Word: gurney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Middle Ages, like A.R. Gurney Jr.'s other plays about the declining Protestant elite (Scenes from American Life, the current off-Broadway hit The Dining Room), is a wistful, elegiac comedy that preserves a tight-lipped emotional reserve: confrontations that could be tragic are played for rueful laughter. Unlike most of Gurney's other plays, however, The Middle Ages has a well-knit, symmetrical plot. It offers two love stories, a star-crossed one between a clownish boy and the girl who occasionally impels him to grow up, and another, almost accidental, between the boy's father...
Like the historical Middle Ages, the present era strikes Gurney as a time to conserve a dwindling heritage. His central character admires the medieval period as "a quiet, dull life punctuated by ceremony " That describes precisely the ordered, ancestor-worshiping existence of the families in The Middle Ages and, more broadly, of virtually all families. By the play's end, Gurney's rebel reconciles himself-and the audience-to the serene rewards of dull domesticity...
Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr. grew up in Buffalo in a world bounded by "the Saturn Club, the Nichols School, Friday-night dancing class, run by an immortal martinet of a man who had also taught my parents and my grandmother, and Trinity Episcopal Church, where my family had sat in the same pew for a hundred years-except on winter Sundays when the snow was good for skiing." From childhood, recalls Gurney, 52, "I was the guy who rebelled, not in action, but by what I said at the dinner table. I had a constant quarrel with that world...
...forgotten) turned instinctively to using home life as the basis for satire. At prep school, he won a prize for a story about his family, called Buffalo Meat. After graduating from Williams College and touring South America and Asia in "a stint as a wild man in the Navy," Gurney went to the Yale School of Drama. "My whole family came there in trepidation to see my play Love in Buffalo, and left in relief that the revelations were not worse. But after that, whenever something of mine was staged, they pretty much stayed away...
...funniest scenes in Gurney's The Dining Room depicts a pathetically senile matriarch who interrupts Thanksgiving dinner at her own table to announce that it is time for her to get up and go home. Says Gurney's uncle, Buffalo Physician Ramsdell Gurney: "My mother did exactly what Peter had her do in that play. To see her portrayed that way saddened me, but the audience thought it was terribly amusing." The most striking parallel in Gurney's plays to his life is the marriage between the young lovers' parents in The Middle Ages: four years...