Drinks Before Dinner

by E. L. Doctorow

  EDGAR Christopher Plummer

  JOAN Zohra Lampert

  JOEL Charles Kimbrough

  CLAUDETTE Barbara eda-Young

  MICHAEL James Naughton

  ANDREA Maria Tucci

  GRACE Virginia Vestoff

  ALAN Josef Sommer

  BOY John Kimbrough

  GIRL Carrie Horner

  MAID/HOUSEKEEPER Fiona Hale

  Directed by Mike Nichols

  Designed by Tony Walton

  Lighting designed by Jennifer Tipton

  Make-up designed by Way Bandy

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  EDGAR, married to

  JOAN

  MICHAEL, married to

  ANDREA

  JOEL, married to

  CLAUDETTE

  GRACE

  ALAN (the guest of honor)

  BOY, aged ten, son of Joel and Claudette

  GIRL, aged eight, daughter of Joel and Claudette

  MAID/HOUSEKEEPER

  Act One

  The action takes place in the

  modern, well-appointed sitting

  room of a New York City

  apartment. Big window upstage with a view

  of the skyline at night.

  Three couples are having drinks.

  The couples are

  EDGAR and JOAN

  MICHAEL and ANDREA

  JOEL and CLAUDETTE (the host and hostess)

  also onstage are a maid/housekeeper and two children

  Later in this scene another guest, GRACE, will join the party

  SCENE 1

  (At curtain: the preliminary stage of a dinner party when the host and hostess, JOEL and CLAUDETTE, present their children to the guests. There are two children, a BOY and GIRL, ten and eight, in night clothes.)

  EDGAR I won’t survive this evening.

  JOAN Don’t be that way. They’re lovely. Their parents are right to show them off.

  (The children are kissed by everyone and led off by the MAID. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres are served)

  EDGAR Forgive me, but let’s not have the evening we all expect to have. I won’t survive it. The children are beautiful but we would say so even if they were not. It’s one of the things we say. We all know what we say. We say of artists that we like them or that we don’t like them. We say of servants that they are difficult. We say of the hors d’oeuvres that we are on a diet. We say of the market that it is depressed. We say of a couple splitting it’s amazing it lasted as long as it did. And the hostess knows if her party is to be a success she must have someone of whom everyone has heard. And the guests form their opinions of the person of whom everyone has heard. And we all come away with a story for the next dinner party where we will all know what we say and meet someone of whom everyone has heard.

  JOAN And so, dear friends, adieu. It’s been a lovely evening.

  CLAUDETTE But that barely begins to suggest the interest of a dinner party. He assumes conversation is limited to what is said. You haven’t mentioned the subtle and engrossing judgments we make of each other as we talk. The exquisite, discreet flirtations with which we entertain one another as we talk.

  JOEL And what about drinking? He’s left that out too.

  CLAUDETTE You’re a hard man, Edgar. Yes, someone is coming to my party of whom everyone has heard. I’m having someone the whole world knows! What am I to do? I was looking forward to my evening. I thought it would be memorable. What would you like it to be?

  EDGAR I don’t know. Memorable. Yes, for God’s sake, let it be memorable. Because something peculiar is going on, and I don’t know what it is. Nothing interests me. The things I’ve always done no longer seem worth doing. Whatever it was I believed is not worth believing. You’re all friends of enormous charm and glamour, but I can’t believe you still believe in the lives we lead. It’s very odd. Everything seems to me as tiresome as everything else. Nothing seems to be unquestionably worth doing. We are bored by everything and believe nothing, but we’re all going along on momentum, believing in what we did and believed in before because we don’t know what else to do.

  JOAN Edgar, if you were not feeling social, you should have excused yourself from the evening. We should not have come. That is the way to handle this sort of thing. There are appropriate occasions for the expression of dark despair, but this is not one of them.

  EDGAR I want to speak of something that matters. Why is that unsocial? Because you’re invited to dinner, must you abandon your mind?

