"The Cocktail Hour"
A play by A.R. Gurney
Huntington Theatre Company
Boston University Theatre
Director: Maria Aitken
Set, Allen Moyer, Costumes, Candice Donnelly, Lights, Paul Palazzo
November 15- December 15, 2013:
This play is a real hoot. Using the apt vehicle of the social ritual called “the cocktail hour’ playwright A.R. Gurney captures then surgically dissects the 1970s upper middle class milieu in which it was still thriving. The man of the house returns from work and the family gathers to talk about the travails of the day. The conversation is lightweight, argument is off limits, and olives for martinis are in far greater supply than emotional content. Dinner is often delayed. The alcohol keeps the illusion of family cohesiveness intact. Cocktail hour is actually a way to be alone together.
The best reason to see this warmly wrought comedy is watching Richard Poe as Bradley, the sublimely over-the-top pater familias. Bradley epitomizes Gurney’s upper class WASP male whose sense of noblesse oblige is big on patronizing, weak on compassion. A stuffed shirt non-pareil, he gleefully chomps upon every scene he’s in. Plastered down gray hair, barrel-chested in his tweed sport coat and slightly-too-short burgundy slacks, he has the stentorian pipes of a news reader who would be lost without the teleprompter.
John (James Waterston) now in his thirties, visits home to announce he’s written a play about the family. The father talks about how he and wife used to go to plays all the time. “They were over promptly then you go to bed." The examined life is not his forte.
“Am I in it?” Bradley asks.
“It cuts pretty close to home,” John answers.
"Write it after I'm dead, not now," his father demands.
The Cocktail Hour by A. R. Gurney, Huntington Theatre Company
Richard Poe (clockwise from left), James Waterston, Pamela J. Gray, and Maureen Anderman portray a New England WASP family in the Huntington Theatre Company production of A. R. Gurney’s comedy of manners The Cocktail Hour. Photos by T. Charles Erickson.
The set, lighting, and costumes are subtle underpinnings that evoke the upper class milieu in which the play takes place.
The setup complete, you know that by curtain time, the foment caused by son John’s play will unearth revelations, truths long buried, behaviors explained, and hurts salved. Then we’ll go home.
Bradley has his own version of events, whether family or history. “I’ll look it up,” John says as his dad tells a tall one explaining the origin of the clipper ship on the label of the bottle of scotch. “No, it will destroy the rhythm of the conversation,” he objects. In scene after scene, we see that Bradley doesn’t allow the truth to get in the way of a good story.
The rest of the family soon appears. Wife Ann (Maureen Anderman, in an exquisitely turned role as wife who’s learned to live with her husband’s spectacularly egotistical foibles, sensing a decent man underneath all that self-aggrandizing behavior), dressed in a pale silk blouse and finely tailored floor length skirt, enters for “Just a splash,” (one of several). She’s followed by daughter Nina (Pamela J. Gray) who brings her own dysfunctional life to the party.
John, who trades his soda water for scotch at the opening of Act 2, says there is something missing in his play (titled "The Cocktail Hour"), a narrative arc, a plot, that he has yet to figure out, that part of the reason he has written the play is to understand his place in the family constellation. By the end of the play, he finds a solution that satisfies all parties. Even Bradley manages to see something in life besides his own image.
Yes, it’s predictable, but so well performed, with so much lively dialogue, that it’s a good night at the theater. It won’t change the way you think about life (unless you need to write a play and bring it home when you visit your parents for the holidays). The play’s ending is too tidily wrapped up but, because it’s acted so damn well, I felt like I’d slugged down a splash myself.
Love your last two pieces. Your writing gets better and better!
Posted by: Susan Bennett | December 17, 2013 at 06:57 PM