ABSTRACT
Drinks Before Dinner is not a conventional drama which focuses upon the development of character. Instead, as E. L. Doctorow argued, ‘The idea of character as we normally celebrate it on the American stage is what this play seems to question’. The result is a play that is intentionally non-dramatic, involving actors who are not really characters speaking lines that approximate the rhetorical mode of Gertrude Stein and Mao Tse-tung. Drinks Before Dinner is unusual in Doctorow’s oeuvre because its form is dramatic, its setting contemporary and its cast of characters exclusively middle class. The play’s originality lies not in these statements but in the way the speeches reveal the social situation. At first glance, there would appear to be little to connect Doctorow’s drama of contemporary affluence with his novel of the Depression years, Loon Lake. If Doctorow took his concern for language from the theatre, he borrowed his narrative techniques from film.
