Party Pooper

By T.E.K.

DRINKS BEFORE DINNER by E.L. Doctorow

This is a play in which a dinner party guest holds his fellow guests and hosts at gunpoint for much of the evening, but talks them to death first. The talk is cosmic-broody and Manhattan cocktail-party modern, which may be a redundancy. As with an onion, the peeling away of each layer of speechifying in Drinks Before Dinner leaves less and less to behold.

The austerely elegant apartment setting at Joseph Papp's off-Broadway Public Theater is an antiseptic anteroom of an urban purgatory. A cubistic formation of white, black, lucite and chrome, the room suggests that a fashionable decorator has just made a hasty exit. The people E.L. Doctorow assembles here, in his first play, are upper-middle-class professionals and old friends whose blood count has been lowered by civilization.

They are the pampered slaves of enervating rituals, of which this dinner party is one. Perhaps Doctorow himself has attended one too many of these gatherings since he attained renown with his bestselling novel Ragtime. If so, he has achieved a suitable revenge. Before he flashes the handgun, Edgar (Christopher Plummer), the garrulous gadfly of the group, says quite flatly, "I can't believe that you still believe in the lives we lead."

The gun is Edgar's whimsically chosen twofold device for waking up these affluent and effete somnambulists to the empty nature of their existence and the imminent prospect of mass extinction. Edgar's gun comes closest to smoking when he has the guest of honor, a Kissinger-like Secretary of State, trussed up in a chair and holds the weap on to the dignitary's head, while the pair reach a tongue-blistering stalemate on the accommodations of power vs. the demands of conscience. Two ideas have entered Doctorow's play on a double ladder of descent. Ennui, anomie -- the catatonic state of buried lives -- was summed up by Kierkegaard when he called despair "the sickness unto death."

The supremacy of anarchy and annihilation was discerned by Dostoyevsky when he wrote that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. Doctorow simply secularizes that prophecy into supine universal unconcern, ecological devastation and the nuclear holocaust.

This could be worth resaying if Shaw or Stoppard were in the pulpit, but despite First Reader Plummer's acute rendering of Doctorow's wry, sardonic and satiric sermon, Drinks Before Dinner is a smudge pot of a drama that never blazes into revelation.

-- T.E.K.

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