Studio Players 'The Cocktail Hour': Stirred and shaken

The Studio Players has built its reputation on plays that poke at the Achilles heels in American family life: "The Lyons," "Clever Little Lies," "August: Osage County."

Sometimes the group squarely hits a funny bone, as in "You Can't Take It With You." In its current production, "The Cocktail Hour," however, the humor bubbles up more subtly, from a recognition of, and identification with, every family's foibles.

Parents finish each other's sentences. The hired help has made such a mess of dinner — one of their "moments of revenge," as daughter Nina (Karen Anglin) observes — that mom, despite intentions, will end up in the kitchen.

There are shards among the ice cubes in this drink. John (Jesse Heindl), their older son, comes to grips with his sense of abandonment and discovers a potential secret in his mother's past in that attempt. His siblings rebel against the restrictive paths their parents have paved for them, one of them looming over the family by an interminable offstage long-distance call.

His father, Bradley (David Whalley), is the wind behind this familial maelstrom. He belittles his son's artistic ambitions as a playwright, even after John's works have ascended to off-Broadway. "You don't need to write plays anyway. You've got a perfectly good job in publishing," he sniffs.

He takes Nina's dream of a dog training school with equal dismay: "Why go to Cleveland?"

Possibly stung by his own marriage to money, Bradley relentlessly steers his sons toward financial independence — sturdy, meat-and-potatoes, dull-as-dishwater careers. He summons up his portended imminent death to bend their wills and blocks them from checking his unsubstantiated claims ("Let's not ruin the flow of conversation with destructive excursions to the bookcase.").

David Whalley, in his fourth role as an actor, is the self-important patriarch of the clan, in a 180-degree turn from his singing, dancing Colonel Pickering in Naples Players' "My Fair Lady."

"I think he’s a pretty clueless —a superficial guy who has done pretty well in his life," Whalley said of Bradley.

 "He’s gotten to a point in his life where he sees things slipping away from him, and he holds John responsible for that no matter how that wrong that may be."

And then again, it may not be wrong. John, as his sister reminds him, is the family instigator, looking to upset any apple carts he comes across — and bringing others to follow their own desires because of that. 

The action is anchored by a nicely WASP-ish set from Kevin Moriarty and Kevin Hendricks. The requisite mahogany bookshelves groan with the weight of important books and a piano is veritably shingled with family photos.

Directing this play has been a joy, said Paula Keenan, a fan of the playwright who is aware this may be the first production of A.R. Gurneys' sweetly acerbic, autobiographical work since his death June 13. She called herself "blessed" to have the self-starting cast she has.

"There was a lot written about Gurney at this time, so all we had to do was Google," Keenan said of the character study. Yet the script is cleverly duplicitous; the actors debated whether John has discovered a hidden layer of his mother (Casey Cobb) and just how autobiographical some of the play's truths are, Heindl said.

Heindl had stepped into the role of John for another actor, and he said the cast was "very knowledgeable about the play. They helped fill me in on a lot of things." Gurney's writing amazed him, he said: "Gurney's writing is fantastic. It's so lively, as if you're actually having these conversations with people — they're real, not characters."

Producer Scott Lilly said he was impressed at how Gurney excelled at doling out humor in equal dosages with the trauma:

"I was laughing while I read and the more I read, the more I laughed. Amid everything, it's a really funny play."

If you go

'The Cocktail Hour'

Who: The Studio Players production of an A.R. Gurney classic comedy

When: Now through Aug. 6; 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays

Where: Joan Jenks Auditorium, Golden Gate Community Center, 4701 Golden Gate Parkway, Naples

Tickets: $25

To buy: thestudioplayers.com or 239-398-9192