A.R. Gurney

A.R.GURNEY

Casebooks on Modern Dramatists Kimball King, General Editor

PETER SHAFFER A Casebook Edited by C.J.Gianakaras

HORTON FOOTE A Casebook Edited by Gerald.C.Wood

SIMON GRAY A Casebook Edited by Katharine.H.Burkman

SAMUEL BECKETT A Casebook Edited by Jennifer M.Jeffers

JOHN ARDEN AND MARGARETTA D’ARCY A Casebook Edited by Jonathan Wike

WENDYWASSERSTEIN A Casebook Edited by Claudia Barnett

AUGUSTWILSON A Casebook Edited by Marilyn Elkins

WOODY ALLEN A Casebook Edited by Kimball King

JOHN OSBORNE A Casebook Edited by Patricia.D.Denison

MODERN DRAMATISTS A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights Edited by Kimball King

ARNOLD WESKER A Casebook Edited by Reade.W.Dornan

PINTER AT 70 A Casebook Edited by Lois Gordon

DAVID HARE A Casebook Edited by Hersh Zeifman

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS A Casebook Edited by Robert F.Gross

MARSHA NORMAN A Casebook Edited by Linda Ginter Brown

JOE ORTON A Casebook Edited by Francesca Coppa

BRIAN FRIEL A Casebook Edited byWilliam Kerwin

BETH HENLEY A Casebook Edited by Julia A.Fesmire

NEIL SIMON A Casebook Edited by Gary Konas

EDWARD ALBEE A Casebook Edited by Bruce J.Mann

TERRENCE MCNALLY A Casebook Edited byToby Silverman Zinman

A.R.GURNEY A Casebook Edited by Arvid F.Sponberg

STEPHEN SONDHEIM A Casebook Edited by Joanne Gordon

A.R.GURNEY A CASEBOOK Edited by

ARVID F.SPONBERG

Routledge New York • London

Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of A.R. Gurney, who permitted the reprinting of the following works: “A Sacred Place,” “Pushing the Walls of Dramatic Form,” “The Dinner Party,” “Conversation Piece,” “Critical Condition ” “When the Final Act Is Only the Beginning,” “Shaw, the Eternal Schoolmaster, Can Still Be Wise,” and “Coming Home to a Musical That Sounds Like America.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A.R.Gurney : a casebook/edited by Arvid.F.Sponberg. p. cm.—(Casebooks on modern dramatists; v. 34) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-92998-9 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Gurney, A.R. (Albert Ramsdell), 1930—Criticism and interpretation. I. Sponberg, Arvid F. II. Series. PS3557 .U82Z53 2003 812′.54–dc21 2003006067

ISBN 0-203-49268-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57514-8 (Adobe eReader Format)

It’s the toughest thing in the world to get a good conversation going with one’s kids. On the other hand, it’s worth working on, since I knowfrom experience that it can be one of the best. —A.R.Gurney, “Conversation Piece,” p. 183

To our children, John and Erica, Whose conversation we cherish.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

General Editor’s Note

x

Preface

xi

A.R.GURNEY: AN INTRODUCTION

1

PART I: INTERVIEWS AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY

17

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CUNNINGHAM

35

AN INTERVIEW WITH HOLLAND TAYLOR

47

AN INTERVIEW W WITH DEBRA MOONEY

57

AN INTERVIEW W WITH JOHN TILLINGER

69

PART II: ESSAYS INDETERMINACY AS TRAGIC FATE: ISSUES OF RACE, CLASS, GENDER, AND SEXUAL ORBENTATION IN GURNEY MARK WILLIAM ROCHA

81

WHERE DOES THE WASP KEEP ITS STING? THE DYNAMICS OF ANGER IN THE PLAYS OF A.R.GURNEY ERVENE GULLEY

95

THE DINING ROOM: A TOCQUEVILLIAN TAKE ON THE DECLINE OF WASP CULTURE BRUCE MCCONACHIE

101

WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER: REALIZING ONE’S POTENTIAL LAURA MILLER

111

vii

ABSENT FATHERS, TRANSIENT SONS: MILLER, INGE, AND GURNEY ARVID.F.SPONBERG

121

ENTERING THE FOURTH DIMENSION: A.R.GUKNEY’S SWEET SUE BRENDA GORDON

129

THE ALLUSIVE A.R.GURNEY BRENDA MURPHY

137

GURNEY’S SYLVIA: WHAT OFT WAS THOUGHT JOALLEN BRADHAM

145

PICNICS AND PARTIES: INGE, GURNEY, AND THE ARGUMENT OF COMEDY ARVID.F.SPONBERG

155

PART III: ARTICLES BY A.R.GURNEY A SACRED PLACE JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, NOVEMBER 1975 PUSHlNG THE WALLS OF DRAMATIC FORM THE NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 27, 1986

