Two Characters in Search . . .

''Will you please hold my hexa-hexa-hexa-flexagon?"

"Cleopatra, what have you done?"

The two lines called out at random by an audience last week in Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse were all that Mike Nichols and Elaine May needed. Beginning with the first, ending with the second, they improvised an eight-minute sketch in more or less Shakespearean language--the style, too, had been spontaneously requested by the audience. What's more, they could have done it in any style from Euripides to the Reader's Digest. For Nichols and May, getting ready for their first Broadway show after years in nightclubs, are essentially modern practitioners of commedia dell'arte, the spontaneous comedy of Renaissance Italy in which strolling players improvised their skits and lampooned their age.

Psychological Substance. Nichols can be alternately Harlequin and Pantaloon, his crayon-blue eyes and round, astonished mouth suggesting that he finds the world just a little too much to cope with. Elaine is a dark-eyed Columbine of many moods who wears her immemorial, feminine wisdom a little uncomfortably, like an ill-fitting evening dress. Just as the commedia players ridiculed the braggarts and poltroons, cuckolds and scheming Don Juans, Mike and Elaine act out caricatures of their own time and place--the phony intellectual, the lecherous boss and his confused secretary, the little man at the mercy of the distant, unreachable, untouchable telephone operator. In An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which they are bringing into Manhattan's Golden Theater next month, they molt easily from character to character, life to literature, now enacting a missile scientist talking on the telephone with his mother, now dropping a bit of dialogue between two Saganesque lovers ("This has been the cheapest, tawdriest affair of my life." "Shh, you'll spoil it.").

As a team, they recall witty Broadway Writers (On the Town) Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who last year appeared in a highly successful show of their own material. But, more subtly, Nichols and May deal in slightly distorted reproductions of accurate sounds, and the effect, which depends upon audience recognition, is subcutaneous. Their material--never written down--is charged with excellent one-line jokes, whether a disk jockey tells a movie starlet that Spencer Tracy was supposed to play the title role in the film biography of Gertrude Stein, or a playwright called Alabama Gross describes his heroine as someone who has "taken to drink, prostitution and puttin' on airs." But the humor rests firmly on psychological substance and can be so telling that it sheds, temporarily, its skin of mirth.

Between their act and the performers themselves there is an intriguing interplay, putting in question what is real and what is theatrical, in a way that suggests one of their favorite models, Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello, himself something of a modern commedia dell' artist. Is Mike's nervous blinking, audiences usually want to know, part of the act or is it real? (It is real but less pronounced offstage.) Are Elaine's black dresses only a stage device? (It is not; Elaine never wears anything but black.) Some signs of tension underlying the humor suggest that Mike and Elaine are a couple of characters in search of an author and, at the same time (since they are both part-time writers), a couple of authors always in search of new characters.

Deflected Inquiries. Nichols, now 28, was born in Berlin of Russian-Jewish parents who fled the Nazis and settled in Manhattan, where his physician father set up practice. Acquiring his wholesome, lactic accents in a series of private schools, Mike went on to the University of Chicago as a pre-med student but soon drifted toward the theater. A year younger than Mike, Elaine was equally adrift when they met in 1955. Born in Philadelphia, the daughter of the late Yiddish Actor Jack Berlin, she has seen the inside of more high schools around the country than James B. Conant, was married and divorced in her teens (she has a ten-year-old daughter). Together, Mike and Elaine took up with a Chicago campus theatrical group that later became the Compass Players (TIME, March 21), soon began to develop a professional rapport so close that they now have more or less Siamese minds. While trying to break into show business, they held some of the odder odd jobs available. Elaine worked as a private eye, Mike drove a post office truck, served as a judge in a jingle contest, in which entrants had to complete a couplet whose first line went "This house has charms that grow and grow . . ." (His favorite losing entry: ". . .a lovely home for Jean Jacques Rousseau").

Through all their success since those days, Mike and Elaine have almost conspiratorially managed to deflect inquiries into their private lives. ("I will tell you something," Elaine will say cooperatively, "but I warn you it is a lie.") Elaine has never remarried, and Mike is separated. Since neither makes any sort of conscious effort to search for new ideas--the birth of a sketch is usually accomplished with a simple remark, such as "You be a dentist. I'll be a patient"--they read miscellaneously. Nichols enjoys his subscription to Dog World, even though he has given up his Saint Bernard, reads Nancy Mitford and Mary McCarthy, never looks at Variety. Elaine is intermittently writing a play for herself and Nichols (with about six other parts) that is tentatively scheduled for Broadway next season.

For all their individual characteristics, the only really extraordinary thing about Mike Nichols and Elaine May is their wit. They use that, too, to keep their lives to themselves. Since reporters are forever asking them for details about their offstage relationship, they have just devised an all-purpose answer. "We live very quietly and we date occasionally," say Mike Nichols and Elaine May. "Right now we are seeing Comden and Green."

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