Word: cocktailing
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...time when theatrical fashion seems to be running toward staged freak-outs and ad-libido dialogue, the APA Repertory Company chose two drawing-room comedies for the first productions of its 1968-69 Manhattan season. Each of them, moreover, is in verse: T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party and Molière's The Misanthrope. It was a brilliantly offbeat dramatic selection, but there, unfortunately, APA's brilliance ran out. The staging of the Eliot play is so inadequate that it points up weaknesses of the play that were not so apparent in the more religiously...
...Cocktail Party, the actors are naked, as it were, in their ordinary clothes. There they sit, in what is supposed to be a fashionable London living room, giggling over silly society stories with tag lines like "Up in a tree: you and the Maharajah," and "Lady Klootz and the wedding cake." This is not exactly American-style froth, and it sounds odd enough in American voices, with their somewhat ponderous, unmusical delivery. And when one of the voices belongs to Comedienne Nancy Walker-solid and scrappy as ever, with her hair dyed firehouse red-the incongruity is almost painful...
Pomposities and Allusions. A devout convert to Anglo-Catholicism, Eliot consciously designed The Cocktail Party as a spiritual parable. It involves an underground league of "Guardians," apparently just as vain and frivolous as any of their social peers, but secretly dedicated to guiding others to salvation. Three characters in the play indicate Eliot's idea of the two paths to that goal: Celia, a married man's mistress, is guided to a saintly martyrdom ("crucified very near an anthill"); an unhappy couple named Edward and Lavinia are pointed toward the quotidian heroism of accepting their own and each...
...most topical digs are reserved for a cocktail-party sequence, featuring Laugh-In's regular cast of kooks, and a segment with hoked-up newscasts. On last week's show, for example, Rowan reported this bulletin of the future: "Vatican, 1988. The church today finally approved the use of the Pill. The announcement was made by Pope Le Roy . . . Junior. His father was not available for comment. His mother, the former Sister Mary Catherine reached at Gluck's Hillside in the Catskills, would only say, 'We like to think of the Pill as St. Joseph Aspirin...
...perhaps dozens of one-liners to recite. Those gags that are not used on one show are preserved on tape, along with an assortment of skits and acts, for use in future shows; they are numbered and filed in a "joke bank" under such headings as "Joke Wall" or "Cocktail Party...