Sidney and Jane Hopcroft
The first Christmas party is held in the clean and modern, but still modest kitchen of the Hopcrofts. Sidney is a scheming go-getter whose intention for the party is gain favor with those on the social scale above him. He hits up a banker for a loan to get the ball rolling on what he believes is going to be the thing that changes his economic fortunes forever. Sidney’s focus on his career and acquiring wealth may or may not be having a significant impact on the overarching character detail of his wife: she is an obsessive cleaner, exhibiting signs of OCD which nevertheless does not seem to negative impact her. In fact, Jane is almost without question the happiest or at least most seemingly content character during every single party.
Geoffrey and Eva Jackson
Geoffrey begins as a successful architect whom Sidney uses to get to the banker. Eva appears to be depressed during the first party at the Hopcroft home, but is nevertheless engaged. By the next year when she is ostensibly the hostess, Eva has become suicidal. All her attempts to end her life are absurdly short-circuited by party guests who remain completely oblivious to her pain, her silence and her attempts at suicide. Before the guests arrive, Geoffrey has confirmed plans to leave the home to go live with his girlfriend Sally suggesting in his long monologue directed toward the silent Eva that the decision was actually her idea. By the Christmas after, Eva is doing much better. That her husband’s career is likely over following the collapse of a ceiling on a shopping center he designed may be just coincidental to her recovery.
Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright
The final Christmas party in Act Three takes place inside the most impressive kitchen of the them all, that belonging to the banker and his gin-loving wife. Two Decembers ago, Ronald Brewster-Wright was riding high and had the world by the tail. He was even possessed of the power to make Sidney Hopcroft’s dream come true. Of course, Ronald never for a moment imagined Sidney would actually accomplish that dream, much less exceed it, much less succeed to the degree that their relative status toward each other would be completely the opposite just two years down the road. He might well have imagined his wife Marion would become a drunk given to public display of humiliating behavior; after all, she was already halfway there inside the Hopcroft home when they hosted the party. And now he and she are reduced to both being put on display for the amusement of an unworthy pair of nobodies like Sidney and whatever his wife’s name is…Jane or Joan or something.
Dick and Lottie Potter
Even those two nobody, Sidney and Jean Hopcroft start out by considering another couple as just friends not worthy of actually being counted as guests. After all, the Potters have nothing to offer Sidney on his way up the ladder. They are so far below the Jacksons and the Brewster-Wrights at first that not only can Sidney and his wife look down on them, but they are essentially invisible. They are voices heard from the other room and victims of dog bites; heard but never seen. Mentioned, but never really thought about. Until that dog bite. And even more to the point, until they accept an invitation from someone higher up the ladder than the Brewster-Wrights are by the time it’s their turn to host the Christmas celebration.