165

THE DINNER PARTY AMERICAN HERITAGE, 39 (SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1988)

173

CONVERSATION PIECE NEWSWEEK, JUNE 26,1989

177

CRTTICAL CONDITION AMERICAN THEATRE, JUNE 24–7,1991

179

WHEN THE FINAL ACT IS ONLY A BEGINNING THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 27, 1991

183

SHAW, THE ETERNAL SCHOOLMASTER, CAN STTLL BE WISE THE NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 31, 1993

187

COMING HOME TO A MUSICAL THAT SOUNDS LIKE AMERICA THE NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 8,1996

193

HIGH TIME FOR COMEDY (AND POLITICAL OUTRAGE) THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 10, 2002

197

Afterword: A Cue for Gurney Studies

199

169

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Chronology

203

Bibliography

207

Contributors

211

Index

213

Acknowledgments

“…time as long again Would be filled up…with our thanks; And yet we should, for perpetuity, Go hence in debt: and therefore, like a cipher, Yet standing in rich place, I multiply With one ‘we thank you’ many thousands more That go before it.” Polixenes, The Winter’s Tale, I.ii Bonnie, my wife, has encouraged and supported this work in ways too many to number and too meaningful for words. Valparaiso University supported the initial work for this book by awarding me a University Research Professorship and a sabbatical leave. Kimball King, the general editor of this series and professor of English at the University of North Carolina, encouraged this book and demonstrated patience beyond any author’s reasonable expectations. The editors at Routledge have guided the book through production with thoroughness, sensitivity, and unwavering support. Jackson Bryer, professor of English at the University of Maryland, has taken an abiding interest in A.R.Gurney and in this book. Both as an editor and the director of the scholar’s conference at the William Inge Theatre Festival—an institution uniquely celebrating the art of playwriting—he gave me opportunities to research and write about Gurney and his plays. The scholars, actors, and director who contributed to this book believe, as I do, that A.R.Gurney’s plays merit the most serious attention from performers, critics and historians. The strengths of the book derive from their bestowal of experience and wisdom. Attribute the weaknesses to the editor alone. Along with thousands of other playgoers, I am most grateful to A.R. Gurney for his gifts to the arts of the theatre and the literature of the stage. The pleasures of talking and writing about his plays almost equal the joys of reading, performing, hearing, and seeing them. Thank you all.

General Editor’s Note

A.R.Gurney is a highly respected American playwright whose life in the theatre has spanned four decades. Because he so frequently has set his works in an upper-middle class or upperclass white milieu, he has become known as America’s premier “WASP” dramatist. This may be an unfair designation as Gurney has, in effect, chronicled a wide segment of American life and its changes in the twentieth century. His instinct for accurate dialogue, his intriguing plots, and his trenchant satire of mores make audiences rethink both their assumptions and prejudices. Still vital, Gurney attracts a large segment of the population that appreciates his wit and humanity. Arvid Sponberg, professor and former chair of the English department at Valparaiso University in Indiana, knows Gurney personally and has written extensively about him over the years. The present volume contains not only Sponberg’s appraisals of Gurney’s work, but also the critical analyses of other major American scholars. In particular, interviews with the author himself, as well as with directors and actors who admire Gurney’s work, make Sponberg’s volume a valuable addition to Routledge’s ongoing series of Casebooks on great American playwrights. Kimball King

