Free Drinks Before Dinner by E. L. Doctorow Page B

much as he defines himself, and his own intentions are something he may learn only as they occur—not before. The images of replicating humans are reflected onstage in this one person divided from his subconscious impulses.
    So my characters are formal expressions of the basic passion of the play—an imitative fallacy perhaps, but only if you want from the theatre what you’re used to. They seemed to be uniformly well-to-do and reasonably well educated, but they have no domestic biographies to offer, no childhoods to remember, no religion, no regional identification. Only two, Joel and Alan, are given professions. There are no blood relationships except for the parents Joel and Claudette and their two children, but even this is conceptualized as an arbitrary genetic circumstance. Deprived of virtually everything else, these characters can only have their being from their positions in the dialogue. After Edgar proposes that they not have the evening they expect to have, the sides are drawn. His wife Joan is his first antagonist. She is succeeded by Joel and Claudette, who defend the life and attitudes that allow them to give parties and live well. Joel is perhaps less resolute and more foolish than Claudette, and he lacks her bitter fatalism, but he is quite capable of being clever at Edgar’s expense. In Act Two, Joel and Claudette are superseded as antagonistsby Alan, whose capacity for disguising himself as a function of the argument, agreeing or disagreeing with Edgar as tactics demand, gradually betrays him to a cynicism that loses the sympathy of everyone else in the room. For it is Alan who torpedoes the one presumption not questioned by Edgar insofar as he believes in the idea of the end of the world—the theological hope of redemption, of the possibility of something more through suffering and universal purgation.
    As for Andrea and Michael, I think of them as the ballast of the play, their weight shifting to one side or the other as the moment demands, Andrea because she is willing to discuss anything, consider anything, in the spirit of self-improvement, or to mediate as one always sensitive to the feelings of others, and Michael, more mysteriously, because he is observant, and curious and thoughtful. I think it is Michael who becomes the most thoroughgoing disciple of Edgar, but for purposes entirely his own.

    Drinks Before Dinner deals in general statements about the most common circumstances of our lives, the numbers of us, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live in, our contraception and our armaments, and our understanding sense of apocalypse. None of these circumstances are visible onstage except as imagery makes them visible. Instead of a play in which specific biographees suffer experiences that we enlarge upon to reflect our own, instead of a progression from the particular person to the thematic implication, we have a play already in the region of the implicatory when the curtain rises. That is why it is so offensive. It is a play turned inside out. It displays human beings not filled in with the colors and textures of their individual peculiarity, but delineated from the outlines provided by the things that shape them, their technology,their failing rituals and faltering institutions, their platitudinous ideas and common fears. They are invisible presences, these people, ghosts, shown only as a space in their surroundings. Like Wells’s Invisible Man, they can be seen only when wrapped in bandages.
    Since the character of Edgar carries the burden of the argument, he is the center of the play’s offense. Edgar is insufferable. He insists upon talking about what everyone knows. He is not a criminal psychopath, nor is he a revolutionary—two suggestions the others come up with to explain his behavior. He is not a psychopath, because he is fully connected to the realities of his life and is more interested, I suspect, in dramatizing the issues that obsess him, or in sharing his