Theater: Puzzle Box the Perfect Party

Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. is a cocktail party charmer--funny, deft with words, genially self-mocking and ever ready to step in before the discussion gets too heavy. His best plays, The Dining Room and The Middle Ages, have been set at social events and have had the rambling, episodic quality of witty but wayward conversation. Not surprisingly, a fiftyish college professor who fancies himself capable of shaping an ideal evening is at the center of Gurney's sprightly new puzzle box of a play, The Perfect Party.

Outwardly, the show, which opened off Broadway last week, is a farce. In pursuit of his ambition, the mild-mannered host (John Cunningham) squabbles with his wife (Debra Mooney), snubs friends, forces drinks on the unwilling, tries to orchestrate the tempo of encounters, wages war against spontaneity. His every move is being judged by a remorselessly bitchy critic (Charlotte Moore) from a newspaper resembling the New York Times. Her very presence indicates that Gurney has metaphors in mind. Other hints include references to Oscar Wilde, whose epigrams the characters mimic, and a mounted portrait of Hawthorne, master of allegory.

Gurney equates staging the unachievable perfect party with creating theater itself--assembling arbitrarily chosen people in an arbitrarily chosen place to act out an externally imposed story. The play closes in a Shavian debate about a larger theme that resonates through all of Gurney's work: America, he says, has lost its sense of absolutes and faces the painful task of living with ambiguity. Striving for perfection in any endeavor signals an inability to cope with an unsettled world. This pastiche, conveying more than a casual cocktail notion, could easily be pretentious. Gurney makes it sly.