, looks like a cheery ad salesman; Suzanne Rand, 28, looks like a Cybill Shepherd with facial expressions. But drop them on a stage--any stage anywhere--and Monteith & Rand are the funniest, most inventive comedy team to come along in years, recalling the days of Nichols and May.

They started out with the Proposition Troupe in Cambridge, Mass., and for the past six months have been convulsing audiences at half a dozen Manhattan cabarets. For several weeks they have been at the off-Broadway Theater East, and next month will be in Washington, performing for President Carter and 1,000 other assorted Democrats at a giant party fund raiser in the Washington Hilton. In October, assuming they have not conquered the world, Monteith & Rand will probably be on Broadway, where the Shubert Organization has already offered them the Booth Theater.

Their specialty is surprise, and they delight in what might be called ambush humor: make them laugh when they least expect it. In one skit, Suzanne, a very leggy blonde, sits down at a bar and orders a gimlet. Monty, pretending he is gay, persuades her that he is now ready to try women, all but writing a sonnet to the female sex. Finally she gives in. "You should try a woman," she says. "In fact," she adds before rushing away, "I'm going to do the same thing."

With few exceptions, the skits are marvelously funny, but Monteith & Rand show their real talent in improvisation. They ask the crowd to supply a setting and a couple of sentences, and they do the rest. One night last week, for example, the audience put them in Moscow, ordered them to begin the scene with a meaningless sentence, "He who hesitates laughs last," and while they were at it work in a reference to Christina Onassis. There was a second's hesitation while two very fast computers scanned the possibilities, and Monty started muttering, "He who hesitates laughs last," in a thick Russian accent. "No, no," Suzanne, as Christina Onassis, gently explained, he had it wrong--but never mind: "I can buy you the best course Berlitz has to offer." "Have we been to Berlitz?" Monty, playing Christina's latest husband, Sergei Kauzov, asks plaintively. "No, that's Berlin," she answers.

Another time the audience dumped them in the Garden of Eden, where Suzanne was soon gobbling an apple. "Forbidden fruit!" shrieked Monty. "What do you think the FDA's for but to warn you off stuff like that? Next thing we know, you'll be smoking." He added: "We've got a good landlord, and we've messed the place up. We probably have the best garden apartment in town."

They feed lines to each other with the smooth telepathy of an old married couple, but in fact their only relationship is professional. He grew up in Philadelphia and wanted to be a song-and-dance man; she was raised in a suburb of Chicago and wanted to sing in cabarets. When they met at the Proposition in Cambridge, however, they knew they had something else going. "We thought, 'Wouldn't we be great onstage?' " says Suzanne. " 'We make each other laugh so.' " They started working "semisteadily," as they put it, two years ago, and this year became a permanent team, ampersand and all. Audiences are now joining in their laughter. That kind of light humor called improvisation, which died out in the dark days of the late '60s, is back, as welcome as ever.

--Gerald Clarke

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