Word: cocktailing
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...answers gets so wholly garbled that the dialogue sounds like one of those elementary conversation books for learning a foreign language. Then the play opens out into a kind of choreographic ritual of modern life, urban herds shuffling to and fro, the commuter's lock step, a cocktail party. It is apparent that interviewers and applicants alike need help: instead of the bread of life, they are fed vacuous cliches by intellectual bubble-gum blowhards representing the church, state, politics and psychoanalysis. One of the self-frocked priests of the Freudian age opens his mouth to say: "Blah, blah...
Like pond lilies, the characters float on the surface of their own reality, fall apart and come together in ever-changing scenes and situations. At the cocktail party, it gradually becomes apparent that one girl is dead. She apologizes for coming late: "I'm dead. Excuse me. I'm dead. Excuse me." But in this world of non-touch and non-feeling, death is both impermissible and incommunicable, as impossible as life...
...DELICATE BALANCE, by Edward Albee, has echoes of Pinterish menace and Cocktail Party elegance as it mutedly discusses the absence of love and the anguish of aloneness. The characters fill and refill their whisky glasses, but the play is empty of thought or drama...
...laymen feel that they can calmly decide and discuss among themselves what they are and are not prepared to accept. "It's been a long time since the doctrine of the Trinity was cocktail-party conversation," says the Rev. John M. Krumm, rector of Manhattan's Episcopal Ascension Church...
Under the leadership of Daniel Seltzer, then acting director of the Loeb, the Shakespeare Festival had brought in a whole new group of undergraduates, relegating the old club of entrenched semi-professionals to minor roles and inbred cocktail parties. Seltzer had passed the torch from one generation to another, and the older crowd wasn't having any of it. They talked behind his back, mailed hastily drafted protest letters to the Crimson, thought about or actually wrote works of vengeance like The Pageant of the Beasts...