Word: gurney
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...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...
...always with Gurney, an outward simplicity conceals a puzzle hunter's trove of puns, metaphors and hidden allusions. In the opening scene, the father misquotes a literary reference and the son, in gentle correction, claims that Coleridge said the three great plots were Oedipus Rex, Tom Jones and Volpone. Sure enough, the play turns out to be, like Oedipus, a struggle between father and son; the play within a play hinges, like Tom Jones, on questions of hidden parenthood; and the father, like Volpone, proclaims his forthcoming death to see what favors can be extracted in the hope of inheritance...
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...
Sifton would steal the show were it not for Adam Barr, who steals it from him. Barr, in the role of Tucker, the Gurney family manservant, injects the production with a dose of much-needed comic relief. As Tucker degenerates from perfect manservant to drunken, pitiable fool, Barr maintains his command over the stage and the audience...
Compared to Barr and Sifton, the other members of the Gurney family--Peter Ocko as Jack's uncle, Leta Hong Fincher as Ocko's wife and *** Tremoulet as their son--pale. While the three are adequate to good, Barr and Sifton save the play from being painful to watch...