Word: gurney
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Kenworthy was influenced profoundly by twocourses he took sophomore year on the Soviet Unionthat were taught by Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professorof History Richard E. Pipes and Gurney Professorof History and Political Science Adam B. Ulam. "Iwas prepared to believe what they were saying, buttheir explantions didn't seem adequate," he says."I began leaning towards a much more skepticalview of their approach...
Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. is a cocktail party charmer--funny, deft with words, genially self-mocking and ever ready to step in before the discussion gets too heavy. His best plays, The Dining Room and The Middle Ages, have been set at social events and have had the rambling, episodic quality of witty but wayward conversation. Not surprisingly, a fiftyish college professor who fancies himself capable of shaping an ideal evening is at the center of Gurney's sprightly new puzzle box of a play, The Perfect Party...
...with his wife (Debra Mooney), snubs friends, forces drinks on the unwilling, tries to orchestrate the tempo of encounters, wages war against spontaneity. His every move is being judged by a remorselessly bitchy critic (Charlotte Moore) from a newspaper resembling the New York Times. Her very presence indicates that Gurney has metaphors in mind. Other hints include references to Oscar Wilde, whose epigrams the characters mimic, and a mounted portrait of Hawthorne, master of allegory...
...Gurney equates staging the unachievable perfect party with creating theater itself--assembling arbitrarily chosen people in an arbitrarily chosen place to act out an externally imposed story. The play closes in a Shavian debate about a larger theme that resonates through all of Gurney's work: America, he says, has lost its sense of absolutes and faces the painful task of living with ambiguity. Striving for perfection in any endeavor signals an inability to cope with an unsettled world. This pastiche, conveying more than a casual cocktail notion, could easily be pretentious. Gurney makes...
Professor of Government Joseph S. Nye will be appearing several times a day on local NBC affiliate WBZ-TV, Channel 4, and Gurney Professor of History and Political Science Adam B. Ulam may also make an appearance on Channel 4 at 6 p.m. next Wednesday...