Happy Hour is the title of a new collection of three short plays written by the filmmaker Ethan Coen. It might have been titled Ethan Coen Attempts to Write a Play, and Doesn’t Quite. It isn’t that the works are of poor quality or that Mr. Coen lacks sufficient literary powers to construct a coherent work of drama—it is not skill that he lacks, but energy. His ability to create memorable characters shows no sign of having been diminished, and the producers have assembled a very good cast of actors to animate them. Mr. Coen simply has not put very much thought into giving them interesting things to do.
The first play—more of a playlet, an appetizer—is called End Days, and it is a collection of monologues given by Hoffman (Gordon MacDonald), a conversation-monopolizing drunk with eccentric eschatological interests: peak oil, resource depletion, financial instability, and the omnipresence of digital communication. He believes that the planet may be getting ready to break down under an information overload. It is, of course, Hoffman who is breaking down under an information overload: He is a maniacal consumer of the news, who ritualistically brings in his New York Timesand clips out columns for his Chicken Little file. He talks and talks and talks, and very little happens otherwise. There are a few gags, including a very cheap and clumsily telegraphed one that ends in the revelation that his barstool interlocutor does not speak English. (Yuk-yuk.) There are