People with little to hide: The Cocktail Hour, by A.R. Gurney

The Cocktail Hour, a play by A.R. Gurney, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, December 7.

We like A.R. Gurney's plays, having seen Love Letters, The Snow Ball, and now The Cocktail Hour. This last play on Saturday night left me a little let down. The friendly but unsatisfied review by Don Aucoin in the Boston Globe seemed accurate to me.

The young playwright John, played by James Waterston, has brought his play manuscript home for the family to read and approve. The play is about his family, with the father taking a lead role. His patrician and cranky father does not approve -- he doesn't like the idea of the truth being displayed up there on the stage. (Who would?) The family members are generally well drawn, though the sister Nina seems a little odd (she's contented living a family life of many small contentments, yet the actress Pamela J. Gray plays her as being easily riled about her unfulfilled life -- the contradiction bothered me). John struck me as a toned down Woody Allen. Great performances by Richard Poe as the prosperous easy-going father Bradley, and Maureen Anderman, as the apparently ditzy mother Ann. They were both perfect as wealthy, monied Buffalonians who live along Delaware Avenue, near the art gallery.

There are lots of small laughs along the way. I recognized myself and my family in the words and characters. That John goes back home to Buffalo to receive approval for his play, well, that certainly hits home with me. It becomes obvious that John's play is actually the play we are watching, and this has a dated feel to it. We know this is experimental, and there's no compelling reason for it.

It occurred to me that these people, these characters, in fact don't really have any momentous secrets to hide. John wants to create some drama...but there really isn't any, at least not in this play. These are ordinary, decent people, not saints. Their ordinariness is both endearing and troubling. That there is in fact no great conflict, or actual confrontations of the type that John talks about regarding his mother, is what left me feeling that the play is somehow unfinished and unsatisfying.