T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party is given a crackling-good presentation by The Actors Company Theatre (TACT) at the Beckett Theater on Theatre Row. How can this intellectual play, concerning commonplace domestic situations, written as poetry, crackle? With the fine cast, even the shallow banter at the beginning is intriguing and engaging as discussions become more complex in an ironic marital situation. There is a mystery, an exploration of psychiatric interpretation, descriptions and analysis of complex goals in life.
Eliot's keen analytic mind, his weird sense of humor, and his underlying Catholic mysticism with a fatalistic view of life in which you have to choose and face the consequences, becomes more and more fascinating. There is even a symbolic Trinity. Cool.
It is really well directed, with perfect timing, by Scott Alan Evans, and period (1950) costumes by David Toser enhance the play.
The set by Andrew Liebermann and Laura Jellinek is simple and quite stark, and its concept of gradually opening up doors and windows as the conflicts spill out doesn't quite work for me, nor does the transparent ceiling with light shining through it. In that opening act, when the actors are downstage, they are in shadow. Lighting by Aaron Copp is clear in Part Two, and gives a bit too much illumination in Part Three as plot is illuminated. The text would have been enough. TACT is one of the finest ensembles in this city, and The Cocktail Party is an intellectually stimulating, quite entertaining piece of Theater that will provoke thought, conversation and argument well into the night.