Preface

A.R.Gurney became a playwright because he discovered when he was young that plays lead interesting lives, and so do the people who stage them, watch them, and write about them. He also learned that among artists who have final authority over the presentation of their works, playwrights occupy an especially public and insecure position. Their works are judged not once or twice but perhaps as many as eight or nine times between inception and your encounter with them. Playwrights, of course, as do all artists, continuously evaluate their own work. Friends and family may offer their views. Then agents and producers may make suggestions. Nowadays, many directors believe themselves licensed not merely to stage but to improve plays. Actors may be depended on to offer insights. Designers of sets, costumes, sound, and lighting give most specific recommendations. Reviewers and critics deposit their accounts in the media. Audiences, then, having no professional or financial interest in the success or failure of plays, levy the most objective opinions, voting with their hands and often with their feet. Finally, scholars and anthologists weigh playwrights’ achievements, nominating some plays as worthy of continuing discussion and also study in the schools. A negative opinion at any point in this chain of judgment may dispatch a play to oblivion. Whichever role you may take in these proceedings, A.R.Gurney regards you as a citizen in the “community of the play.” The interviews and essays in this collection take you part of the way into that community so that you may feel its form and pressure. Of course, casebooks are a species of reference work and you will have your own agenda that will guide your use of this one, just as when you use a dictionary or encyclopedia. So you may ignore this suggestion: start the book with the introduction and read through to the end. First, you will meet A.R.Gurney himself and become familiar with his background and the general nature of his works. Then you will meet four artists—three actors and a director —who have known him and worked closely with him for many years. Then you will read essays by scholars who are interested in placing Gurney’s plays in the context of your broad cultural heritage. Finally you will read articles by Gurney himself about the nature of theatre and its place in American life. By the end, you will know how Gurney creates plays that interpret our lives. His vision is complex and his voice is as distinctive as his characters and their stories. This is a book about a serious business—writing comedy for live actors performing for live audiences. In fact, this is such a serious book that I have to reassure you: Gurney’s

xii

comedies are so good that they have the power to make you forget every thing you will read here—and just laugh. A.F.S.

A.R.Gurney: An Introduction ARVID F.SPONBERG

A Sense of Community Gurney’s youth in Buffalo, New York, focused his attention on ideas that concern him today. Foremost are the twins, fairness and responsibility. As he recalls his early life, Gurney sees that his awareness of these ideas came, in part, through rituals of family life. His mother’s family and his father’s family arrived in Buffalo in the 1850s and succeeding generations remained there pursuing careers as attorneys, real estate brokers, and merchants. By Gurney’s birth in 1930, the long strands of the family circle had braided intricately. Some family rituals seem simple and ordinary. The evening meal, for example, always three courses long, anchored each day in Gurney’s home.1 Sunday and holiday visits to his grandmothers’ houses knitted together the extended Gurney relations. And even though the divorce and remarriage of his maternal grandmother, Marian Perkins Spaulding, disturbed and complicated these rituals, they were not disrupted. Rather the rituals accommodated the new order of relations as you can see in Gurney’s play Ancestral Voices. That experience—of the social fabric stretching and containing the strongest emotions— shapes Gurney’s thinking about his art. Other rituals had more complicated and striking aspects. They bound him more closely to his brother, sister, and parents even as they connected the family to trends in national life. The proliferation of recreational activities, the automobile, and the mass media often have been named as culprits in the so-called decline of family values. However, in Gurney’s memory, skiing, an automobile, and a radio program intensified the emotional warmth of the family: There’s another very important ritual in our family which was due to Buffalo being in a snow belt. Skiing was just starting up right before World War II. And we’d take the car, the whole family, and go down to the Boston Hills which are small mountains south of Buffalo right in the center of the snow belt and there were just beginning to be rope tows. And my father loved to ski and my mother did, and the family loved to ski, so we’d all pile in the car and we’d go down there and my father would teach us. We’d all have to follow him like little quail following the father quail. We’d have to follow the exact turns that he made. And then we’d drive home at night, and on Sunday there were certain radio programs we’d always listen to in the car. I’ve

