Cocktail Party

THERE are people who have seen Halley's Comet more often than they have seen a play in the Eliot House dining hall. The mere fact that someone has cared enough to mount a show in such unfamiliar surroundings automatically exempts the production from easy sneers about the House's obsession with prep schools and Straus Trophies.

Perhaps it is the unfamiliarity which gives the Eliot version of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party its distinct air of uneasiness. Director Ronald Fischler's entire company seems uncomfortable with its medium, too aware of being actors doing things actors ought to.

Fischler has obviously shaped his cast with a firm hand, but either because the hand was too firm or because the cast was too inexperienced, the effect is of posing rather than acting. Valentine Callahan is too much the effusive matron, Richard Deutsch too much the urbane globetrotter, Howard Beale altogether too much the wise but enigmatic doctor. It is as though everyone is expecting a photographer to take his picture at any moment, and by God, he's not going to be caught looking out of character when the flashbulb goes off.

I can't find too much to say about Warren Knowlton and Marty Ritter, as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Chamberlayne, the couple that gives and lives the cocktail party. Each seems to strike the right chord now and again, but more often they're just awkward enough to be vaguely troubling. Glenda Garrett is somewhat smoother than the others as Celia, and Harrison Drinkwater at least looks right as Peter; but no single actor is strong enough to hold things together by himself.

Just as the play concerns ordinary existence and some higher form of life which Eliot calls "trans-humanization," so the language alternates between verse which approximates the rhythms of everyday speech and, occasionally, transcedent bursts of poetry. But the current production hangs somewhere in between, slightly stilted when it wants to be conversational, slightly prosaic when it wants to be luminous. The net effect is to add to the sensation of discomfort.

Steven Flax's set doesn't help a great deal. Part of it is furniture rescued from the common room, and the rest is badly painted flats.

The best way to describe the entire show is that it is a faltering but admirable attempt. It won't do either to laugh at the production or to be condescending toward it. One only hopes that the people in Eliot House will try again, soon.