Word: tadjedin
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Directed by Massy Tadjedin...
...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...
...fellow students act out a play by a poet who once seemed untouchably historical but who now seems like only another Harvard alum, and we realize that the play we have (barely) seen might actually be a reflection. The insolubility of Eliot's thought is not a result of Tadjedin's failure to properly direct The Cocktail Party. Rather, it is its greatest strength. It is comforting at least that the characters Eliot has created for us are just as bewildered as we are--yet, it offers no relief...
...going to miss Phil," Tadjedin said. "He was very easy to work with and his political experience was invaluable...