2 ARVID F.SPONBERG

written about it a little bit in Scenes from American Life. We listened to The Shadow and then we’d have to listen to Jack Benny. It was very cozy. The cars then were smaller. You’d all huddle around the driver more and the kids in back would lean forward to hear the radio. We didn’t have any speakers in back. I just remember this kind of family nucleus, all hanging together over Jack Benny, because the more you listened to him, the more you built up the rituals of all the things that occur in Jack Benny. His tightness, his car, his relationship with Rochester, as they became more familiar, they became funnier, just as with Cheers today. The characters were very specific. That I remember very strongly as a very binding and warm aspect of our family life.2 The bonds of affection in his immediate family remained as strong and as taut as tow ropes. Harder to chart were the twisting lines of emotion that tied him to those carrying the heaviest burdens of fairness and responsibility. Tracing the relationships in his extended family proved more difficult than following his father down a ski trail, especially when neither his father nor his mother chose to show the way: My mother’s mother is a very interesting story and I’m just beginning to think about her more. She was married to a Spaulding and that Spaulding was only interested in guns and dogs and camping out and pulling in the salmon and the trout. She fell in love with his best friend. And just suddenly left. Just ran off. Shocked my grandfather who was a kind of innocent, sweet man, beautiful athlete. But that had never occurred to him, didn’t read many books, wouldn’t have known who Anna Karenina was, for example. But my grandmother was kind of Anna Karenina. She didn’t run very far away. She ran out to a place in the country near Buffalo where she lived with this guy. Her name was Marian [Perkins] Spaulding and she married a man named [Charles] Goodyear who was a kind of scion of another branch of the family in Buffalo. It’s all very complicated and intricate. She was totally ostracized by Buffalo society. All her friends would not speak to her. She lived out there with this guy and was frantic for the kind of social life that she once had in this small but, at that time, energetic town. So she gave a lot of parties and she was very concerned about her grandchildren. She didn’t pay much attention to her children but, because she was now a kind of Anna Karenina, an ostracized woman…she was very concerned about her grandchildren, and she would give parties for us. She had a tennis court and a pool out there because the guy she married was rich. And she’d give sports parties. She just was very good about keeping her eye on us. And a very warm woman. You could understand why she ran off from my grandfather, who really probably didn’t give her much attention. But she lived a kind of sad life. She never really earned back the trust of her children. They all thought it was a betrayal. She destroyed my grandfather who took to drink immediately after this happened. He never remarried and kind of drank himself to death. And she was never ultimately happy with the guy that she ran off with, who was a kind of cold—he was a very good looking guy but a kind of snob— and who was a little embarrassed. A little like Vronsky. Always looking over her shoulder. One time she said to me, “Before I die, I want to tell you my story. I’ve

A.R.GURNEY: AN INTRODUCTION 3

got a lot to tell you. I know a lot more about life than you think I do.” But she never did get around to telling me. [My parents] didn’t tell us that much. And my mother was terribly wounded by it and adored her father. My mother was married quite young. She was twenty-one, she had two little kids by that time, me and my sister, and she suddenly had to deal with this major rift that was occurring in her family. My mother was already an adult, though her younger brothers weren’t, and my mother was the oldest of four kids. So my mother, who was trying to raise two little kids, suddenly had to deal with her mother and her father, move her father to an apartment. My mother suddenly grew up. And my father, who didn’t like to discuss anything that was unpleasant, just didn’t deal with it. So we had to go out to my grandmother’s for lunch a lot. My mother never liked to do it very much because she really was angry at her mother and remained angry all her life. But we had to do it. They were both good sports, my mother and my father. And we had to go out and my grandmother, I remember, would say, “Now make sure you say hello to your Uncle Charlie.” That’s what we called this guy. We had to be very polite to this guy who we knew had somehow aced my grandfather out of his job. And it was weird. But nobody ever sat us down and said, “Now here’s the story. This is what happened.” As kids, we just had to put this strange scandal together in our own way. But the redeeming side of this was that both [my] grandmothers were very, very warm women and very good grandmothers in the sense that if we were sick, they’d give us presents. If we went away, they’d write us letters. And they were always concerned about our life. They were very hands-on grandmothers. Our family on both sides was very close despite that rift. Easter, Christmases, many Sundays, we had to go from one grandmother nucleus to the other. Gurney has not written autobiographically in the manner of Tennessee Williams (e.g., The Glass Menagerie) or William Inge (The Dark at the Top of the Stairs) or Neil Simon (Brighton Beach Memoirs). Some plays draw situations and characters directly from his own life. Scenes from American Life, What I Did Last Summer, The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour, Far East, and Ancestral Voices may be included in this category. But all his characters and predicaments draw upon the knowledge of the heart that he acquired at home. His congenial and prominent family flourished socially while struggling privately with the effects of painful separation and loneliness. Unspoken social rules gave a person in the position of Gurney’s mother far less leeway than they do today to seek help coping with anger, resentment, and frustration even if such help had been available. Occasional participation in formal worship characterized the family’s religious life rather than focused, observant faith. The psychological professions had scarcely begun to develop in the 1930s. The ideas of Freud, Jung, and Adler, which now appear less sophisticated by contrast with the therapies of the 1990s, were still establishing themselves among elites of major cities. In Buffalo society, during Gurney’s childhood, as in the United States generally, people coped with emotional pain more stoically than we are accustomed to do. We may think of them as taking Socrates’ advice to “quiet yourselves and endure.” As the young Gurney learned the differences

