Growing up in Buffalo, I used to roller skate and later bicycle from my own sidewalks (Lafayette Avenue, then Bird Avenue) to ones with those lavish homes (the parkways -- Lincoln and Chapin -- and Soldiers Place, Gates Circle, Delaware Avenue, Dana Road, etc.) and wonder.
As dusk would settle, those sprawling mansions peeking through the lush Dutch elms seemed lonely. All the rooms were dark, usually, save for a flickering glow in one corner room. It made you wonder what was going on.
Thanks to A. R. Gurney's newest play, "The Cocktail Hour," which opened Thursday in New York's Promenade Theatre, I think I found out. And I liked a lot of it. (I also cannot tell a lie: I get a kick out of hearing hometown references -- the Gallery, the Philharmonic, Tilinghast, Lake Erie, the Erlanger, Ex-Cel Market, the Saturn Club, the Niagara River).
"The Cocktail Hour" is set in Buffalo but, for dramatic purposes, Buffalonian Gurney calls it a city in upstate New York. John, the playwright son, has ventured home to seek his father's permission to present a play he has written in which the father is a central figure.
People are also reading…
Father could be taken for stuffy if it weren't for some double-layered zingers he aims at the modern theater.
"Nobody likes long plays," he declares. "Everybody wants to get it over with and go home to bed." He's opposed to "people standing around on stage, shouting obscenities and taking off their clothes."
Father's name is Bradley -- no last names for any of the family -- and he is played by Keene Curtis with proper arrogance and endearing reserve. Father is skeptical about the son involving the clan in theater.
There was that other play about the family where "the last critic said we weren't worth writing about." Pop would prefer John wait until everyone is dead and then "you can put it on right here in Memorial Auditorium."
Enter actress Nancy Marchand, another Buffalonian, wonderfully engaging and saucy as Ann, Bradley's wife and John's mother. The cocktail hour is sacred, she reminds everyone.
"We're never too busy for it. . .the bishop said the cocktail hour took the place of evening prayer." Bradley is obsessed with dying, says Ann. He announced it on his 40th birthday, maybe 35 years before.
"When we go to bed," she says plaintively, "he doesn't say good night, he says goodbye." Bradley thinks he wards off the grim reaper by reading the Bible at night -- "surprisingly good reading and good insurance."
John and his sister, Nina, are attractively played by Bruce Davidson and Holland Taylor. Each holds up well as an individual. She's dedicated to dogs. He's passionate about plays. Even another son, Jigger, unseen but an ever-present part of the dynamic between Bradley and John, scattered between their volleying quotes of Emerson and Byron, gets to express his love of boats.
As the family prepares to dine together (an off-stage temporary cook has taken forever with the food befores she's discharged, giving good theatrical time for an intoxicatingly funny and tender cocktail hour) the properly-raised son puts on his tie out of habit but with cheerful resignation. The father turns off the lamps in the living room and off goes Gurney's group to a corner room where the candles have been lighted.
I wanted to join them.
