In fact, he sports some of the more unfortunate characteristics of the ancient prophets. Prophets went about exaggerating everything that was wrong in their society and they warned what would happen if things didn’t change. They made dramatic, symbolic gestures to get their ideas across to people who didn’t want to hear them: Isaiah went out naked and Jeremiah wore a yoke around his neck. Edgar brandishes a gun, the device of a world perfecting itself for Armageddon, but as with his antecedents, to make people listen whether they would like to or not. Certainly it is an arrogant role to choose for oneself, and for his trouble Edgar suffers the expropriation of his faith in the idea of redemption and renewal. So the joke is on him.
Nevertheless, a community of perception has been
formed. Condemned, renounced and alone—dinner about to be served.
I must warn future directors and actors of the play that with a language frankly rhetorical and sometimes incantatory, with a playwright who prefers a hundred words to one gesture, with a text that neglects the ordinary benefits of characterization and the interaction of ordinarily characterized persons, in which the spectacle is static and the words tumultuous and relentless (in fact, that is the first image I had of a production—a storm of language contained by a minimum of gesture and movement), this play does not solicit conventional theatrical sentiment from its audience. It should not be hammered and twisted in order to do so. The actors should be discouraged from imagining histories for their characters or inventing relationships not indicated in the text. They should put on the words, as their costumes, and see what happens.
On the whole the production should be conceived in such a way as to keep the audience from thinking in practical terms and asking practical questions—as, for example, why nobody takes the gun away from Edgar. Perhaps the play should be thought of as spoken opera, with aria and recitative, the music being in the imagery, the action more grand than behavioral. The stage has to go through several metaphorical transformations, from a living room to a hijacked territory to an earth in apocalypse, to an ark. It might manage this more easily if the production did not suggest everyday naturalism.
The director will find a very thin line separating the portrayal of Edgar as a menace, or as no threat at all. Either extreme is wrong. Edgar is threatening but must keep the audience’s allegiance. The real suspense is to see how much diffuse complaint the artist can get away with before the occasion loses its power. The answer lies in each individual Edgar. There must be enough tension in the introduction
of the gun and its display, but not enough to appall the audience. In the original production the gun was handled as an unfamiliar object, definitely not as John Wayne or Clint Eastwood would handle it. In this country, perhaps now in all countries, the difficulty of introducing a gun onstage is in making it somehow more than the class of guns in Westerns, detective thrillers, guns in films and TV programs. The audience’s easy familiarity with the guns of popular culture must be stripped away—the sense of this gun must be of one introduced into their own living room.
Another recourse is to play the play as the comedy it is, not just at the beginning but all the way through: play against the melodrama of the piece, just touch the gun to the head and forgo the tensions of realistically threatening to blow someone’s brains out right there onstage. But in any case, Edgar should never leer, gloat, sneer, swagger or mock or tease the others. He is not
macho
. He is someone who helplessly tells his truth, as visionaries do, without tact. Acting against the lines, as it were, he may advance on Alan almost as if commanded by logic, and with glee, the popular culture must be stripped away—the sense of this gun to the head an extension of the argument, not the ending of it.
A final note: I have no compunction in saying that the last line of the play seems deliverable by either Claudette or Edgar, depending on the director’s point of view. The text here has Claudette speaking the last line. This would suggest the solace of shared perception, the acceptance of Edgar by the others of the party, the only consolation of his sacrifice. The variant, in which Edgar reads the last line (as was done in the original production), dispenses with this consolation, Edgar using the line to carry his despair to a form of sardonic illumination in which even the newly opened eyes of the others is seen to be useless. And now, you’re going to say it, he tells Claudette, in effect, and everything will go on and everything I’ve done here tonight
will have resulted in nothing, changed nothing, except that I have given my life for a small episode between drinks and dinner.
But I like the ending as printed. We’re on the ark, after all, and have been for some time.
E. L. D
.
Drinks Before Dinner
was first presented by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Public/Newman Theater in New York City on November 22, 1978, with the following cast:
EDGAR
Christopher Plummer
JOAN
Zohra Lampert
JOEL
Charles Kimbrough
CLAUDETTE
Barbara eda-Young
MICHAEL
James Naughton
ANDREA
Maria Tucci
GRACE
Virginia Vestoff
ALAN
Josef Sommer
BOY
John Kimbrough
GIRL
Carrie Horner
MAID/HOUSEKEEPER
Fiona Hale
Directed by Mike Nichols
Designed by Tony Walton
Lighting designed by Jennifer Tipton
Make-up designed by Way Bandy
CAST OF CHARACTERS
EDGAR
, married to
JOAN
MICHAEL
, married to
ANDREA
JOEL
, married to
CLAUDETTE
GRACE
ALAN
(the guest of honor)
BOY
, aged ten, son of Joel and Claudette
GIRL
, aged eight, daughter of Joel and Claudette
MAID/HOUSEKEEPER
Act One
The action takes place in the
modern, well-appointed sitting
room of a New York City
apartment. Big window upstage with a view
of the skyline at night.
Three couples are having drinks.
The couples are
EDGAR
and
JOAN
MICHAEL
and
ANDREA
JOEL
and
CLAUDETTE
(the host and hostess)
also onstage are a maid/housekeeper and two children
Later in this scene another guest,
GRACE
, will join the party
SCENE 1
(
At curtain: the preliminary stage of a dinner party when the host and hostess
,
JOEL
and
CLAUDETTE
,
present their children to the guests. There are two children, a
BOY
and
GIRL
,
ten and eight, in night clothes
.)
