The Turbulent Genius of Mike Nichols Vogue 2/1/2021
The first Broadway play I ever saw was a matinee performance of David Rabe’s
Streamers, a shattering tale of masculinity, racism, and homophobia set during the Vietnam War that was playing at Lincoln Center in the summer of 1976. I walked out of that theater stunned and not sure what to do next, so I walked around the city for what must have been hours, trying to absorb what I had just seen. That play was directed by Mike Nichols, a fact I had forgotten until this week, when I was reading
Mike Nichols: A Life (Penguin Press), Mark Harris’s fascinating, exhaustively researched, and utterly absorbing biography of the cultural polymath, someone who seemed to move effortlessly between the theater and the movies, conquering them both.