STAGE REVIEW : ‘Cocktail Hour’ Serves Up Mixed Concoction

Playwright A. R. Gurney Jr. is the perfect upper-middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant: upstanding, derisive, witty, controlled--and seething inside.

He’s given us chiseled landscapes of this hallowed WASPish terrain: that state of suspended animation where the passing order of the Old abuts uncomfortably against the brashness of the New. Consider “The Dining Room,” “The Middle Ages,” “The Perfect Party,” “Another Antigone.”

Now, with “The Cocktail Hour,” which opened Thursday at the Old Globe (launching that theater’s summer festival), Gurney has made a late-career leap to the autobiographical play. Call it the true confessions of a contumacious playwright--himself, barely disguised. Only its timing surprises.

John (Bruce Davison), who makes his living in publishing, has come for a weekend to visit his parents in upstate New York. He’s sharing an upscale cocktail hour with his mother and dad (Nancy Marchand and Keene Curtis) and later his sister (Holland Taylor), who drops in.

This is the repressed, stern and guilt-ridden world of Robert Anderson’s “I Never Sang for My Father” and Tina Howe’s “Painting Churches.” Self-flagellation is its natural heritage. “The Cocktail Hour” (not to be confused with T. S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party,” of which a lot is made in Gurney’s self-mocking piece) is also the ripest example of this world’s smartly literate inarticulation: clever talk that dances brightly all around a subject to avoid addressing it, particularly if emotions are involved.

John, who perceives himself as abused and unloved, has a hidden agenda. He’s exorcised his demons by writing a play about his family, his dad in particular, and he’s there to ask “permission” to produce it.

Permission ? This is a married man with nearly grown kids! He stuns even himself by this slavish sense of filial obligation. But, of course, it’s the trigger to lots of bright and acerbic situational cross fire--cocktail hour banter with a twist of sour grapes. It serves as the peg on which to hang all sorts of pent-up emotion, including a bitterly funny diatribe against uncredentialed critics and the frustrations of playing minor roles--in families and in plays.

Therapy or drama? Both, which wouldn’t matter if the self-examination were more incisive, the exchanges less genteel, the character changes more true.

Despite a long first act with virtually no action, we are carried aloft by the wit and glitter of the small talk. Gurney’s people, these in particular, excel in the art of conversation. But the playwright uses words the way nature uses plumage: to enchant, conceal, transport, disguise and ultimately deceive. Under the scintillating language, “The Cocktail Hour” is a shallow indictment of elementary Freudian family dynamics, with second-act resolutions (too pat and too late) that lack the ring of truth.

In terms of production, however, Gurney could hardly ask for better--from Steven Rubin’s elegant Colonial interior and his tellingly understated costumes, to Jack O’Brien’s urbane direction and splendid casting.

As the sister withering away in a life of suburban frustration, Taylor has a persuasive, breezy manner even in moments of deep despair. Davison is a perfect 10 as John, an indecisive, disappointed man, self-centered and weak and suffering acutely from undeclared rebellion. But it is the parents who shine.

Keene’s gruffness, polish and bluster as the father feed richly into Marchand’s sly portrayal of the mother who likes pretending she’s less knowing than she is. Her ambiguous semi-confessional scene in Act II is the evening’s highlight--a fascinating mix of the mildly mendacious and the absolutely real. Not unlike the play wherein it sits.

Performances at the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park run Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., until July 10. Tickets: $17-$24. (619) 239-2255.