  CLAUDETTE Actually, I rather like this tack. I rather like it.

  EDGAR I’m sure I can’t be the only one to feel this way. It amazes me how little I have to do in order to survive. It’s astonishing what little investment of care or attention secures for me the right to live another day, and secures it in some comfort. I have to wonder if others do as little as I do. Do you care as little as I care? How has this happened? How do we get away with it?

  ANDREA I recognize that feeling. I think secretly everyone knows more than I know and is more competent in everything than I am. I feel if everyone knew how little I do, I would be sent away. You know, as children are from games: You can’t play. I’m waiting to be told I can’t play.

  JOEL Well, Andrea, I would never tell someone as lovely as you that she couldn’t play, And I don’t share Edgar’s malaise. I like what I do and I think it’s useful. Doctors are coming in for criticism these days, much of it justified. We’re not perfect. But I like what I do and I think I do it well. I’m happy to be in a society that allows me to do something useful, and to be paid well for doing it.

  EDGAR The point is, Joel, whose resources are maintaining us, I with my malaise and you with your smug self-satisfaction? Someone still has energy, but who? Not you. Not I. I see in my friends’ eyes feelings similar to my feelings. Is it our age? We have no more lust for our wives and no more attention for each other. We have no more lust for each other’s wives! We think of the young women who are available to us as pockets of desire and ignorance, as repetitions, we think of passion as repetition, and of passionate young women as repetitions of other passionate young women. Suppose someone were to walk in right now and I were immediately to fall in love. A little time sets everything right. If you smell the sweet hair of a young girl, it’s the scent of her shampoo. Very soon there are small defections from the thrall of love. She is reading the morning newspaper before you’re out the door. She says something about a failing or fault of yours, not in criticism, but as someone who occupies your flaw or failing as you yourself do. One evening you have an intense discussion about the future. She turns out to plan ahead, like your wife. One day you see they have separately bought the same dress. They have separately chosen the same scarf and separately want to know if you like it.

  JOAN I should explain that Edgar hasn’t begun to speak frankly of his feelings and his lusts only now when they’re obsolete; he has always broadcast the state of his feelings. He has always shared his feelings, whatever they were, with me as with his previous wives, and in fact has been generous enough to assign us a share of responsibility for those feelings. I notice now the young women to whom he is not married have come in for their share of responsibility. I find that interesting.

  CLAUDETTE Joel, perhaps someone wants another drink?

  JOAN But in Edgar’s life of changing feelings one thing remains the same and it is that women are creatures upon whom he makes his choices. We may be wives or passionate young women repetitious of other passionate young women, but we are here for him to do with as he chooses, to be fucked or not to be fucked, because we exist solely for the sake of his choosing, so that he may resolve his changing definitions of himself and make his aesthetic distinctions, and carry on the progress of his moral life.

  EDGAR Maybe it is chauvinist to mourn the failure of love or the death of the presumption of love. But you seem capable, without any grant from me, of making your own moral distinctions and carrying on the progress of your own moral life. You don’t need
permission from me. Surely what women have been saying in the past few years is that marriage proves nothing and sustains no one. Why do you fight it? What small damp hankie of domestic hope do you carry balled in your fist? How many friends of yours were separated last week? How many divorced? We need a calculator to keep track of these things. Here is a husband with his vasectomy discovering the diaphragm in his wife’s purse. Here is a wife turning off the downstairs lights at dawn. Here they are arguing about what one of them said to the other. Here they are arguing about how much one of them drinks. Or how much one of them spends. Or here they are arguing about nothing at all, talking about nothing at all, in no apparent conflict at all. Here she is running to the bank with the passbooks. Here he is shouting at his lawyer. Marriages are bombed, machine-gunned, they fall away screaming with their arms thrown up.

  ANDREA Oh, that is too frightening to talk about. It is true. And you always wonder when you are next, when your death of love is next, because the war is all around you.

