Elaine May

 ( 1932 Births ) 

By 1960, they made their Broadway debut with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which later won a Grammy. After performing their act a number of years in New York's various clubs, and then on Broadway, with most of the shows sold out, Nichols could not believe their success:

His feelings were shared by May, who was also taken aback by their success, especially having some real income after living in near-poverty. She told a Newsweek interviewer, "When we came to New York, we were practically barefoot. And I still can't get used to walking in high heels."

The uniqueness of their act made them an immediate success in New York. Their style became the "next big thing" in live comedy. Charles H. Joffe, their producer, remembers that sometimes the line to their show went around the block. That partly explains why Milton Berle, a major television comedy star, tried three times without success to see their act. Critic Lawrence Christon recalls his first impression after seeing their act: "You just knew it was a defining moment. They caught the urban tempo, like Woody Allen did." They performed nightly at mostly sold-out shows, in addition to making TV program and commercial appearances and radio broadcasts. Their relatively brief time together as comedy stars led New York talk show host Dick Cavett to call their act "one of the comic meteors in the sky". Woody Allen said, "the two of them came along and elevated comedy to a brand-new level".

Technique Among the qualities of their act, which according to one writer made them a rarity, was that they used both "snob and mob appeal", which gave them a wide audience. Nachman explains that they presented a new kind of comedy team, unlike previous comedy duos which had an intelligent member alongside a much less intelligent one, as with Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, and Martin and Lewis.

What differentiated their style was that their stage performance created "scenes," a method very unlike the styles of other acting teams. Nor did they rely on fixed gender or comic roles, but instead adapted their own character to fit a sketch idea they came up with. They chose real-life subjects, often from their own life, which were made into satirical and funny vignettes.

This was accomplished by using subtle joke references which they correctly expected their audiences to recognize, whether through clichés or character types. They thereby indirectly poked fun at the new intellectual culture which they saw growing around them. They felt that young Americans were taking themselves too seriously, which became the subject of much of their satire.

Nichols structured the material for their skits, and May came up with most of their ideas. Improvisation became a fairly simple art for them, as they portrayed the urban couple's "Age of Anxiety" in their sketches, and did so on their feet. Reprinted in Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates,, New York, NT, USA: Penguin. According to May, it was simple: "It's nothing more than quickly creating a situation between two people and throwing up some kind of problem for one of them."

Nichols noted that after coming up with a sketch idea, they would perform it soon after with little extra rehearsal or writing it down. One example he remembered was inspired simply from a phone call from his mother. I called Elaine and I said, "I've got a really good piece for us tonight." They created a six-minute-long, mostly improvised, "mother and son" sketch, which they performed later that night.

May helped remove the stereotype of women's roles on stage. Producer David Shepherd notes that she accomplished that partly by not choosing traditional 1950s female roles for her characters, which were often housewives or women working at menial jobs. Instead, she often played the character of a sophisticated woman, such as a doctor, a psychiatrist, or an employer. Shepherd notes that "Elaine broke through the psychological restrictions of playing comedy as a woman."

May and Nichols had different attitudes toward their improvisations, however. Where Nichols always needed to know where a sketch was going and what its ultimate point would be, May preferred exploring ideas as the scene progressed. May says that even when they repeated their improvisations, it was not rote but came from re-creating her original impulse. Such improvisational techniques allowed her to make slight changes during a performance. Although May had a wider improvisational range than Nichols, he was generally the one to shape the pieces and steer them to their end. For their recordings, he also made the decision of what to delete.

Team break-up Audiences were still discovering May and Nichols in 1961, four years after they arrived. However, at the height of their fame, they decided to discontinue their act that year and took their careers in different directions: Nichols became a leading Broadway stage and film director; May became primarily a screenwriter and playwright, with some acting and directing. Among the reasons they decided to call it quits was that keeping their act fresh was becoming more difficult. Nichols explained:

Nichols said that for him personally the breakup was "cataclysmic", and he went into a state of depression: "I didn't know what I was or who I was." It was not until 1996, thirty-five years later, that they would work together again as a team, when she wrote the screenplay and he directed The Birdcage. It "was like coming home, like getting a piece of yourself back that you thought you'd lost," he said. He adds that May had been very important to him from the moment he first saw her, adding that for her "improv was innate," and few people have that gift.

Director Arthur Penn said of their sudden breakup, "They set the standard and then they had to move on." To New York talk show host Dick Cavett, "They were one of the comic meteors in the sky."

They reunited for a Madison Square Garden benefit for George McGovern for President in June 1972. The event, titled "Together Again for McGovern," also featured two musical groups that had recently broken up, Simon and Garfunkel and Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as singer Dionne Warwick.

May acted in the film In the Spirit (1990), in which she played a "shopaholic stripped of consumer power"; Robert Pardi has described her portrayal as a "study of fraying equanimity that is a classic comic tour de force." She also contributed to the screenplay for the drama Dangerous Minds (1995). May reunited with her former comic partner, Mike Nichols, for the 1996 film The Birdcage, an American adaptation of the classic French farce La Cage aux Folles. Their film relocated the story from France to South Beach, Miami. It was a major box office hit. May received her second Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay when she again worked with Nichols on the 1998 film Primary Colors.