Mike Nichols: A Life

by Mark Harris

But at their strongest, they took themselves and Compass audiences into new and more formally daring territory. Late in 1956, they developed a long, complicated sketch known as “Pirandello” that, true to its namesake, played explicitly with notions of performance, reality, absurdism, and metatheatricality as it wound through several beats that had to be calibrated perfectly to create the level of discomfort and anxiety in the audience that they were after. The scene began with Nichols and May as two small siblings in a burping contest. “Mike would say, ‘I can belch louder than you.’ He was a great belcher,” says May. “It would bring the house down. And then somehow the game went into, we started imitating Mommy and Daddy.” Seamlessly, without tipping audience members as to exactly when the shift happened, Nichols and May glided from playing kids acting like their parents to playing the parents themselves, in an escalatingly personal and ugly fight. “And then,” May says, “we became . . . not really us, but we made it sound like we, the performers, were fighting. At some point, I found something to say within the fight that had something to do with his being impotent. And he would walk offstage. When he did that, there was sort of a laugh, because they still thought it was part of the sketch, and I would laugh, too, and say, ‘Is it something I said?’ in the way that one performer would say something to cover for another.” As Nichols and May developed the sketch, they dared t...

This is amazing.