Word: wasps
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Love Letters (1989). Sly and genial chronicler of Wasp foibles in The Dining Room and The Cocktail Hour, A.R. Gurney went for gut emotion in this story of a half-century relationship told solely in letters. Weekly changes of cast (Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, Swoosie Kurtz, Richard Thomas) demonstrate, despite individual triumphs, that the play's the thing...
...engagingly -- and a bit smugly -- displays the trappings of his success: "I force myself to remember that I was not born in a Philadelphia house with 20- foot ceilings but began life as the child of Russian Jews from New Jersey." He had earned his mansion, plus his Wasp wife Deirdre and several million dollars, by founding the Mnemosyne Institute, an upscale think tank designed to help government and corporate bigwigs improve their powers of recall: "As I used to say to clients, 'Memory is life...
...COCKTAIL HOUR. Nancy Marchand's sozzled, sardonic portrayal of a grande dame enriches A.R. Gurney's Wasp family tale at Washington's Kennedy Center...
Arriving at work one day, a Wasp lawyer for Washington's Smithsonian Institution finds a carton on her desk. She is stunned. Inside the box are some clumps of dirt and a note proposing that the contents -- the remains of her grandparents, freshly dug up from a New England cemetery -- be put on display by the museum. The sender is a part-Navajo conservator at the institution, furious that such a fate has befallen the bones of his ancestors...
...COCKTAIL HOUR. Nancy Marchand's sozzled, sardonic portrayal of a grande dame enriches A.R. Gurney's Wasp family tale at Washington's Kennedy Center...