The long-unavailable work by one of America's most eminent writers. Drinks Before Dinner is E. L. Doctorow's only play, originally produced by Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, directed by Mike Nichols and Christopher Plummer in the lead role of Edgar. A tour-de-force of language and ideas concerning the individual's role in and response to contemporary America, Drinks Before Dinner revolves around a dinner party for the economically privileged. As Doctorow writes in his introduction, "[This play] deals in general statements about the most common circumstances of our lives, the numbers of us, the cars we drive, the television we watch, the cities we live in, our contraception and our armaments, and our underlying sense of the apocalypse..."