The disjuncture between the two halves of T. S. Eliot’s verse drama The Cocktail Party is so radical and complete that one might very well describe the work as two plays rather than one. There is no obvious solution to the difficulty this presents in staging the play; in Scott Alan Evans’s recent production for The Actors’ Company Theatre, only the most subtle efforts are made to reconcile the play’s irreconcilable differences, and that seems to have been the artistically intelligent choice. Under Mr. Evans’s direction, the actors achieved a remarkable continuity of character in characters that are not, in truth, continuous, and maintained the cohesion, such as it is, of a story that begins as a drawing-room comedy and ends in a crucifixion. You’ll almost forget Eliot wrote Cats.

Eliot’s artistic commitment to verse drama was as carefully calculated and cultivated as his cottonmouthed British accent. Which is to say that the effect is not always entirely convincing. Eliot’s genius was of the classical kind—formidable technique wedded to an aesthetic vision rooted in the tradition it transcended—and there is no denying that The Cocktail Party is finely wrought in the particular and far-seeing as a whole. But there seems to be something missing in the dramatic middle distance. Eliot could be extraordinarily powerful in both his major modes, acting as a maker of intellectual music boxes in Sweeney Among the Nightingales or waxing prophetic in Choruses from ‘The Rock,’the best of the