A couple weeks back, I finally returned to Manhattan and started filling
theatre seats here. And one of the first things I saw was something that took
me back to Chicago again. I'm talking about the Chicago of the early days of
improvisational theatre, a world that so intrigues me that I wrote a book on
the subject (Something Wonderful Right Away, a collection of interviews with
the pioneers of Chicago improv). Among the many extraordinary people who
emerged from the Compass and Second City in the late Fifties and early
Sixties, two with solid positions in the first row of the pantheon are Elaine
May and Alan Arkin.
I remember a conversation I had with Arkin during which he said he was pretty
sure he'd never act on the stage again. This conversation probably took place
in 1975. Something must have happened in the intervening twenty-odd years to
make him change his mind, and that something should be thanked.
Power Plays is a triple bill written by May and Arkin, directed by Arkin,
starring May and Arkin along with her daughter Jeannie Berlin and his son
Anthony. I'm not going to claim that the plays are major additions to
dramatic literature. Viewed by a purist, all three are pretty ramshackle
affairs, bouncing along until they run out of gas and something approximating
endings are scotch-taped on. But as vehicles for the performers to show what
they can do, they gloriously serve their purposes.
The first, May's "The Way of All Fish," concerns a rich lady named Ms.
Asquith (played by May) and the secretary she bullies, Miss Riverton (Berlin).
When Asquith discovers that she is accidentally without a social engagement
for the evening, she deigns to dine in her office with Riverton. As they get
to know each other, Asquith realizes that the secretary she has barely noticed
(and whose first name she has been getting wrong) has a screw loose and
harbors fantasies of killing someone rich and/or famous (possibly her) in
order to achieve a little measure of fame for herself.
The scene bears more than a little resemblance to a Peter Cook and Dudley
Moore scene about a cab driver who tells a rich and famous customer of his
fantasies of killing someone rich and/or famous (possibly him) in order to
achieve a little measure of fame for himself. But unlike that ominous little
gem, May's piece doesn't pretend to be seriously concerned with the roots of
assassination or the gulf between classes. (Nor is the script particularly
logical. At one moment, Asquith is making a terrified phone call to a friend;
at another she is blithely proving she can take care of herself without
raising much of a sweat.)
Rather, May uses the premise as an excuse -- a kind of clothes line on which
she hangs conversational gambits and lines of almost ferocious wit. Both
mother and daughter have deadpan deliveries that make outrageous lines at
first sound like statements of common sense; it is only when your mind goes
back over what they've said that the contradictions detonate like retroactive
depth charges.
The play Arkin wrote for himself and son Anthony has strong roots in improv.
As any good improviser knows, the basis of a scene is agreement. Arkin's
"Virtual Reality" is about two men named De Recha and Lefty who have been
assigned to work together on some mysterious and probably illegal assignment.
Waiting for crates carrying the equipment necessary for the assignment to be
delivered, De Recha (played by the elder Arkin) pressures Lefty into joining
him in miming opening and examining the crates. (This despite the fact that
neither knows what the crates will contain.)
Lefty reluctantly joins De Recha in the task, describing objects he imagines
he is pulling out. The more seriously they invest themselves in their shared
illusion, the less of an illusion it is. At a certain point, the moving of
the mimed objects produces real sounds. Towards the end, the two find
themselves in a life-and-death struggle with non-existent weapons.
Again, as a piece of writing "Virtual Reality" seems less a play than an
excuse for the two to do interesting stuff together. But indeed the stuff
they do -- including a good deal of precisely-executed mime – is compelling.
As in the May-Berlin piece, the Arkin-Arkin piece reveals what parent and
child have in common. Both Arkins bring a such high-energy commitment to the
actions they play that the stage hums as if it house dynamos. At one point,
Arkin the elder opens an imaginary manifest and positions himself under a
light bulb in order to have light to read by. The action is absurd, but it is
performed with a concreteness that makes it completely credible.
The third and strongest piece, May's "In and Out of the Light" showcases all
four. Alan Arkin plays a dentist named Kesselman and May plays his new and
slutty assistant Sue. Their plans for some quick, dirty sex are interrupted
by the after-hours arrival of the dentist's son Harry (Anthony Arkin) and a
phobic long-time patient named Wanda (Berlin). It goes without saying,
Kesselman and Sue never get to satisfy their lust.
In this piece, May has written scenes for every possible combination of the
four performers, heaping both verbal comedy and slapstick into the mix.
Coming into the home stretch of the evening, she apparently realized she
didn't have an ending for the play, so instead, to the accompaniment of piped-
in music, she has Sue teach the others a cheerfully filthy little song. At
first, they tap out a rhythmic accompaniment using dental paraphernalia at
hand, and then the four join in a line and begin to do a dance of delirious
silliness until the lights fade.
Another early improv great, Second City's Mina Kolb one played a character
who explained that life's real struggle is against gravity. As a baby you
fight it in the effort to stand and walk. The older you get, said Mina, the
more gravity starts "grabbing at you" and pulling you back down to the ground.
May and Arkin may be old enough to collect Social Security, but, as I joined
the audience howling with helpless laughter, I couldn't help but think that
Power Plays represents a resounding victory over gravity.
P.S. As I write this, May and Arkin are playing their final performances.
They will be replaced by Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss who, being alumni
of Northwestern, have their share of Chicago theatrical roots.


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