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Mike Nichols: Sex, Language, and the Reinvention of Psychological Realism Kyle Stevens. Oxford University Press, 2015.This special book tells the fascinating tale of Mike Nichols, an extraordinary man who made many major contributions to the American stage and cinema as an actor and producer as well as a theater and film director. The book started as a biographical doctoral dissertation by its author, Kyle Stevens, a graduate student at the time at the University of Pittsburgh, and ended coincidentally very near the time of the death of Nichols in New York on November 19, 2014.The German-born Nichols came to the United States as a young boy where he lived in New York while attending private schools. His career began in the 1950s in Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago and joined a local improvisational comedy group called The Compass Players, which later became the legendary entertainment phenomenon known as Second City. Among his colleagues here was Elaine May, a very talented young actress with whom he formed the highly successful dynamic comedy duo known as Nichols and May.Looking next at the book's contents, we find that its 202 pages of text contain an introductory chapter, "Mike Nichols and the Politics of Character," and a concluding chapter, "Nichols's Cinema of Conversation," as well as five chapters in between. The first of the five is "Nothing Goes Unheard: Nichols and May, Improvisation, and the Skewing of Language," and this chapter is followed by "Nichols's Comedy of Remarriage." Next appears "The Graduate and the Subversion of Silence," followed by "Carnal Knowledge: The Close-Up, Duration, and Affective Impotence." Fifth and last is "The Minds of Chameleons: Nichols and Streep."While Nichols will be remembered for individual feats that he accomplished in the theater and cinema, it is the staggering number of his major successes in a variety of artistic arenas over a lifetime of work that make him not just special, but spectacular.Starting with his early work with Elaine May, we find that their improvisational acts on Broadway in the late 1950s produced three successful albums, with the debut album winning them a Grammy Award.Soon after their act was dissolved in the early sixties, Nichols tried his hand at directing plays and soon found that he had a talent for this as well, after directing the actors in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963 and The Odd Couple in 1965. … |
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