  EDGAR We’re all changing. None of us is exempt. It is happening to us all. How can I be a chauvinist if my personality no longer supports me, if it has failed, if my concept of the person has failed, if our reasons for the person are failing, and that all of us now in this country, fucking or being fucked, are persons whose being as persons has failed.

  JOEL Is that all it is? For a moment I thought it was serious.

  CLAUDETTE Tell me, Edgar, don’t you enjoy anything? Is nothing right? Is nothing good? Doesn’t anything give you pleasure? Perhaps these things you’re saying give you pleasure, perhaps you like to distinguish yourself by saying these things. But to me it’s like juggling or standing on your head—it’s impressive and distinctive, but of no demonstrable importance.

  EDGAR But everyone knows what I’m saying. I can’t distinguish myself by saying these things. We are all saying them. Our novelists in books, our crooners in Las Vegas, our social workers and church spokesmen, our killers in saloons and our maniacs in wards—who is not saying these things? We reward people who say these things in the right way. This is the culture of saying things, this is the society in which these things are supposed to be said. The very fact of our saying these things is part of what these things are. So what you see when you walk the streets are people rushing along like this with radios to their ears. They are listening to the radios as they walk. They watch television when they get home and turn on the record players while the television sets are going; they are trying to keep up. They are reading papers as they walk along listening to radios. They are stopping in front of appliance stores to watch the banks of TV sets while they listen to their radios with their newspapers tucked under their arms. They don’t know how to keep up. They are reading reviews of movies based on plays taken from novels. They are going to school to study the novels upon which films they have seen are based. They remember the films about the lives of the authors of the novels they study upon which the lectures are based. They are trying to keep up.

  JOEL Well, if I understand Edgar correctly, he’s saying our culture consumes us. But didn’t people say that too in the eighteenth century when novels began to be published? He also says that passion does not last, but I am not sure it should. Can you imagine the effect of a constant lifelong passion on one’s prostate? He says our relationships are easily duplicated. But that’s what it means to have been evicted from Eden. So where’s the news in any of this? It has undoubtedly been true before our time that it appeared to somebody or other that nothing seemed to be worth doing. So it is tiresome to wring one’s hands over this. Perhaps something crucial has happened and we are becoming depleted persons in some way. But I look around and see so much unregenerate ego in human beings that I would welcome a loss of person for all of us, across the board. In fact, it is hugely funny to me that Edgar, with his formidable ego and a mind given over to its own inimitable hysteria, should worry over his loss of character. It is enormously funny. A doctor learns early in his career, that most illnesses are imaginary. It is a form of narcissism, of course. People love themselves more in the fear of death.

  ANDREA But he is talking of how we are compromised, and I understand that. I really understand that. The way we all duplicate each other. I really do understand that and feel that when I walk in the street and see other girls not only wearing my clothes but walking my walk. Oh, how I understand that. Life is becoming unclear. The lines are disappearing. I see women who are men and men who are women. I suppose I should say my idea of life is no longer clear. I see in old movies dead people who are still alive. They live in states of high drama. They have more life than I have.

  CLAUDETTE Good, Andrea dear. Let it be that way. Drama is to be avoided. I want to live my life as undramatically as possible. I want to live quietly and watch my children grow and keep my family fed and clean and enjoy beautiful things, and not be hurt by anyone. Besides which, whatever we know about our lives, we go on living them. Isn’t that right? Even you, Andrea. Even Edgar. No matter what we say of it, life requires us to go on living it. It is the custom of life to go on with itself no matter what we say or what we feel. It has that aspect of requiring us to go on with it. Life is so totally careless of what we feel or what we know, or think we feel or think we know, that all our emotions and thoughts are continuously superseded by other emotions and other thoughts because life pushes on and forces us to continue living it. So that even if we are blissfully happy, it pushes on until we are not; even if we are in love, it pushes on until we are not; and even if we discover something marvelous or do something that makes us famous, it pushes on. It just goes through a whole lifetime of our feelings, careless of all of them, not giving a damn for any of them, except I suppose our last feeling before we die. When we have got life to stop to accommodate our feeling, we die. And what we said about it and felt about it is gone, and what we thought is gone, and our anger is gone, and the expression of our eyes and the character of our smiles, that’s all gone. And if we knew how to embroider or sing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” that’s gone too.

