Word: cocktails
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...COCKTAIL PARTY...
Crammed into the elegant and (conveniently) parlor-like Winthrop Junior Common Room, HRDC's The Cocktail Party should be seen first and considered later. Party because actually seeing the floor-level set past twelve rows of upper-class attendees requires great skill and cunning and partly because the play is riddled with T.S. Eliot's innocuously cryptic language, no distinct message leaps forth from the play. Rather, various lines worm their way into the audience, reappearing days later as pertinent homilies for the daily personal lives of audience members...
...play is certainly not incomprehensible. Director Massy Tadjedin '99 clarifies T.S. Eliot's '12 1949 verse play in this production: lines are clear and the plot is crisp. But like any interesting play, the essence of The Cocktail Party is difficult to grasp. Drama can be frustratingly concrete. A painting or symphony may be sufficiently abstract to be immediately beautiful, but a play requires active sympathy and reflection. The domestic conversation that constitutes the action of The Cocktail Party, sans British accents perhaps, could be exchanged in any of our parents' living rooms, but because it is part...
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...