4 ARVID F.SPONBERG

between private and public experience, he began to form both the desire to tell stories and the comic sensibility that perceives the discrepancy between the ideal and the real. In this regard, his parents became infallible guides: I think my father and my mother were the ones who introduced me to the delights of literature. Both were big readers and my mother particularly. They would always be reading something good. My mother has a kind of an addiction for detective stories [in] the way somebody might watch the news on television. But they would always say, “You’ve got to read this. Yoif ve got to read Dickens. You’ve got to read Shakespeare.” My father would be reading the Bible or Dostoevsky. He wasn’t a religious man but he’d always have a good book by his bed and he’d read a little of it every night. My mother would always be urging us to read and they’d give us so much money when we finished a book. We’d get a quarter, not very much. And they were always discouraging us from reading comic books, which were the equivalent of junk TV today. So they were constantly touting the importance of literature. But Gurney believes that his parents’ own upbringing had not been literary. In fact, his mother’s choice not to attend college reveals an attitude of her social class that we would not associate with her present-day counterparts: My mother and my father were both very well educated. They both went to very good boarding schools. And then my father went to Yale. He read Latin and Greek. He was a well-educated man. My mother never went to college, because in that time, in that town, going to college was considered a little middle class. She really regrets it because she would have been an excellent scholar. She regrets that her parents never encouraged her to go to college. She got caught up in the party life. It was in the late twenties and she just thought, well, it’d be more fun just to kind of goof around. She got married quite young, too, nineteen or twenty when she married my father. But she kept up with her reading and she organized these book reading clubs in Buffalo, and they’d read serious things. They’d read Faulkner and Swift and Joyce. So she passed on that passion to me and my sister, I think, more than to my brother. Some of Gurney’s earliest memories of the theater connect his grandmother, Evelyn Ramsdell Gurney, and musical theater: I adored her. She was terribly warm. She had a big house down on Summer Street in Buffalo and three maids. She never, until the day she died, lived without three maids. And she was not very nice to these maids. I don’t know why I adored her but I did. She always made me feel good when I saw her. She made me feel important and good. She was very warm. She took me to the theater a lot, I think. She thought the theater was part of any person’s education. She’d take me to the Erlanger theater on Saturday afternoons when I was a little kid, and things like road companies of

A.R.GURNEY: AN INTRODUCTION 5

Sigmund Romberg and Gilbert and Sullivan, that kind of thing. She’d never take me to Tennessee Williams or anything like that. She was a kind of Victorian woman and really perceived herself as a kind of Queen Victoria, but, for reasons which are still not clear to me, I loved her. She’s that old lady in The Dining Room, who’s going kind of gaga at the end of the first act. So she kind of lost her marbles at the end. His parents played their role, too, though they did not forsee the outcome of their theatrical adventuring: My parents loved the theater and occasionally they’d take me to theater but not so much in Buffalo. They used to make these theater excursions to New York and in those days Buffalo was hooked to New York by the New York Central Railroad. They could take a sleeper down, stay in a hotel, take a sleeper back. It was very easy and rather comfortable. They’d be staying at a hotel and they’d tell the bellboy to deliver their bags to the railroad station so they could go right from the play to the railroad station, get on the train, the bags would be in the stateroom, and then they’d sit in the club car with their friends who’d got on and talk about the play until Albany and then they’d go to bed and get up in Buffalo. So they’d tell me about the plays they’d seen. And I’d always ask them. They’d say, “Oh, we saw the best play” and they’d describe who was in it and everything. That plus the fact some of these plays would come through Buffalo at the Erlanger theater and my grandmother would take me to some of them made me feel that the theater was something extremely exciting. When I got into it myself, they backed off a little. Sort of, you know, what have we done? What have we created? They knew that I was a rather bright student but they didn’t see any particular talent emerging as a writer. I wrote a prize-winning story at school and that kind of perplexed them. They didn’t think it was that good. They thought it was kind of anecdotal. I don’t want to speak for them, [but] my feeling is they didn’t think I was good enough to make it in the theater. And they didn’t think the theater was reputable enough…. The theater people they knew, and they knew a few, seemed rather vulgar and disreputable. My father’s roommate from Yale, for example, married Adele Astaire. So that when they went down to New York…my father would want to have dinner with his buddy, whose name was Kingman Douglas, and Adele Astaire [was], I guess, a tough cookie and she used a lot of four-letter words, and I think my mother and my father thought, oh god, theater people just aren’t really the kind of people you want to associate with. His family also provided two models for young Gurney’s sense of humor: his father and his father’s brother, Uncle Charles, not to be confused with “Uncle Charlie,” his stepgrandfather. Gurney remembers his Uncle Charles as a “very distinguished, stuffy, but highly amusing kind of litterateur. He read a great deal and got very deft at bons mots. He was a kind of an image of ultimate civilization for me….” It was Uncle Charles who first awakened Gurney to the possibilities of “…high comedy. He was always very amusing and adept at describing events, telling a story. He was a great raconteur, but extremely stuffy.

