Theatre in Review: The Cocktail Party
The Cocktail Party
Light and Sound America
David Barbour
March 18, 2010
The Actors Company Theatre is one of a trinity of Off Broadway organizations that regularly satiates our curiosity about the past, offering first-class productions of yesterday's forgotten hits. The troupe struck gold earlier in the season with its revival of Sidney Howard's '30s farce The Late Christopher Bean. Now it has taken one of its biggest risks, reviving T. S. Eliot's metaphysical drawing room comedy, The Cocktail Party.
Eliot, along with Christopher Fry and Archibald MacLeish, presided over a postwar revival of verse drama, a movement that flared briefly and brightly, then faded away, never to return. The Cocktail Party clocked 408 performances and nabbed the Best Play Tony in 1950, but its last major New York revival was 42 years ago. There's no question that Eliot's unique, possibly bizarre, mix of blank verse, psychoanalysis and Anglo-Catholic mysticism -- all served with just a pinch of existentialism -- may baffle modern audiences, but, thanks to Scott Alan Evans' finely tuned direction, an expert cast illuminates both the text's crystalline poetry and its elusive ideas.
From the opening moments, at the event of the title, the dialogue strikes a distinctly Mandarin note. Eliot is having a bit of fun here, sending up the Coward-Rattigan tradition of elegantly meaningless one-liners -- but, as he soon reveals, there's a tangle of misery under the trivial banter. For one thing, Lavinia, the hostess, is strangely absent. Edward, her husband, confides his anguish to someone known only as An Unidentified Guest, a man who possesses an uncannily detailed, and dry-eyed, insight into the situation. Edward has no feeling for Lavinia, in fact, he's been sleeping with the young and lovely Celia, another party guest -- but, with Lavinia gone, he's slipping into a terrible existential panic.
More trouble is brewing. Peter, a young screenwriter, confides to Edward his unrequited love for Celia, and the Celia-Edward affair is suddenly, strangely unraveling. It's not long before most of them land in the consulting room of the Guest, who is revealed to be Henry Harcourt-Reilly, a psychoanalyst. Henry, no conventional doctor, hands out his own brand of tough love. And so it goes, with superbly polite and eminently speakable words serving to sheath the author's stunningly savage insights. No one ever raises his or her voice in The Cocktail Party -- they don't need to, for their spiritual torments are laid bare in sentences that are uncannily lucid even as they hint at darker, more inexplicable realities.
Henry will finally put everyone's lives in order again, and he will ensure at least a measure of happiness for Edward and Lavinia. But hold on for the shock in Act III when we learn the fate of Celia, who has opted for a harder, lonelier road in search of a deeper spiritual fulfillment. It's a brutal twist, and it's something of a miscalculation, I think; it throws the action out of whack, leaving you almost unable to concentrate on the play's windup.
But, for most of the way, Eliot's poetry has the ability to mesmerize -- not just the beauty of the words, but their ability to probe the illness ravaging his characters' souls. Fortunately, Evans has assembled a crack team of TACT veterans, all of whom deliver the verse with assurance while ably hinting at stronger emotions underneath. Jack Koenig manages to balance Edward's panic and politeness, even when battling with Erika Rolfsrud's quietly furious Lavinia. Simon Jones comes off a little too smug and knowing in his first appearance, as Henry, but he grows in authority in each scene. Cynthia Harris is delightful as Julia, the perpetual party guest, who isn't nearly as batty as she seems. But the evening belongs to Lauren English, who turns Celia's long Act II consultation with Henry into a voyage of interior discovery.
The production is stylized in a way that meshes neatly with the script's carefully mannered surface.
Indeed, Eliot's cocktail chatterers aren't unhappy so much as they are haunted by a feeling of unreality and creeping unease. Both feelings are capably rendered in a production that manages to make a play, often dismissed as relic, seem far more modern that you might think. Cheers to TACT for taking the risk, and cheers for succeeding so well