What's Ticking on the Table?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

An aging father and mother who seem drawn from a New Yorker cartoon are hectoring their middle-aged playwright son about the "need" for less of his satirical japery and for more plays of the kind they used to enjoy -- elegant talk, beautiful clothes, faintly risque hints of extramarital indiscretion. They want entertainment to affirm life, not scrutinize it. Having sampled truth, they prefer illusion. Atop the coffee table, looking innocuous yet posing a threat so potent that a grown daughter claims to hear it "ticking," is yet another of the son's kind of play. This one is overtly about the family, and he has come to ask their permission to let it be produced.

The name of the son's script, The Cocktail Hour, is the same as the work onstage. The setting, "upstate New York," is plainly the native Buffalo of its author, A.R. Gurney (The Dining Room). Gurney's actual family has made little secret of its distaste for being portrayed in his work ever since his cartoonish Love in Buffalo was mounted at Yale School of Drama in 1958, while he was a student there. Yet the puckish hint of autobiography is only one of the charms of The Cocktail Hour, which opened off-Broadway last week.

As always with Gurney, an outward simplicity conceals a puzzle hunter's trove of puns, metaphors and hidden allusions. In the opening scene, the father misquotes a literary reference and the son, in gentle correction, claims that Coleridge said the three great plots were Oedipus Rex, Tom Jones and Volpone. Sure enough, the play turns out to be, like Oedipus, a struggle between father and son; the play within a play hinges, like Tom Jones, on questions of hidden parenthood; and the father, like Volpone, proclaims his forthcoming death to see what favors can be extracted in the hope of inheritance.

What makes The Cocktail Hour Gurney's most emotionally satisfying play is that audiences need not catch any of these highfalutin references to savor a splendid, old-fashioned family confrontation. This is indeed a play of the style celebrated by the parents, in which secrets are discovered, forgiveness bestowed and the ending genuinely happy. Its theme is universal. Why, Gurney asks, when family relationships look so much alike, does each turn out to be unique? Why, despite good intentions, do parents love one child more than another -- and why do the children keep caring, right into their own old age?

Jack O'Brien has preserved his deft, unobtrusive staging of the original production at San Diego's Old Globe Theater, where he is artistic director, and has retained a splendid company: Bruce Davison as the playwright, Holland Taylor as his discontented sister, Keene Curtis as their fussy paterfamilias and Emmy winner Nancy Marchand as the mother. Puffing up her husband, belittling her offspring, getting slowly sozzled with "just a splash" -- a command she never barks the same way twice -- Marchand at first appears silly and superficial. Like the play, she turns out to have surprising depths.