Theater Review: The Chattering Classes Chatter in The City of Conversation

“Dinner, you have to understand, is always about something,” says the son of a Washington hostess, explaining the local power rituals to his naïve, if ambitious, girlfriend. At his mother’s glamorous evenings, he points out, there’s a professed agenda involving entertainment and also, beneath it, a profound one involving argument. But for Hester Ferris, a Pamela Harriman-like Democratic doyenne whom we follow over the course of 30 years, the gap between the professed and the profound is very slim: Argument is entertainment. Others may feel differently. Like Hester’s dinners, Anthony Giardina’s perplexing new melodrama, The City of Conversation, is about something: the destruction of political comity that resulted (the play suggests) from the barbarian invasion of the Reaganauts in 1980. Unfortunately this argument is planted in an entertainment that can’t support it.