'The Cocktail Hour' Opens Over Weekend at Bowie Playhouse

Bowie Community Theatre’s current production of A. R. Gurney’s 1988 genteel comedy of manners The Cocktail Hour opened on April 1 for a 3-weekend run with performances at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday evenings through April 16 and at 2 p.m. matinees on April 3 and 10 at Bowie Playhouse in .

Set in upstate New York in the mid 1970s, The Cocktail Hour has been called Gurney’s finest play perhaps in part because it is considered to be his most autobiographical. 

It tells of middle-aged playwright John who returns to his parents’ home to get their permission so that he can produce a play about them. 

His father Bradley is a retired businessman, and his mother Ann a socialite concerned about maintaining her family’s comfortable status quo.

John’s well-to-do WASP parents are horrified at the prospect of having their private lives and family skeletons exposed on stage by their son’s play.

Living near her parents, John’s sister Nina has come to dinner and seems less distressed about his airing family secrets and instead is annoyed that she is only a minor character in John’s play.  Perfect daughter Nina indeed may be a minor character in her parents’ lives as well.

BCT’s production is smartly directed by Scott Bloom who has selected a quartet of excellent actors who are credible as genteel members of a traditional WASP family. 

Helping to create the illusion of genteel elegance is the impeccable set design of John Mecholsky and of the 18 member crew who constructed the fine set.  From grand piano to elegant wing chair to selection of paintings and accessories, almost everything bespeaks a bygone era of refined gentility.

Family life seems to revolve around the all-important cocktail hour before dinner for Bradley, well played by Bill Jones, who insists on mixing everyone’s drinks and keeping the conversation going brightly until he is alone with son John.

Also savoring the cocktail hour ritual is Ann, as played by Nancy Linden, ordering “just a splash more” and convincing us by her demeanor that she perhaps could have bested Katherine Hepburn in a tennis match.  Linden conveys Ann’s nonconformist past that includes her own attempt at writing.

Terry Averill projects John’s self-absorption, his torment at not being loved enough by his parents and his current need to gain their approval.  Averill’s John delights in commenting on then contemporary 1980s culture.

Jo Sullivan portrays Nina in all her complexity, as frustrated at not being appreciated as the perfect daughter as she is at being only a minor character in John’s play, Sullivan’s Nina convinces us that she could find fulfillment by training Seeing Eye dogs.      

Elsewhere we are intrigued by playwright Gurney’s comments on the state of 1980s theater in such lines as “noisy British musicals” and “plays filled with obscenities and nudity” that make up only part of the rich humor throughout the play.

Humor and witty family discussions add up to an entertaining evening that we can cheerfully toast at The Cocktail Hour at Bowie Playhouse.  Order tickets online at BCTheatre.com or at 301-805-0219.