The Cocktail Hour

Play (1988)
by A. R. Gurney

With Richard Poe (Bradley), James Waterston (John), Maureen Anderman (Ann), Pamela J. Gray (Nina)

John (James Waterston) comes home to reveal his new play – The Cocktail Hour – to his parents, Bradley (Richard) and Ann (Maureen Anderman), and they are none too pleased with the idea since it is all about them. In a funny turn, they keep encouraging him to write a book instead, which presumably no one will read, but he is adamant about the play. His sister, Nina (Pamela J. Gray), as earnest about going to veterinary school as John is about writing plays, weighs in amid the heavily lubricated battle of barbs.

A. R. Gurney used to live in Newton and wrote a play, The Dining Room (1982), about goings on around the table in his house there, that made him famous.

Here, the setting is the setting of Gurney’s youth – Buffalo – and the home of his WASP parents.

Much of the play is about their negative reaction to his writing a play about them. It goes on in that vein as the severity of judgment hardens, in particular between father and son. All the various familial buttons get pressed, including a rivalry with an offstage brother who is presumably the father’s favorite.

The play, according to author Gurney, is very personal; a poignancy emerges which bears that out, its psychological warmth emerging from the resistance between the young author and the stiff parents.

Though the setup of the play is interesting, its execution comes off as somewhat belabored, with quite a bit of repetitive commentary which does not serve to build the drama significantly. Though based on the cute self-referential idea, the play itself is fairly flat and uneventful.

Nonetheless, enthusiastic students of semiology should revel in this self-referential abandon of a play about a playwright presenting a play with the same name to the characters about whom it is written; for such enthusiasts, the idea alone is worth the price of admission. I happen to love this kind of stuff; but here that fun knot of ideas comes off better than the way it unravels in the text.

The funniest parts of the play – it is a comedy of sorts – comes from the wry and dry one-liners the parents, Bradley (Richard Poe) and Ann (Maureen Anderman), offer at random intervals. There is something about the soused bon mot emerging from a wired jaw that occasionally really hits the spot here.

The acting overall is not bad. Richard Poe and Maureen Anderman make convincing hard-wired, hard-drinking WASP parents. James Waterston is an earnest and evocative son. And Pamela J. Gray ably creates a more subtly wounded daughter.

However, there seemed to be a kind of veneer over the production, making it difficult, especially at first, to get inside the action. Perhaps that was just a function of the particular performance I saw; but when that veneer gradually dissolved as the play went on, what emerged seemed predominantly mannered rather than spontaneous.

Sometimes particularly good productions can levitate plays with somewhat constrained narratives out of their literary bondage and make them come alive. Though the actors put in a noble effort here, it was not quite enough to liberate this well-intentioned enterprise from its somewhat too self-conscious authorial provenance.

– BADMan