Three for the Seesaw

Luv, by Murray Schisgal. Three morose souls are raining laughs all over Broadway's Booth Theater. They suffer all the fashionable ills and itches that modern mind and flesh have fallen heir to. They go through an inferno of cocktail-party griefs, a slapstick, tongue-wagging, satirical jaunt of crippling hilarity.

It all takes place on a suspension bridge, and the plot is a shoestring. A beatnik's beatnik, Harry Berlin (Alan Arkin), is poised for a suicidal leap. Up comes natty Milt Manville (Eli Wallach), who recognizes him as a onetime classmate at Poly-Arts U. They swap case histories. Harry tells a tale of existential woe that started when a fox terrier mistook his pant leg for a hydrant: "I was nauseous, sick to my soul, I became aware . . . aware of the whole rotten senseless stinking deal." Mimed in outrageously funny fashion by Alan Arkin, Harry is so sick that he goes momentarily rigid with paralysis and then turns deaf, blind and mute. Milt prates of the good things in life, but he, too, is gnawed by despair. "I'm more in love today than on the day I married--but my wife won't give me a divorce." It occurs to Milt that Harry might find a meaning in life by falling in love with Milt's wife, leaving Milt free to marry the girl he loves.

Ellen Manville (Anne Jackson) appears, and she not only has a case history but a graph to illustrate it. Vividly charted for each "seven-day period" over months and years, it shows how the number of Ellen and Milt's "sexual experiences" has plummeted. Ellen warms to Harry, even though he is a love-testing suitor who stomps on her foot, rips her dress to the waist and throws her mink coat in the river. Four months later, the trio is back at the bridge, sadder still, and at curtain's drop Harry is being chased by a very persistent fox terrier.

What Playwright Schisgal has done is to turn the theater of the absurd upside down. Absurdist plays customarily use laughter to evoke despair. Schisgal uses the histrionic pretentions of despair to provoke laughter. Immeasurable credit is due Director Mike Nichols for keeping the pace on the wing and inventing cleverly apposite bits of business. One dry jump and three wet ones are taken off the bridge, all with acrobatic finesse. The performances of Wallach, Jackson, and Arkin are models of comic acting, perfect in control and timing, flawless in witty inflection of the lines.

With the traditional conservatism of comedy, Schisgal shows that where human nature is concerned, change changes nothing. Like the classic writers of comedy, he is involved with human limits, not possibilities, and with the saving common sense that mocks self-pity and self-absorption. Unlike his characters, he refuses to keep a straight face before some of the pious obsessions of the contemporary world and stage--alienation, loss of identity, inability to communicate, homosexuality, existentialism, Freudianism, self-expression and the meaninglessness of it all. In Luv, he devastates these themes in a holocaust of laughter.

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