A production of A. R. Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour at Pittsburgh's South Park Theatre – in which I played Bradley, the pompous, septuagenarian patriarch who learns that he is the subject of a new play written by his playwright son – has just closed. It is a play that focuses on family conflicts and generational changes, but it is also a play that develops a fine critique of the contemporary drama and its prospects for the future in a changing world.
"Of course, nobody goes to the theatre anymore," Bradley pontificates, as he reflects aloud upon learning about the new play. All they do in the theatre these days, he goes on, is "stand around and shout obscenities" and then "they take off their clothes." In the old days, years ago, there were "good" plays¸ plays in which someone might have committed a "minor indiscretion," and everyone would have been very "attractive about it." Those were the days of the Lunts and Katherine Hepburn. The "good" plays he is talking about must have been plays like The Philadelphia Story and Blithe Spirit, drawing room comedies like most of Gurney’s own plays, The Cocktail Hour included.
These are drawing room comedies not because they necessarily take place in drawing rooms, but because they deal with the kind of people who actually might have drawing rooms, the social set to which Bradley feels he and his family belong. These are the people who belong to the country clubs, who sail their boats on the lake, who are "never too busy for the cocktail hour." The trouble is that their way of life has gone. All has changed. All is changed. There are no more maids to make ice and pass cheese. Cooks can't be depended on to keep the oven turned on. Married couples lead lives apart. Children are scattered all over the country. No one drinks with relish anymore; even his own sons and daughter have no time for the sacred cocktail hour. No one cares about their way of life, Bradley laments, not the younger generation, not the critics, not the modern theatre audiences.
Yet despite this lack of interest, The Cocktail Hour is at once Gurney’s love letter to the dying drawing room comedy and his deconstruction of the genre. It is one of those meta-plays, which is in fact about itself. Bradley tells John he could have put the family's skiing into his play. John replies that you can't very well put skiing on the stage. Bradley says that he could have at least mentioned it, and John says he did: thus, in fact, doing so.
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