Murray Schisgal, a playwright and screenwriter who brought his off-kilter brand of black comedy to Broadway with the screwball hit "Luv," and who later forged a partnership with actor Dustin Hoffman that led him to co-write the gender-bending blockbuster "Tootsie," died Oct. 1 at a nursing home in Port Chester, N.Y. He was 93.
His son, Zach Schisgal, confirmed the death but did not give a precise cause.
Whether in plays, movies, or a novel involving a hunchbacked musician, Schisgal was known for creating angst-ridden characters who were often more ludicrous than endearing, struggling with family conflict or professional failures that served as a backdrop for Schisgal's examinations of self-loathing or modern romance.
His work often set irascible men (played by Hoffman, Alan Arkin or Eli Wallach) against coolly intelligent women, frequently portrayed by Anne Jackson, Wallach's wife.
Schisgal wrote dozens of plays but came to the theater relatively late, after practicing law, teaching junior high English and playing saxophone and clarinet in a jazz band. In his early 30s he wrote one-act plays produced in London and New York, then made his Broadway debut with "Luv," about a husband who sets his wife up with a downcast friend so he can marry another woman.
Directed by Mike Nichols in his second Broadway outing, "Luv" premiered in November 1964 and ran for more than 900 performances, winning three Tony Awards and earning Schisgal two nominations.
"Luv" opened with Arkin, looking forlorn, preparing to jump off a bridge. That effort failed, as did a subsequent attempt to hang himself from a lamp post.
Schisgal's exploration of suicide and despair recalled other absurdist plays by European writers such as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Eugne Ionesco, whom he cited as key influences. But Schisgal was "one step ahead of the avant-garde," theater critic Walter Kerr wrote in a review for the New York Herald Tribune.
"If the avant-garde, up to now, has successfully exploded the bright balloons of cheap optimism, Schisgal is ready to put a pin to the soapy bubbles of cheap pessimism," he wrote. The play marked Schisgal's only major Broadway hit, although like his subsequent works it divided critics, with The Washington Post's John Simon writing that "Luv" was neither "devastating social satire" nor "avant-garde theater," but "plain and simple burlesque or vaudeville." It was turned into a 1967 movie, adapted into an off-Broadway musical and followed on Broadway by his play "Jimmy Shine."
The 1968 comedy starred Hoffman, fresh off his success in Nichols's movie "The Graduate." He and Schisgal had met a few years earlier, working on regional theater in Massachusetts. They went on to work on Broadway plays such as "All Over Town," which Hoffman directed in 1974.
But their most acclaimed collaboration was "Tootsie" (1982), in which Hoffman played Michael Dorsey, an out-of-work actor who dresses as a woman to win a role on a soap opera.
