‘The Cocktail Hour’ airs family laundry that’s never very dirty
by Kevin Kirby – Palo Alto Weekly
Playwright A.R. Gurney is the chronicler of a vanishing lifestyle. His bestknown comedies are snapshots of the dwindling WASP aristocracy of the eastern U.S. — the starched, patrician world of prestigious schools, private country clubs and money so old that it’s impolite to mention it.
This is the world in which Gurney grew up, and it’s no secret that much of his material is drawn from his own family’s history. Nor is it a secret that his family, over the years, has been less than enthusiastic about seeing their quirks and foibles dissected on the Off-Broadway stage.
The cliche “airing dirty laundry” is not really apropos, since Gurney’s laundry is never that dirty. The worst that one is likely to see in a Gurney play is the dramatic equivalent of a muddy paw print on white yachting pants: unsightly, perhaps, but certainly no scarlet letter to besmirch the family honor.
In fact, the worst that Gurney captures is the humanity of his subjects: the small self-deceptions, the fits of pride, the vague unspoken sadness. This has always been his strength as a writer; it grants his stories a universality, making his family feel like our family, regardless of politics or bloodlines or social strata.
Given the gentleness of Gurney’s portraiture, it’s hard to understand his family’s discomfort. And yet, the plot of “The Cocktail Hour” — the latest offering from Palo Alto’s Dragon Productions — hinges on that very discomfort.
”The Cocktail Hour” is the story of a middle-aged playwright, John, who returns to his parents’ home in upstate New York, seeking their permission to produce a play based heavily on their family relationships. John’s play, none-too-incidentally, is also called “The Cocktail Hour,” and Gurney has set the debate over John’s script squarely in the middle of the family’s cocktail hour — that sacrosanct hour (or two) before dinner when the men sip scotch and revel in their own civility.
While John’s mother, Ann, urges him to turn it into a book instead (books, she says, are much less public), his father, Bradley, takes a more direct tack, offering John $20,000 to leave the script in a drawer until all members of the older generation are safely dead. John’s sister Nina, in contrast, is less concerned with the play’s subject matter than with the insignificance of her own role therein.
C. Conrad Cady plays the playwright. Charles Numrich and Ann Kuchins are his parents, and Janine Evans plays sister Nina. They are all confident, seasoned performers; all but Evans are making their Dragon debut with this show.
The show also has two important unseen characters: a newly hired domestic servant named Sheila (or Shirley or Sharon or Cheryl —the family can’t quite be bothered to get it right) whose inept handling of dinner stretches the cocktail hour into a second act; and John’s brother Jigger (seemingly named after a bartender’s implement), the favorite son who always got the parental approval that John craved.
Gurney’s script is funny and well-observed — he has a good ear for the way these people speak — but it is not his best work. His alter ego, John, admits that his “Cocktail Hour” doesn’t have much plot (“I can’t seem to write them,” he says), and the same can be said for Gurney’s play about the play. The second act gets a bit preachy on the topics of unearned wealth and the exploitation of servants. And, weirdly, the conflict over John’s script is resolved by a major life decision made by the absent Jigger, which is revealed in a phone call to the family. (To make this deus ex machina even more disappointing, the phone call happens offstage.)
Furthermore, perhaps to avoid accusations that he has stacked the deck in his alter ego’s favor, Gurney spends a great deal of time beating up on John, painting him as a lifelong trouble maker who’s “jealous of anyone who seems to have a leg up on life.” This, combined with a certain gloominess in Cady’s manner, ultimately makes John the least likable character in the play. On the other hand, Numrich’s Bradley is perhaps insufficiently cantankerous. Numrich plays him as a rigid, emotionally distant man with outdated attitudes. This is all well and good. What’s missing, though, is the sense that he is, in his final years, truly desperate to control the public perception on which his hollow social standing is based. (We’re told that the character is in his late 70s and believes his time is short, but this hardly shows up in his demeanor.) In any case, an edgier performance from Numrich would serve to up the ante for Cady, adding a bit of zing to a well-mannered first act.
Kuchins and Evans are both fine comic actresses. Each handles Gurney’s text with ease, and they nicely embody the different attitudes of two generations of American women. Director Rachel Manheim has chosen to accentuate the self-referential meta-ness of the narrative, reminding us in various ways that we may be watching the very play whose fate the characters are discussing. She has Cady carry a typewritten copy of John’s script for much of the first act, making pencil notations as the other characters speak — sometimes even mouthing their lines along with them.
In a similar vein, scenic designer Ron Gasparinetti has provided a self-conscious skeleton of a set, in which the massive sloping beams serve to dispel rather than create an illusion of spaciousness. Around the edges of the playing space — outside the confines of the sitting room — unused flats and an aluminum step ladder lean against the stage walls, never letting us forget that we are in a theater.
These Brechtian touches are interesting; whether they enhance or merely complicate Gurney’s intent is a question open to debate. Overall, Dragon’s production of “The Cocktail Hour” is a well-paced, honestly acted, faintly dysthemic comedy, characterized by Gurney’s gently satiric treatment of the people he knows best. The family dynamics will be recognizable to everyone, and the script is packed with inside jokes about the theater world that regular theatergoers will appreciate.
What: “The Cocktail Hour,” a play presented by Dragon Productions
Where: Dragon Theatre, 535 Alma St., Palo Alto
