Word: gurney
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...DINING ROOM by A.R. Gurney...
Almost never does a U.S. playwright deal with bloodlines, class lines and cultural totems and taboos. That is what makes A.R. Gurney Jr.'s drama something of a novelty. It is not a play, properly speaking, but a series of vignettes, almost like revue sketches, set in Northeastern Wasp territory, where the inhabitants go to Ivy League schools, often possess inherited wealth and hold their opinions in their obdurate spines...
...Gurney uses the room as a kind of revolving door for life's large and little ironies. Through it troop generations of disparate families as well as a feudal array of maids much given to the response "Yes, Missus." In the first episode, a brother and sister who have inherited the house argue testily about which of them is to have the dining room. Subsequently, an architect advises a psychiatrist purchaser of the house to split the room up into his office and a reception area...
...driving rain. Hospitalized, he releases himself and bombards his way into his own dressing room. What Norman is confronted with is a shuddering, sobbing hulk of a man who cannot remember the first lines of a play he has performed 426 times. Sir's wife (Rachel Gurney) and his longtime stage manager (Marge Redmond) are all for canceling the performance, but Norman adamantly invokes the theater's sacrosanct commandment without actually uttering it-the show must go on. Norman pleads with Sir, he prods, he cajoles, he utters the hypnotizing words ("a full house"), catapulting the fragile tyrant...
...future of political and intellectual freedom in modern Russia may well depend on future Russian perceptions of Western spiritual, economic, and military power, Adam B. Ulam, Gurney professor of History and director of the Russian Research Center, said last night...