6 ARVID F.SPONBERG

But also an excellent uncle. He would write us letters at school, if we stepped out of line. He was a very good uncle.” Gurney’s father revealed another side of the humorist’s art—the side we now label as “performance” art: I think my father had the best sense of humor of anyone on both sides of the family. He had a great sense of humor, a particularly public sense of humor. He was a great public speaker. He could get up and make a toast at a small family gathering and have people in stitches. Or he could speak to a really large group—I’m not talking about two thousand—but a big banquet of two hundred—and he would be equally professional. And if anybody heckled him, and, of course, everybody liked to because that was another ritual, he would deal with the heckler in a brilliant way. I really admired the man. He could think on his feet quicker than anyone I’ve ever met. So he became kind of a master of ceremonies, toastmaster, for a large number of functions in Buffalo and sat on a great many boards simply because he was the one who could give the best speech. Gurney himself credits a feature of his father’s performance style as a source of his own fondness for using literary allusions in his plays: “My father would always do that. And he was very clever—he [would say], ‘As we all know…’ and then he’d give this obscure quote and he’d make the audience feel good. He’d assume they knew even though, of course, they didn’t. And I follow, maybe, in that tradition.” A Sense of Perspective How his formal education affected this comic sensibility is not entirely clear even to Gurney, but his memories yield some indications. To begin with, his teachers encouraged him to write and he picked up their cues. Not all of them liked Gurney or his taste in reading but he learned something helpful from each. His taste for writing plays emerged during his elementary school years: I liked to read a lot. I liked to read novels when I was little. But whenever I had a school assignment for a composition—and in those days we were always assigned compositions—I remember a number of times I’d say, “Can I write a play instead?” I always seemed to like the dialogue form. I remember as a little kid I used to hate what I called “I books,” books that were told in the first person. I always felt as a kid that that was such a limited perspective. I liked the third-person narrative where you had an outsider. Now that’s not necessarily dramatic. You can have a third-person narrative without going into drama, but the reverse is certainly true; it’s very hard to write a play from an individual perspective. Tennessee Williams tries in The Glass Menagerie, but in the end that’s not what it’s about. The most significant scene in The Glass Menagerie takes place when the narrator isn’t there. In any case, something about my sense of perspective made me veer toward drama, too.3

