Let us be fair to E. L. Doctorow. In Drinks Before Dinner, he has tried to do something incomparably more ambitious than any new American play has done in years—he has tried to put the whole case against civilization in a nutshell. That is impressive by definition: while our cleverer young playwrights have been agonizing over the harmful effects of the media, or how secrets corrupt the nuclear family, Doctorow has looked at the map of our moral world, and unerringly pointed one fat finger at its capital city, the heart of the problem: We don't like how we live, and the better we live, the less we like it.

Knowing the right question to ask, of course, is not the same as being able to phrase it correctly, and in Doctorow's play the great question of civilization is phrased with surprising badness; his map of the terrain he claims is both messy and of dubious accuracy.

The nutshell into which Doctorow wants to force all of civilization, for purposes of his indictment, is a dinner party in an expensive East Side apartment. The civilized elite, rich and glamorous, have gathered to meet, informally, an Important Person—a Secretary of something (probably State) who has won the Nobel Prize for Peace. One of the elite, Edgar, is unhappy—about everything, it seems. Arbitrarily, he removes a gun from his jacket pocket. He holds the assembled elite at a kind of puzzled and accidental gunpoint. ("You appear," someone says, in one of the play's four jokes, "to have hijacked a living room.") When the Secretary arrives, during the intermission, he is tied to a chair, and made to listen to Edgar's grievances, which by now have acquired a premise: Industrial Civilization is causing the end of the world. The Secretary is made to admit that the government has contingency plans for the end of the world. Mankind wants to destroy itself, but his high-level planning will save it. Edgar, who would sooner see destruction, discharges the gun. It is unloaded. The Secretary, untied, stalks out, muttering threats. Edgar collapses. The play is over. Whether the rest of the elite will now sit down to dinner with him is left ambiguous.

Although it looks like one neat, continuing action, this plot is in fact schizoid, since Edgar's malaise is not shown to have anything to do with the Secretary. If Doctorow's main interest is Edgar's relation to the society he is a part of, the play is moral and social; if the Secretary and the invidious "planning" he represents is the focus, the play is ethical and political. But this is never sorted out, just as, when Edgar talks about "the end of the world," it is never clear whether he means the end of civilization as we know it, the human race, or the Earth as a planet.

From these big confusions, many smaller ones arise, partly owing to the fact that Doctorow has kept his dinner party as abstract as possible: This is not his world ending, or yours and mine; it is the world of party-loving people who inhabit glossy magazine ads for cigarettes and vodka. They have first names, and spouses, but that is about it in the way of characterization.

Abstraction, in fact, has poisoned this play more thoroughly than anything a major writer has given us since Albee's All Over. As a novelist, Doctorow has been able to invent ferociously dramatic scenes like the encounter between Evelyn Nesbit and Emma Goldman in Ragtime, and he has been able to make the most inexpressible events seem harrowingly real and everyday, as in the electrocution at the climax of The Book of Daniel. It seems puzzling that in most of Drinks Before Dinner his writing is flat, prosy, and empty, lacking not only the curves of human speech but the sting of his own narrative style. If he really thinks life has become one big affluent blur, he has fallen into the imitative fallacy, and re-created it in his blurred play. I salute his desire to say something gigantic; how I wish he had found a way to say it fully, genuinely, and dramatically.