Let us be fair to E. L. Doctorow. In Drinks Before Dinner, he has tried to do something incomparably more ambitious than any new American play has done in years—he has tried to put the whole case against civilization in a nutshell. That is impressive by definition: while our cleverer young playwrights have been agonizing over the harmful effects of the media, or how secrets corrupt the nuclear family, Doctorow has looked at the map of our moral world, and unerringly pointed one fat finger at its capital city, the heart of the problem: We don't like how we live, and the better we live, the less we like it.

Knowing the right question to ask, of course, is not the same as being able to phrase it correctly, and in Doctorow's play the great question of civilization is phrased with surprising badness; his map of the...