  JOEL So it is clear, then, that those who do best in life are those who get on with it. Life is surely merciful to those who get on with it. Yes. So that is what we do. We get up in the morning and go about our business. We get up and go to our jobs, if we have jobs, or to the unemployment lines those who don’t have them. And there is the holding of a job and then losing it, or the looking for a job and not finding it, and of course the getting of a job and hating it. All that is getting on with it. Meeting someone, making a marriage of whatever duration, is getting on with it. Having a job and having a family is surely getting on with it. And everyone each morning, no matter what his or her feelings, gets up and gets on with it. And that is what makes the romance of the cities.

  MICHAEL I beg your pardon, did you say the romance of the cities?

  JOEL Look at those lights. Isn’t that romance? Isn’t that human enterprise shining like a constellation? Don’t tell me I can’t walk in the park at night. We’re a great civilization. There was poverty and disease in Renaissance Italy. There was filth and degradation in Edwardian London. Were these not great civilizations? You feel the romance of the city by living in it. You feel it in the lights of the evening, you feel it in the day when everyone is going about his business. A person’s spirit is lifted by the doing of what everyone else is doing at the same time. That is the appeal, for example, of public dancing. That is the appeal of soldiers marching. In this country we work on our own behalf but together with others who work on their own behalf. The spirit is lifted by the numbers of people working for their future in the same rhythms as others working for their future. The spirit rises on the numbers of people going about their own business together through the streets in the mornings at random speeds and in different rhythms of walking.

  EDGAR Yes, so that the spirit is lifted that way, I can see that. It is lifted by the numbers of people walking to their places of business. I agree with that. It is lifted too by the numbers
of derelicts marching through the streets to their places of business. It is lifted on the dancing steps of child prostitutes and in the happy song of their pimps. It is lifted on the merry tinkle of empty wine bottles breaking against the sides of buildings, it is lifted on the soaring coloratura of the police cars and ambulances and fire engines going about their business. And it’s lifted to its heights in the exhalations of the dying. People who die, as they are murdered in the streets at night or in the operating rooms of the hospitals in the early morning, release with their last scream the great hallelujah of their dying, and altogether the stabbed and shot and butchered and starved, the overdosed and run-over and burned alive, lift the rest of our spirits in their chorus of dying breath so that we may gaze down in philosophic happiness at the greatness of our civilization.

  (The sound of the doorbell, JOEL and CLAUDETTE stand and look at each other)

  CLAUDETTE But he said he’d be delayed. (She goes to the doorway) No, wait, it’s Grace. Darling!

  (Everyone regroups for the new arrival, GRACE enters and is greeted by CLAUDETTE, JOEL, and then by MICHAEL and ANDREA. EDGAR and JOAN are, for a moment, alone)

  JOAN (To EDGAR) What has gotten into you! Are you aware of the pains they’ve taken to make this evening successful? You’re being awful! Putting everyone in a state, acting like some nasty destructive child—if you don’t stop, we’ll be asked to leave. In fact, I won’t wait to be asked.

  (The new guest, GRACE, is led toward them and JOAN puts on a smiling face, CLAUDETTE’s introductions are not here effusive. They are cursory first-name sort. GRACE sits down and receives a drink. Almost everyone sits. There is an awkward silence)

  GRACE Has anyone seen the Hopper retrospective at the Modern?

  JOAN Yes, isn’t it marvelous?

  GRACE I was disappointed. I used to like Hopper. Now I find I dislike him.