I’ ‘m Judy Miller – recently out of jail,” said Judith Miller to audience laughter, moderating a panel on “Sartre and Theater” at New York University’s Maison Francaise on Saturday morning. The chairman of NYU’s Department of French shares her name with the New York Times reporter who was released from prison last week after agreeing to testify before a grand jury in the Valerie Plame case.

In the audience were NYU French professor Nancy Regalado, who helps lead an interdisciplinary storytelling colloquium, and Mary Anne Caws, who was holding a copy of a novel by W.G. Sebald.

Panelists discussed Sartre while seated in front of a picture of the French existentialist philosopher, author, and playwright. University of Illinois at Chicago professor of French John Ireland told an anecdote about a play of Sartre’s dealing with torture called “The Victors.” Simone de Beauvoir once noted that Sartre was so jarred by his own production that he needed whiskey to get through watching it.

The director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, Tom Bishop, spoke on “Situating Sartre’s Theater of Situations.” He described Sartre being uncomfortable with the theater of the absurd. The audience laughed when Mr. Bishop added with irony that when it came to Sartre’s own plays, “he does not worry about whether they are accessible to the masses.”

Mr. Bishop said that in the realm of drama, “No Exit” was Sartre’s “one clear masterpiece.” He spoke of the play’s setting as an anti-realistic metaphor for hell, but added, “If hell were really a Second Empire drawing room, ‘No Exit’ would be a realistic play.”

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SPEAKEASY CRUISE On board the deck of the Diplomat, a 135-foot motor yacht, fans of Algonquin Round Table wit Dorothy Parker reveled on a party cruise Saturday night on the Hudson River.

The president of Standard Oil of New Jersey once owned the boat, which was built in 1930. Famous people who have been on board include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, financier Bernard Baruch, and the king and queen of Denmark. During World War II, the Navy used the boat to patrol the Chesapeake Bay.

Ladies wore chemises, boas, or diadems crowning foreheads; gentlemen wore bowties, tailcoats, or spats, some handed down by grandfathers and great uncles. Alcohol flowed and the pre-Prohibition-era ambience was recreated. This was the second year the Dorothy Parker Society of New York has held a boat cruise.

The open-air bar served fermentation of the erstwhile era’s cocktails: gin fizzes, highballs, and Manhattans. One attendee drank from a silver flask.

Bliss Blood and the Cantonment, with special guest Cindy Ball, played 1920s-era songs. Attendee Lauri Kahn declared, “Here, everyone feels connected.”

Aboard this craft upon the silvery waters of the harbor was Elizabeth Bussey Sowdal,a columnist forTexasescapes.com, who had traveled from Oklahoma to attend. Coming down from Boston was Benchley Society founder David Trumbull. They had their first weekend celebration of Nathaniel Benchley over Labor Day. Asked if anything exciting happened, he replied that one member called him late at night asking for bail money.

Actress and singer Sara Jangfeldt came over from Stockholm. Her performance piece “Enough Rope,” based on Dorothy Parker’s work set to music, will be shown December 29 on Swedish national television. Also attending was writer and lyricist Tajlei Levis, whose musical based on Dawn Powell’s novel “A Time To Be Born” was performed in Provincetown, Mass.

The happiness on the boat was so contagious that even the Statue of Liberty, with its headdress and flowing robes, appeared to take on an aspect or two of a Jazz Age flapper.

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GO WEST Novelist, journalist, and critic Rebecca West was another woman with trenchant insight. At the second international conference on her work last month at the Mercantile Library, a sign lay on the table saying, “Write your favorite West quote.”

The Knickerbocker peered into the box and read this uplifting passage: “There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all. We speak; we spread round us with sounds, with words, an emanation from ourselves. Then they are affected by these other circles, to be sure, but not because of any real communication that has taken place, merely as a scarf of blue chiffon lying on a woman’s dressing-table will change colour if she casts down on it a scarf of red chiffon.”

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KNICK-KNACKS Applause Books has recently published three volumes of John Simon’s criticism on theater, film, and music. Associate publisher Kay Radtke told the Knickerbocker that Mr. Simon is about to have his portrait added at Sardi’s.

gshapiro@nysun.com