Stage

...The cocktail hour, as the father in the play sees it, is a quiet moment in which a libation celebrates the family and the society in which it functions and paves the way to the next ritual, the family dinner...

...perhaps she had been to see My Brilliant Career at her local moviehouse...

...At the end of the play, she has adopted a child and the suggestion is that she has found a certain solidity as a single mother, but nothing in the play or the character makes motherhood look like anything but an occasion for Heidi's next disappointment...

...Since Gurney's dialogue and his stage business effectively dramatize the family's talent for avoiding unpleasantness, he does not have to explain it-or have his surrogate playwright explain it...

...then, shepherded by the Seattle Rep's Daniel Sul-livan, it moved to a well-received off-Broadway debut and then to Broadway...

...She is supposed to be an expert on female artists, correcting the sexual imbalance in the history of art, and we see her in lectures at the beginning of each act...

...If Heidi as activist and Heidi as unrealized lover are a bit difficult to accept in her Chronicles, Heidi as art historian is impossible...

...It was Gurney who defined his people, in The Dining Room, as "The Wasps of the Northeastern United States," and critics have picked up the label and used it pejoratively as though Gurney's choice of setting robbed his plays of emotional content...

...We are supposed to understand the distress within the character, which surfaces primarily in runs of nervousness and in one unlikely overt moment in which she turns a speech at an alumnae gathering into a high whine of generational regret...

...Gurney's The Cocktail Hour began at San Diego's Old Globe Theater and thert, shepherded by the Globe's Jack O'Brien, opened off-Broadway where it settled 9 into a long, comfortable run...

...The audience follows Heidi's progress in brief scenes that teeter on the edge of broad satire and sometimes, as in the consciousness-raising meeting, fall over completely...

...It has always been a cross for the children and for the constantly changing servants in the kitchen trying to keep the dinner until the paternal whistle is well wetted...

...Her manner is oddly frothy, her disclosure decorated with what I think of as wee academic jokies...

...The chief weakness of the play is that it has no dramatic center...

...Just because people live in well-appointed rooms, dress with casual elegance, and speak full sentences does not mean that they cannot have their fair share of the world's suffering...

...As a comic writer, Wasserstein can see what is ludicrous in the convoluted social history of the last fifteen years...

...Heidi's oldest woman friend, the only other important character in the play, is a Wasserstein joke, a chameleon who becomes whatever the moment requires: a ditsy sexpot, a jargonesque feminist, a member of an ecological commune, a power-lunch paragon in the entertainment business...

...The hour we take part in here is a special one since the playwriting son (who earns his living as an editor, not as a professor, as Gurney does) has come to ask permission to produce a play about the family...

...It is a valid point, but The Cocktail Hour too often makes it rather than embodies it...

...As with the student in The Dining Room who uses his aunt's demonstration of the correct table setting for an anthropology project, the playwright is assumed to be betraying the family...

...Heidi remains pretty much the same throughout the fifteen years-concerned, but a little cold, a little distant, her involvement tinged with self-irony...

...There is much more to the play: sibling rivalry, for instance, and a family secret that son must worm from the mother, a closet novelist...

...It takes place in familiar Gurney country-an affluent family in upstate New York (read, Buffalo...

...Had I been shopping for a Pulitzer possibility, I might have lingered longer over Hour...

...In part, that is a product of the unanchored Heidi described in the paragraph above...

...Joan Allen is one of the finest reactors among American performers (consider last year's Tony-winning performance in Burn This), but however fascinating it is to watch Allen work, Heidi remains flaccid...

...The ending is as arbitrary as that of Wasserstein's earlier hit, Isn't It Romantic, in which the heroine decides for no very clear reason not to marry the man she loves...

...GERALD WEALES GERALD WEALES...

...Her lectures diminish the whole enterprise of rethinking the female presence in art...

...We learn in the course of the play that the hour in this family has always gone beyond its sixty minutes, has become more lubrication than libation, designed to obscure the cracks in the solidity that the father-uneasy at coming from a less social family than his wife-liked to imagine their life was built on...

...One of the more interesting ingredients is Gumey's attempt to rectify his critics' responses...

...The wee academic jokie, of which there are far too many on campuses, is not funny if it sounds as though it were written into the lecture, if it is taken out of the classroom context, if it makes the speaker sound as though she were apologizing for her subject matter...

...On her stroll down memory lane, she is accompanied by the two men closest to her-a homosexual doctor who remains her best friend (and incidentally provides an excuse to bring in AIDS as an item in Wasserstein's cultural catalogue) and a fast-talking charmer, sometimes her lover, an intellectual conman who plays the main chance and persists in confusing the fashionable with the significant...

...It is a typical American-theater success story of the 1980s, but I have trouble working up much enthusiasm for its triumphant journey...

...We have been there before with Gurney in The DiningRoom...

...The Heidi of the title is an art historian, a presumably intelligent and sensitive woman who moves from 1965 to 1989, picking her way through the ideational thickets of those years, only to find that the goal of her generation, to become an independent woman in a male world, brings emptiness with it...

...Sometimes the most electrical confrontations are those that do not take place...

...On the serious side, The Heidi Chronicles is one of those gee-it-didn't-turn-put-* way-we-expected plays, another offspring of The Big Chill...

...Heidi is so muted in her behavior that she serves as little more than a foil for the more animated characters-a kind of wall on which Wasserstein can hang her snapshots...

...As so often in Gurney plays, it deals with a ritual family occasion which the devotees see as a civilized holdout in an increasingly vulgar world, but which the play shows as an empty or repressive rite...

...it has now been blessed by the Pulitzer Prize committee...

...So it is with all of Heidi's jokies...

...Through the somewhat self-pitying cries of the son, the acid-tinged complaints of the daughter, the defensive prickli-ness of the father, the circumlocutions of the mother, the play insists, "If you prick us, do we not bleed...

...Permission is finally given when the father realizes that the son is moved by love and reluctant respect as well as by exasperation and anger at an upbringing that he has found crippling...

...In part, it grows out of the play's tendency to trivialize the genuine concerns of women in particular, radicals in general, by emphasizing the fashionable patina on social change...