A.R.GURNEY: AN INTRODUCTION 7

Notice Gurney’s emphasis on fulfilling the assignment in a different way, on listening to dialogue, on not wanting to take the “I” position. Ruling out stories that put “I” in the limelight leaves stories in which a group or an ensemble holds center stage. Rather than one voice, many voices interest Gurney. As he matured, Gurney found additional ways to multiply voices. He mixed classical and contemporary characters in many of his early one acts (The Comeback, The David Show, The Golden Fleece) so that the past and present comment on one another. He uses this technique again in his 1996 play, Overtime, mixing modern and Renaissance sensibilities by extending into our time the lives of the characters from The Merchant of Venice. He mixed present and absent characters, underscoring the experience of separation and loss (Children, What I Did Last Summer, The Cocktail Hour, The Old Boy, and Love Letters). He wrote plays in which actors play more than one character, deploying the resources of acting to the greater delight of both actor and audience (Scenes from American Life, The Dining Room). He wrote a play (The Wayside Motor Inn) in which multiple scenes play simultaneously. And in what remains his most striking experiment, even if it is not regarded as his best work (Sweet Sue), he wrote a play in which different actors play the same characters, so that the audience experiences alternating interpretations of actions and feelings within a single performance. More recently, he pushed theatrical boundaries beyond merely human perspectives and created a dog, the title role in Sylvia.4 For his primary education in Buffalo, Gurney first attended the Franklin school and the Nichols school. Then, in 1944, Gurney went to St. Paul’s school in Concord, New Hampshire. There he immediately tried out for the school play and won a role. However, his classmates’ reaction to his first appearance on stage nearly derailed his theatrical career even before it built a head of steam. The play was Arsenic and Old Lace. Gurney won the part of the ingenue (St. Paul’s was then a boys’ school). Dressed as a girl, he earned a dreaded nickname: ‘Legs’ Gurney—because in a skirt I had very good legs. You know what life is like in boarding school, and I got such a hard time about that I never wanted to go near the theater. I think I played the part very well, maybe too well. They kept asking me to be in other plays but at St. Paul’s it just was so humiliating for me, and I was teased so much about that, that I just absolutely backed away from the theater. But he continued to write—for the school magazine and for two memorable teachers, Frederick Arthur Philbrick—known to students as Fap because he signed notes with his initials—and John Richards, the grandson of Julia Ward Howe, called “sentimental John.” Gurney recalls Philbrick as a martinet who made him attend to details and avoid clichés. However, Fap also encouraged his students to try different forms of writing so Gurney “experimented with humor and comic essays…He’d read them aloud in class, and when you’re a young kid, and you get the class laughing with you, it turns you on.” Gurney remembers Richards as “absolutely the reverse” of Philbrick. Richards taught Gurney’s honors English classes in his freshman and senior years. In the latter, the students read all of Shakespeare. Richards’ teaching did not rely on brilliant scholarship but upon open, affecting vulnerability, an unashamed emotional response to the beauty of language:

8 ARVID F.SPONBERG

…what struck me most about him is that he would read a passage from Shakespeare and he’d start to cry because it moved him so much…he’d say, “I can’t tell you any more than this is wonderful,” and we’d believe him just because he proved it in the fact that he became so emotionally wrought about it. And that wouldn’t be simply true of Shakespeare. It would be true of Milton. It would be true of Keats. And then it would be true of second-rate things he’d also read that really weren’t that great… Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana was one of his favorite books. We had to study that endlessly. He didn’t like Thoreau very much but there was another woodsman named Stewart Edward White, I think, who wrote books about how to start a fire in the woods and all that and he just loved this...he loved to walk, and St. Paul’s is a very pastoral environment. He’d never take walks with students but you’d see him in the woods walking and communing with nature, so he became...a man who somehow was in tune with the vernal wood and with literature in a way that really turned him on... I kind of admired him for that. He never liked me very much. He didn’t dislike me, he was a wonderful, gentle man. But he thought I was too sophisticated, at least in literature. I would like restoration comedy or Much Ado About Nothing where[as] he wanted me to turn on to Romeo and Juliet and things like that. These memories illuminate two aspects of Gurney’s mature work and responses to it. Gurney has been criticized for insufficient emotional power in his characters and predicaments. But his memory of Richards shows that a vulnerable openness to the power of literature impressed him as a young writer. At the same time, as a seventeen-year-old, he knew that his tastes favored stories more subtle in their delineation of personality and situation than those his teachers preferred. In this regard, the influence of Philbrick is likewise significant because Philbrick’s teaching, as Gurney remembers it, coupled a disciplined approach to finding fresh words and images with a freewheeling exploration of form. These elements became cornerstones of Gurney’s dramaturgy. As the interviews with Tillinger, Cunningham, Taylor, and Mooney show, The Perfect Party exemplifies particularly well this combination of verbal perfection and formal experimentation. Indeed, the predicament of the play’s central character has a rather Philbrick-ian ambience and one wonders if Tony, an ex-professor, doesn’t embody some remnant of the spirit of Philbrick. A Sense of Craft In the fall of 1948, Gurney entered Williams College, two years behind Steven Sondheim whose reputation was already established and growing: It was the fact that Sondheim was making such major strides even then with the student musicals. He was cracking open the whole form at Williams…. He’d already done one show, which I had heard about when I arrived, and then he did another one when I was there, which just amazed me. Prior to Sondheim the spring student musical consisted of, like the Hasty Pudding at Harvard, a parody show with a funny title and a kick-chorus of men with hairy legs. No girls, no women went to Williams

