‘The Cocktail Party’

Re “ ‘Cocktail Party’ Loses Its Fizz” by F. Kathleen Foley (May 27)--Foley has only been on the Theater Beat a short time and already she has made history: She is the first reviewer ever to accuse Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot of “psychobabble.”

Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party” has multifaceted characters, comedy, pathos and several twists in its fascinating plot--everything that a great play should have. It’s a complex play filled with poetic images that lead the audience to conversation and debate.

So what was Foley’s critique? She wanted the director (me) to approach the play with “a healthy spirit of iconoclasm.” Where does she get the impetus to suggest that the play should be performed other than how its author intended?

It used to be a compliment to suggest that a director was true to the playwright’s vision, but that was back when a director could direct a “Macbeth” that actually took place in Scotland. Nowadays directors feel compelled to impose their own “visions” on famous plays with choreographed movement, special effects, gender role reversals and other “tricks of the trade.” Such tricks are sometimes appropriate, but, with “The Cocktail Party,” a director need only see to it that the actors give great performances (which Foley acknowledges) and that the staging and design of the show (which Foley ignores) bring the playwright’s words and ideas to life.

Plays like “The Cocktail Party” are timely but make their points about the human condition with an eloquence that is increasingly absent from today’s plays, where the four-letter word is king.

LOREN LESTER

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