EDGAR
I won’t survive this evening.
JOAN
Don’t be that way. They’re lovely. Their parents are right to show them off.
(
The children are kissed by everyone and led off by the
MAID
.
Drinks and hors d’oeuvres are served
)
EDGAR
Forgive me, but let’s not have the evening we all expect to have. I won’t survive it. The children are beautiful but we would say so even if they were not. It’s one of the things we say. We all know what we say. We say of artists that we like them or that we don’t like them. We say of servants that they are difficult. We say of the hors d’oeuvres that we are on a diet. We say of the market that it is depressed. We say of a couple splitting it’s amazing it lasted as long as it did. And the hostess knows if her party is to be a success she must have someone of whom everyone has heard. And the guests form their opinions of the person of whom everyone has heard. And we all come away with a story for the next dinner party where we will all know what we say and meet someone of whom everyone has heard.
JOAN
And so, dear friends, adieu. It’s been a lovely evening.
CLAUDETTE
But that barely begins to suggest the interest of a dinner party. He assumes conversation is limited to
what is said. You haven’t mentioned the subtle and engrossing judgments we make of each other as we talk. The exquisite, discreet flirtations with which we entertain one another as we talk.
JOEL
And what about drinking? He’s left that out too.
CLAUDETTE
You’re a hard man, Edgar. Yes, someone is coming to my party of whom everyone has heard. I’m having someone the whole world knows! What am I to do? I was looking forward to my evening. I thought it would be memorable. What would you like it to be?
EDGAR
I don’t know. Memorable. Yes, for God’s sake, let it be memorable. Because something peculiar is going on, and I don’t know what it is. Nothing interests me. The things I’ve always done no longer seem worth doing. Whatever it was I believed is not worth believing. You’re all friends of enormous charm and glamour, but I can’t believe you still believe in the lives we lead. It’s very odd. Everything seems to me as tiresome as everything else. Nothing seems to be unquestionably worth doing. We are bored by everything and believe nothing, but we’re all going along on momentum, believing in what we did and believed in before because we don’t know what else to do.
JOAN
Edgar, if you were not feeling social, you should have excused yourself from the evening. We should not have come. That is the way to handle this sort of thing. There are appropriate occasions for the expression of dark despair, but this is not one of them.
EDGAR
I want to speak of something that matters. Why is that unsocial? Because you’re invited to dinner, must you abandon your mind?
CLAUDETTE
Actually, I rather like this tack. I rather like it.
EDGAR
I’m sure I can’t be the only one to feel this way. It amazes me how little I have to do in order to survive. It’s astonishing what little investment of care or attention
secures for me the right to live another day, and secures it in some comfort. I have to wonder if others do as little as I do. Do you care as little as I care? How has this happened? How do we get away with it?
ANDREA
I recognize that feeling. I think secretly everyone knows more than I know and is more competent in everything than I am. I feel if everyone knew how little I do, I would be sent away. You know, as children are from games: You can’t play. I’m waiting to be told I can’t play.
JOEL
Well, Andrea, I would never tell someone as lovely as you that she couldn’t play, And I don’t share Edgar’s malaise. I like what I do and I think it’s useful. Doctors are coming in for criticism these days, much of it justified. We’re not perfect. But I like what I do and I think I do it well. I’m happy to be in a society that allows me to do something useful, and to be paid well for doing it.
EDGAR
The point is, Joel, whose resources are maintaining us, I with my malaise and you with your smug self-satisfaction? Someone still has energy, but who? Not you. Not I. I see in my friends’ eyes feelings similar to my feelings. Is it our age? We have no more lust for our wives and no more attention for each other. We have no more lust for each other’s wives! We think of the young women who are available to us as pockets of desire and ignorance, as repetitions, we think of passion as repetition, and of passionate young women as repetitions of other passionate young women. Suppose someone were to walk in right now and I were immediately to fall in love. A little time sets everything right. If you smell the sweet hair of a young girl, it’s the scent of her shampoo. Very soon there are small defections from the thrall of love. She is reading the morning newspaper before you’re out the door. She says something about a failing or fault of yours, not in criticism, but as someone who occupies
your flaw or failing as you yourself do. One evening you have an intense discussion about the future. She turns out to plan ahead, like your wife. One day you see they have separately bought the same dress. They have separately chosen the same scarf and separately want to know if you like it.
JOAN
I should explain that Edgar hasn’t begun to speak frankly of his feelings and his lusts only now when they’re obsolete; he has always broadcast the state of his feelings. He has always shared his feelings, whatever they were, with me as with his previous wives, and in fact has been generous enough to assign us a share of responsibility for those feelings. I notice now the young women to whom he is not married have come in for their share of responsibility. I find that interesting.
CLAUDETTE
Joel, perhaps someone wants another drink?
JOAN
But in Edgar’s life of changing feelings one thing remains the same and it is that women are creatures upon whom he makes his choices. We may be wives or passionate young women repetitious of other passionate young women, but we are here for him to do with as he chooses, to be fucked or not to be fucked, because we exist solely for the sake of his choosing, so that he may resolve his changing definitions of himself and make his aesthetic distinctions, and carry on the progress of his moral life.