MS

Murray Schisgal has died.  Perhaps not a great playwright, but an interesting one.

He first rose to prominence with The Typists & The Tiger, two imaginative one-acts that ran off-Broadway as a single show.  His biggest hit was Luv, an absurdist romantic comedy. It was his first production on Broadway and ran 901 performances in the mid-60s.  Directed by Mike Nichols (who won a Tony), it starred Alan Arkin, Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach.

His next play, Jimmy Shine, was not a hit, but starred up-and-comer Dustin Hoffman, starting a professional relationship between Hoffman and Schisgal.  Hoffman would make his first movie appearance around this time in The Tiger Makes Out, a bad adaptation of Schisgal's The Tiger, starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.  For that matter, the movie version of Luv, starring Jack Lemmon, Elaine May and Peter Falk, doesn't work either.

His play All Over Town, directed by Dustin Hoffman, got some notice, running 233 performances on Broadway in the mid-70s.  His last Broadway production, two one-acts collectively known as Twice Around The Park, opened in 1982 and ran four months. It reunited Schisgal with Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach.

Schisgal wrote and produced a few TV projects, but his best-known work outside the theatre was his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Dustin Hoffman's huge hit Tootsie. Of course, this being Hollywood, Schisgal was hardly the only scribe involved.  The story was credited to Don McGuire and Larry Gelbart, and the screenplay to Gelbart and Schisgal.  In addition, Barry Levinson, Elaine May and other writers worked on it, not to mention the input from star Hoffman and director Sydney Pollack.

The last time I read Luv, a few years back, I thought it had dated.  But now I wish someone would revive it.  There may be life left in it yet.