Word: gurney
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...MIDDLE AGES by A.R. Gurney...
...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...
...Douglas Bush, Gurney Professor of English Emeritus and noted literary humanist, died Tuesday, three weeks before his 87 birthday...