Word: carneys
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...restage it," Nichols would say when they hit a foggy patch. "No, let me rewrite it," Simon would insist. Next month Simon and Nichols will be working together again, on Simon's new play The Odd Couple, which will star Art Carney and Walter Matthau. "It's about two guys who are having trouble with their wives," says Nichols. "You never see the wives; you just see the other girls, just like in real life...