Why the works of Philip Barry (1896–1949) have been relegated to the relative margins of modern American theatrical history is mysterious at the conclusion of Donald R. Anderson's Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Philip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story. Barry's reputation as a chronicler of the manners of the tribal 1920s “smart set,” continuing through the postwar 1940s, in plays such as Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, is far too simplistic as the author of this much-needed, well-researched analysis of Barry's canon proves. Anderson includes some new biographical information and delineates the fascinating relationship between Barry and Katherine Hepburn, star of both stage and screen versions of The Philadelphia Story. But his goal is to debunk the idea that Barry was a mere purveyor of light comedies. He views Barry's twenty-one plays through a lens focussed on a generation seeking definition (e.g. You and I, The Youngest, In a Garden); marital infidelity (Paris Bound, Holiday, Tomorrow and Tomorrow); faith and fantasy (White Wings, John, Hotel Universe, The Joyous Season, Here Come the Clowns); and those puzzling games Barry played in Cock Robin, Bright Star, Spring Dance, and Liberty Jones, among others. Thus Anderson provides what has been lacking in Barry scholarship: viewpoint.

Philip Barry worked from a Noel Coward palette, peopling his stately drawing rooms with beautiful, rich young sophisticates – characters and settings that repeat throughout his canon. He could convey wit and a frothy lightheartedness. Yet, ultimately, his comedies are less romps than “shadowed cocktails” – apertures into the quandaries that modernism itself presents. His sophisticates are beset by darkness as they seek to escape and/or to answer the weighty questions posed by the times and lives they lead: how and why does the universe operate? Can one find meaning in a world being reduced to scientific inspections? What constitutes a good marriage? Is family possible? Are we not all “freaks” of the tallest and smallest order satisfied by illusion as we struggle with the presence of pain and evil puzzling out our existence?

The Philadelphia Story exemplifies how seriously Barry limns a witty comedy of remarriage, a genre popular in the 1930 s and 1940 s in which a couple divorce, flirt with outsiders and then remarry. Tracy Lord, encased in money and rectitude, is challenged to forgive her philandering father yet can only do so if she first admits the possibility of her own sexual infidelity. The play is highly class-conscious: men from three distinct social classes (old money, new money, and working class) vie for her hand. Considering that America is supposedly egalitarian, and that Americans tend to root for the underdog, one would suppose the working-class man would have prevailed; however, Tracy remarries Dexter Haven – old money. This morally ambiguous play also comments on its time's anxieties over social mobility; by transforming Tracy into a living, loving daughter only after following a path of moral ambiguity, Barry celebrates uncertainty in a nation on the verge of a global war.

In the 1927 Paris Bound, in a time of sexual, cultural revolution, Barry provides less nuance, but brings equal gravitas to the subject of marital infidelity. Here, Barry asks the penetrating question of what exactly marriage is if infidelity is the fatal blow to what is institutionally a spiritual union. Is that not privileging sex over spirit?

Barry clearly is on the side of spirit. From 1934 to 1939, Barry endured years of discouragement: he wrote four plays (The Joyous Season, Bright Star, Spring Dance, Here Come the Clowns), and a novel (War In Heaven) into which he poured his heart and soul and deepest faith – all of them failures, plays that the public was not ready to support. Accustomed to the high-society plays, focussed on the sophisticates therein, and less on the penetrating questions these plays asked, Barry's public was unwilling to attend his more absurdist, existentialist leanings. In these plays Barry asked more from his public: in White Wings, is anything sacred? In John, what is the nature of conviction? In Hotel Universe, is life only part of experience? Is there no beginning or end? In Here Comes the Clowns, can we ever know if it is enough to die battling evil?

Barry's questing, experimental nature, transmitting a sense of the absurd, should, with Anderson's help, redefine him as a dramatist ahead of his time. The author clearly understands the thrust of Philip Barry's angst, and the relevance of Barry's ever-greater “message” to today's audience – some fifty years after Barry wrote his last play, Second Threshold, a testimonial to the indivisibility of life. Like Philip Barry, we too should be willing to go through the looking glass of uncertainty before we embrace certainty.