Divorce Is What You Make It

The Odd Couple is an evening of group hysteria, induced by Playwright Neil ("Doc") Simon, Director Mike Nichols and two greatly gifted actors of atrabilious hilarity, Walter Matthau and Art Carney. The only worry they leave in a playgoer's head is how to catch his breath between laughs.

Matthau and Carney are middle-aged newly de-weds. Matthau, a sportswriter, has been deserted and divorced; Carney, a newswriter, is booted out by his wife just as the play begins. Matthau invites Carney to share his lonely eight-room apartment. "What can I do here?" asks Carney. "You can take my wife's initials off the towels," replies Matthau with morose glee.

The two men begin living an uproarious travesty of a bad marriage, an astutely characterized study in incompatability. Matthau is a gruff, irresponsible slob, a sort of cigar-chomping depilated bear who shambles around in his ill-kept cave. A Friday night poker-playing crony judges Matthau by a Rorschach test of his refrigerator: "I saw milk standing in there that wasn't even in the bottle." By contrast, Carney is a fuss-budgety fanatic of cleaning and cooking. The kitchen is his womb, and the apron string is his umbilical cord. But his real specialty is crying on his own shoulder; he claims more symptoms than there are diseases. Matthau grouses that his fidgety roommate is "the only man in the world with clenched hair." A clenched-jaw finale finds the pair admitting that they are not meant for each other, though each may have learned just enough about himself to mend his broken marriage.

The Mike Nichols touch, always deft, daft and droll, flicks The Odd Couple along at a dervish's pace. But it is Neil Simon's comic freshness of vision that provides the inner momentum. Simon rarely tosses a line straight up in the air for an isolated gag; he hits it across a net of personal relationships so that a steady volley of wit builds up out of character and situation. Simon also knows how to prod a cliche off its bed of banality so that it walks toward the brink of logical absurdity. "Who'd send a suicide telegram? Can you imagine getting a thing like that? You have to tip the kid a quarter." An entire rhetoric of expert timing is contained in Walter Matthau's slow burns and Art Carney's fretful fidgets, with Matthau inching out acting honors in one scene of nervous collapse that is rather like seeing the Empire State Building crumpling in slow motion. The rest of the cast is merely flawless.

For those ever-patient people in the box-office line, one thing is as sure as waiting for the tickets. When they do get in to see The Odd Couple, they'll live laughing.

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