Word: doctorow
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Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow: the past imperfect, done with syncopation and high style...
They are the pampered slaves of enervating rituals, of which this dinner party is one. Perhaps Doctorow himself has attended one too many of these gatherings since he attained renown with his bestselling novel Ragtime. If so, he has achieved a suitable revenge. Before he flashes the handgun, Edgar (Christopher Plummer), the garrulous gadfly of the group, says quite flatly, "I can't believe that you still believe in the lives we lead...
...guest of honor, a Kissinger-like Secretary of State, trussed up in a chair and holds the weap on to the dignitary's head, while the pair reach a tongue-blistering stalemate on the accommodations of power vs. the demands of conscience. Two ideas have entered Doctorow's play on a double ladder of descent. Ennui, anomie - the catatonic state of buried lives - was summed up by Kierkegaard when he called despair "the sickness unto death...
...supremacy of anarchy and annihilation was discerned by Dostoyevsky when he wrote that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Doctorow simply secularizes that prophecy into supine universal unconcern, ecological devastation and the nuclear holocaust...
This could be worth resaying if Shaw or Stoppard were in the pulpit, but despite First Reader Plummer's acute rendering of Doctorow's wry, sardonic and satiric sermon, Drinks Before Dinner is a smudge pot of a drama that never blazes into revelation...