Word: cocktailing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dilemma not unlike actors contemplating Hamlet: how to launch songs with opening lines nearly as familiar--and potentially as rote--as "To be or not to be" and still sound fresh and spontaneous and not at all like a stale peanut-scented night at the airport Sheraton's cocktail lounge. In this regard, Jeffery Smith, an American expatriate living in Paris, has set himself a real challenge on his first American CD. He has sequenced the songs Lush Life ("I used to visit all the very gay places"), Misty ("Look at me/ I'm as helpless as a kitten...
With her cast of eight, Tadjedin has built an effective rearrangement. The Cocktail Party is three acts of point-blank life, improbable yet familiar. It is straight drama, structured around the marital problems of one London couple, paced according to the speech of its eight-person cast and having in its three acts only two settings--a London drawing room and a psychiatrist's consulting room. Rising from this conventionally-British yet potentially-portentous setting, Eliot's language manages a tone of religious pronouncement and philosophical anguish that still sounds natural coming from the play's routine, middle-aged characters...
...also along these lines that the circumstantial humor of The Cocktail Party thrives. Reminiscent of latter-day sitcom standards, much of its humor is based on the sudden ironic entrance of various cast members. For example, in the midst of a weighty discussion between the "Unidentified Guest" and Edward Chamberlayne (Sam Shaw '99), the troubled husband whose marriage is the subject of the play, the hysterical, aunt-like Julia (Emily Stone '99) rushes in to retrieve her lost umbrella and maternally questions Edward about his seemingly drunken companion. We wish we could parrot her seeming naivete...
What do we do with this sort of theater? Even when it was hardly visible from the back row, The Cocktail Party filled the Winthrop JCR with an obscure imperative, neither calling for a systematic analysis of Eliot's intention nor a sympathetic internalization of Edward Chamberlayne's plight. Eliot's play glistens in space between gushing romanticism and total ironic self-deprecation. As still young and mostly un-betrothed audience members, we can only be glad that Eliot has asked his questions, and it is cathartic to see that the answers (to live in darkness, to honestly accept...
...poet who once seemed untouchably historical but who now seems like only another Harvard alum, and we realize that the play we have (barely) seen might actually be a reflection. The insolubility of Eliot's thought is not a result of Tadjedin's failure to properly direct The Cocktail Party. Rather, it is its greatest strength. It is comforting at least that the characters Eliot has created for us are just as bewildered as we are--yet, it offers no relief...