Theater Review—

A Delicious ‘Cocktail Hour’ At Long Wharf

By Julie Stern

“So you’re writing a play? What’s it about?”

“Us”

“What’s it called?”

“Uh, The Cocktail Hour.”

“But that’s a play already.”“No, actually, that’s “The Cocktail Party” by T.S. Eliot

“Well everyone will think it’s the play by T.S. Eliot. Don’t write it!”

NEW HAVEN — Like an Escher print, John is using the family cocktail hour as the moment to break the news to his parents, Bradley and Ann, and his sister, Nina, that he is writing a play about them. The play is set in the family living room, during the cocktail hour, where a man breaks the news to his parents and sister that he is…

There is no plot beyond a series of confrontations between the playwright and his family, through which he unloads a lot of old baggage, and they get very angry at him because he is probing too deeply into regions where they do not want to go.

The reference to Eliot is deliberate. In that play a psychologist reveals hitherto unknown truths to the other characters about themselves and each other. While John’s family, having been educated at the best schools, are familiar with the title, they are not bookish enough to have actually read it. The Cocktail Hour – the play by Gurney – is being produced at Long Wharf Theatre for just two more weekends, until February 4.

The time is the 1970s. To Bradley and Ann, married for fifty years, the cocktail hour still represents the essence of civilized behavior, a formal pre-dinner ritual in which refined people join together for intelligent conversation and relaxation from their daily responsibilities.

To John (and the audience) it is more a case of watching his parents get gracefully sloshed, while out in the kitchen the maid prepares the family roast. Discreet alcoholism is presented as the characteristic disease of a social class who use the balm of “one more martini” to ease the pain of lives in which concern with appearances and “what people will think” are more important than love and personal passion.

The long first act of the play seems amorphous. Clearly, John is seething with anger, over issues that are not yet explained. Bradley is outraged and defensive, claiming that the play (which he has not looked at) will humiliate them all and drag up old dirt, and Nina is furious because she has been relegated to a minor role. (“Well I haven’t quite been able to get your number,” he admits.)

As John explains that the play, in order to be perfected, is going to require some explosive confrontation scenes with his mother and father, the second act takes shape, and magically, so does the whole piece. Writing this play is therapeutic. Since childhood, he has harbored resentful fantasies to explain his feeling that his parents never loved him, and that his father never really knew him.  Jigger was the “favorite” son. Nina was the “good” daughter. Was he illegitimate? Was there some scandal being covered up?

In the angry exchanges that follow, what comes out is not at all what John expected. Instead of melodramatic revelations of sin and betrayal, each is finally able to articulate the real, if quirky, dreams that they stifled in order to maintain the façade of socially appropriate lives.

To do this and to make audiences care about the people concerned is a mark of the real playwright’s skill. A.R. Gurney is properly celebrated as the chronicler of the modern American Wasp, examining the manners and mores of  the American “aristocracy” whose now-thinning blood once dominated the bastions of power: the prep school, the country club, the white shoe law firms and insurance brokerages.

In plays like Love Letters, The Dining Room and Scenes From American Life, Gurney captures the rigid social code to which  young “Jiggers” and “Muffies” are bred to adhere, even as the rising tide of democratic egalitarianism has eroded their position of privilege.

In The Cocktail Hour, as always, he does this with wit and authenticity, capturing perfectly the nuances of speech and gesture that make these characters recognizable. There is also kindness and empathy. If John is a stand-in for playwright Gurney, dissecting the foibles of his own people, skewering their pretenses and hypocrisies, he never reduces them to caricatures.

Haunted by the shadow of death, by the recognition that the world they knew is disappearing, and by the fact that you just can’t get good servants any more, Bradley and Ann gallantly maintain their smiles. And when iconoclastic, bluejeans-clad John reaches into his pocket with the skilled assurance of a born preppie to produce the requisite necktie before going into dinner at the end of the cocktail hour, it is an act of conciliation and contrition.

The whole thing is flawlessly acted, especially by Mary Beth Peil as Ann and John Cunningham as Bradley.

Michael Yeargan’s set design, with its unimaginative living room backed by a sweeping line of windows showing the rich color of a suburban Buffalo autumn, is just right for a play about “tradition.”

Whether you count yourself as a Wasp or not, it’s always a pleasure to see what Gurney does with them, and The Cocktail Hour is no exception.

(Contact Long Wharf’s box office at 203-787-4282 or visit LongWharf.org for full performance and ticket details or to make reservations.)