Word: cocktailing
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What in heaven's name adorns the Kerr cocktail table? Can it be a marshmallow tree...
Like most of The New Yorker's laughing boys, Thurber can be insufferably chatty ("This may not give you the creeps but it gives me the creeps"), and he suffers from the peculiar delusion that anything written about a cocktail party is bound to be funny. He also lapses frequently into college humor (speaking of nervous ailments: "Have you heard of the roofer who got shingles from Sears, Roebuck?"), and sesquipedalian prose ("Amidst verbal wonders and linguistic portents the stultification of English was caused by the decapitation of words as well as by unwonted lengthening"). But at his best...
...Eliot's odd plays, The Cocktail Party is quite possibly the oddest. At times the characters flourish an almost Wildean wit; at others they sit around quoting passages that sound like they were deleted from an early draft of the Four Quartets.. Needless to say, it is when Eliot is Wildest that the play is most interesting; only the drollery, in fact, makes it produceable...
...Cocktail Party is fashioned on the Alcestis legend (already the subject of a tragedy by one of Eliot's favorito writers). But in Eliot's play the fun has just begun when Alcestis--Lavinia returns from the dead. Lavinia and her husband realize that time's only issue has been grief and anxiety, and that their marriage in its present state cannot last. Celia Coplestone, Edward's quondam mistress (apparently considered to be another aspect of Alcestis) decides that she is also far from mental health...
Regardless of these many drawbacks, and the flaws inherent in the script itself, enough humor remains in the production to make it well worth while. The Cocktail Party, after all, is a play not often produced...