Theater: Conversation Pieces

At a time when theatrical fashion seems to be running toward staged freak-outs and ad-libido dialogue, the APA Repertory Company chose two drawing-room comedies for the first productions of its 1968-69 Manhattan season. Each of them, moreover, is in verse: T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party and Molière's The Misanthrope. It was a brilliantly offbeat dramatic selection, but there, unfortunately, APA's brilliance ran out. The staging of the Eliot play is so inadequate that it points up weaknesses of the play that were not so apparent in the more religiously oriented atmosphere of 1950, when it first opened in Manhattan. And while The Misanthrope turns out well indeed, much of the credit belongs to Moliere's writing and Poet Richard Wilbur's lithe translation into conversational rhymed couplets—plus the wigs and swords and period couture that actors love to strut and fret with.

In The Cocktail Party, the actors are naked, as it were, in their ordinary clothes. There they sit, in what is supposed to be a fashionable London living room, giggling over silly society stories with tag lines like "Up in a tree: you and the Maharajah," and "Lady Klootz and the wedding cake." This is not exactly American-style froth, and it sounds odd enough in American voices, with their somewhat ponderous, unmusical delivery. And when one of the voices belongs to Comedienne Nancy Walker—solid and scrappy as ever, with her hair dyed firehouse red—the incongruity is almost painful. The play's central character, a mysterious psychiatrist called Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, who is given to gin-and-water and gnomic observations, is played by Sydney Walker with a kind of arch exaggeration that would surely prove more off-putting than compelling to the delicate souls he is out to snare.

Pomposities and Allusions. A devout convert to Anglo-Catholicism, Eliot consciously designed The Cocktail Party as a spiritual parable. It involves an underground league of "Guardians," apparently just as vain and frivolous as any of their social peers, but secretly dedicated to guiding others to salvation. Three characters in the play indicate Eliot's idea of the two paths to that goal: Celia, a married man's mistress, is guided to a saintly martyrdom ("crucified very near an anthill"); an unhappy couple named Edward and Lavinia are pointed toward the quotidian heroism of accepting their own and each other's shortcomings and simply getting on with their lives.

In the superb New York production of 1950, Alec Guinness brought an aura of mystery and suave authority to the part of Harcourt-Reilly, and Irene Worth as Celia evoked a taut sense of spiritual crisis. Without their skills, the confessional-psychiatric dialogue, which sends Celia off to her eventual anthill, sounds surprisingly specious and unconvincing. Suddenly more awkward than intriguing are Eliot's pomposities, like the stilted toast that the three Guardians intone to the future of their charges. And it no longer seems much fun to speculate on the writer's half-veiled allusions (do a pair of spectacles with one lens missing and a jaunty song about "The One-Eyed Riley" have something to do with Matthew 6:22?).