Word: cocktails
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...Cocktail Party...
...name of the son's script, The Cocktail Hour, is the same as the work onstage. The setting, "upstate New York," is plainly the native Buffalo of its author, A.R. Gurney (The Dining Room). Gurney's actual family has made little secret of its distaste for being portrayed in his work ever since his cartoonish Love in Buffalo was mounted at Yale School of Drama in 1958, while he was a student there. Yet the puckish hint of autobiography is only one of the charms of The Cocktail Hour, which opened off-Broadway last week...
What makes The Cocktail Hour Gurney's most emotionally satisfying play is that audiences need not catch any of these highfalutin references to savor a splendid, old-fashioned family confrontation. This is indeed a play of the style celebrated by the parents, in which secrets are discovered, forgiveness bestowed and the ending genuinely happy. Its theme is universal. Why, Gurney asks, when family relationships look so much alike, does each turn out to be unique? Why, despite good intentions, do parents love one child more than another -- and why do the children keep caring, right into their...
...Cocktail Party...
THIS is the second time this play has been put on this year--a Div School group did it last spring. Cocktail Party is one of those rather nasty comedies of manners that are the ancestors of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? T.S. Eliot translates his marital problems and his wife's mental instability into theater...