THEATER REVIEWS / ‘COCKTAIL HOUR,’ ‘LOVE LETTERS’ : Heart-Felt Drama : In one, a family struggles to overcome alienation; in the other, two people achieve an intimacy of souls via the written word.

The coincidental opening in the same week of two plays by A.R. Gurney within a block of one another gives us justifiable cause for concern. At a time of economic, social and political assaults on the insular, increasingly untenable aspirations of the American middle class, along come two productions by a playwright who portrays the WASP way of life coming apart from within.

Perhaps the double dose of “The Cocktail Hour” and “Love Letters,” for all their sparkling surface wit and charm, underscores the seriousness of the affliction. At least we can take solace that despite some joint advertising, the respective producers--Ensemble Theatre and the new Lobero Theatre/Pasadena Playhouse alliance--have refrained from publicity stunts like wheeling patrons on gurneys between the theaters.

Despite both plays’ abundance of witty punch lines, their diagnoses are serious. The treatment: a healthy dose of self-examination for their characters, and an implicit invitation for the audience to follow suit.

The clink of rattling ice in Scotch and soda glasses is pervasive enough to be the musical accompaniment during Ensemble Theatre’s “The Cocktail Hour,” as the four members of an affluent suburban family try to deaden the pangs of alienation.

Clearly an insider, Gurney renders his WASPs’ nests with scientific precision. Even at home, the men put on ties before they sit down to dinner, and women share with their husbands the egalitarian rights to alcoholism.

In “The Cocktail Hour,” the hyper-realistic set by Robert L. Smith is the perfect fishbowl, replete with the icons of the country club set. We’re talking well-to-do leisure class here, but not so well off that they can afford not to worry about the money running out.

Every inch the stiff patriarch, Bradley (Robert Munns) parades around in his navy blazer as though he owns the world, but some disquieting physical ailments have brought his own mortality to consciousness.

His disposition is increasingly morose and Bradley also suffers the barbs from his perpetually inebriated wife Ann (Gretchen Evans). “He doesn’t say ‘good-night’ anymore,” she sighs. “He says ‘goodby.’ ” Not that she doesn’t have problems of her own: The new cook’s ineptitude with the roast has made dinner problematic.

Ann’s hysterics are all the greater because their playwright son John (Michael Rathbone) has just returned from New York, ostensibly seeking Bradley’s permission to stage a play he’s written about the family. Bradley refuses, certain the unread play will reveal unflattering details. “I give him the maximum deductible gift at Christmas,” he fumes, “and now look.”

But what John’s really after is self-discovery, even though he’ll have to reopen old wounds to get it. “You came here to cause trouble,” says his sister, Peggy Steketee, in a well-integrated, insightful supporting performance.

What follows, hilarious and poignant by turns, is a systematic immersion into the process by which this family has cut its own human connections.

Evans’ performance as Ann is a richly layered study of severed emotional nerves; her hidden dimensions come marvelously to light when John interrogates her about the neglect he got as a child.

As the father, Munns hits all the notes, and quite impressively, considering he was a replacement in the role with only a week’s notice. But he still has a ways to go in putting the full measure of self-defensive authoritarianism on his dry, pedantic pronouncements. There were enough signs in Friday’s opening to suggest Munns’ still-maturing interpretation will be first-rate.

With a little more steel, he’ll be the formidable antagonist Rathbone needs to better define John’s crisis point: abandoning his “switched by gypsies at birth” stance to embrace his own roots. A touch more rancor beneath John’s politeness would also emphasize the distance he travels.

In what is clearly an autobiographical work (emphasized in Robert G. Weiss’ direction), John’s homeward journey embodies Gurney’s recognition of his own roots. The play that John talks about rewriting in the end will become the “The Cocktail Hour” we’re watching.

“Love Letters” is something less than a full play; it’s really a staged reading in which guest celebs recite the lifelong correspondence between a man and woman who rarely met in person, but who maintained an intimacy of souls that would make many a marriage pale in comparison. Something of a gimmick, but a surprisingly powerful one under John Cochran’s direction at the Lobero.

In a time spanning the 1930s to the present, we first meet Andrew and Melissa with his acceptance note to her eighth birthday party. Through the subsequent series of letters, cards and other communiques, we follow their respective fortunes.

Early on they realize they do better as correspondents than lovers. When they meet, they both seem to be expecting more than what is there. It’s only later in life that they enjoy a brief torrid liaison, which Melissa describes in a subsequent note as being like “Two uptight WASPs going at it like a sale at Brooks Brothers.”

Here too these characters are drawn from the social boundaries of Gurney’s familiar milieu--children of affluence, boarding schools and social responsibility.

It is their destiny and their tragedy. It isn’t until too late that they realize how much they need each other, and by then their social obligations have made a union impossible.

The aching tenderness of the piece cuts deeper than its social milieu, however, which accounts for its enormous popularity wherever it’s staged.

The opening performers, Lynn Redgrave and John Clark, lent eloquent voices to Gurney’s chronicle of romantic sensibilities breaking through the tough armor of hard-boiled realism. But by the time you read this, Martin Sheen and Trish Van Devere will have taken over the roles (to be followed next week by Barbara Rush and Tom Troupe), so the details of performance are of secondary concern to the innate appeal of the show itself.

Basically, it works for three reasons.

In the first place, the stage rarely presents the entire span of lifetimes and the chance to follow the characters’ histories is a pleasant change of pace.

Secondly, the recital takes us back to storytelling at its most elemental--being read to as children, where our imaginations are engaged. Yes, we have to take some responsibility for creating this reality.

Finally, by keeping the characters only partly represented, the show invites us to fill in the missing details from our own histories. And that personal projection is the most powerful material of all.

Both “Love Letters” and “The Cocktail Hour” bear Gurney’s twin signatures: his preoccupation with the upper middle-class and his unflagging cleverness with dialogue and form. While these are undoubted strengths in defining himself as a playwright, they’re also the barriers to be overcome in his quest for something universal and authentic.

Fortunately, Gurney proves talented enough to write his way out of his own corners, and both productions overcome their own structural artifice. The sustained connection between John’s play and the events of “The Cocktail Hour” may at times be a little too pat and elegant, but the weight of autobiographical turbulence pierces the veneer. And for all its clever conceptual conceits, “Love Letters” really evokes something fundamental between men and women.

WHERE AND WHEN

* “The Cocktail Hour” will be performed through Oct. 6; Wednesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m. at the Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara St. in Santa Barbara. Tickets are $10 Wednesdays and Sundays, $12 Thursdays, and $14 Fridays and Saturdays. For reservations or further information call 962-8606.

* “Love Letters” will be performed through July 26; Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. at the Lobero Theatre at 33 E. Canon Perdido St. in Santa Barbara. Tickets are $27.50. For reservations or further information call 963-0761.