A.R.GURNEY: AN INTRODUCTION 9

College then. Sondheim said to hell with that. He knew people in New York. He got the rights to I think it was Three Men on a Horse. The title was All That Glitters. It had women singing in it because he got Bennington women interested in playing it. It had a story and interesting songs. Had a great set. Got a lot of good people to work for him. And I said to myself I want to do that, too. So the following year was his senior year, and I think he already had his eye on New York. I think he was taking courses in New York. He was the darling of the music department any way. We wrote a revue. Now he wrote a couple of songs in this revue and he gave me liberal advice on lyrics to the songs that I wrote. The revue was called Where to from Here? and of course it was a total backsliding after Sondheim’s book musical, but nonetheless, Sondheim was partially engaged with it. He lent his name to it. I ended up writing most of the skits and the continuity. I tried to give it some kind of a shape and the precedent of having women in it was established so women came from all over to be in it. And it was fun and it worked. Then the next year Sondheim had graduated and I did the whole thing myself, again a revue, but a revue striving for a kind of story, and I had a couple of guys write the music with me. I wrote a couple of songs myself because I took a music course and figured out how to read music, so I picked them out on the piano. And then my senior year, I said all right now I’m ready for the big time and I proposed to [the director of the college’s theater] that I do a musical version of Shaw’s Pygmalion. And he rejected the idea. Sondheim’s influence on Gurney seems similar in two ways to that of Philbrick. Each emphasized attention to freshly minted words used in striking ways and each encouraged Gurney to break through the walls of existing forms of storytelling. Sondheim’s influence may be seen as unique, however, because it placed Gurney for the first time at the controls of the premier American theatrical vehicle, the musical. Gurney’s love of popular music has always been strong. Almost every one of his plays includes memorable tunes from the thirties, forties, and fifties. The rejection of his idea to musicalize Pygmalion temporarily halted Gurney’s progress as a librettist. During his senior year, he turned his attention once again to the classical theater. He wrote a senior thesis on The Winter’s Tale under Professor James Clay Hunt, whom Gurney remembers as “very influential” on him and his love of literature. After graduating from Williams, Gurney joined the navy—there was a draft in those days—and the ranks of distinguished American theater artists who found life in the armed forces was not merely compatible with a life in the arts but that, in fact, the armed forces comprise a de facto national endowment for the arts.5 In Gurney’s case the depth and configuration of his resources were particularly rich as they included not only musicians and a “performance space” but an audience. His circumstances might stir envy in the heart of any struggling nonprofit arts manager: …because I’d done shows at Williams, I just lucked on to a large [aircraft] carrier [the Franklin D. Roosevelt] and I started doing shows. It had a built-in audience. When a ship came into port, at least two thirds or half of the ship’s company would have to remain aboard the ship. At that time, during the cold war, you couldn’t let

10 ARVID F.SPONBERG

the whole ship ashore. We’d raise the number one elevator that brings the planes to the carrier deck and we’d turn that into a stage. I had a huge ship’s orchestra that [had] lots of arrangements because they would play for dances and had to play national anthems whenever we came into port. So the orchestra was there with arrangements and then I’d write these shows using these arrangements. I put new lyrics to these old songs that they had… I knew after having been in the navy that I could somehow entertain [or] reach a larger audience than just a collegiate audience. Fifty years ago, apparently, mastering the elements of musical theatre in the Navy constituted appropriate taxpayers’ support of the arts, while distributing dollars to nonprofit arts organizations today remains problematic for many legislators. After he left the Navy in 1956, Gurney entered the Yale School of Drama. While he found the faculty there “not…erribly exciting,” one teacher, Nikos Psacharopolous, proved to be extraordinary, influencing Gurney’s development then and in later years at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. However, Gurney didn’t work with Psacharopolous immediately. His first teacher was the redoubtable John Gassner and he and Gassner had decided differences in taste, rather as Gurney had with Richards. Gassner admired the social realism of writers such as Ibsen and Odets. Gurney liked the richer language and the more intricate plots of the Elizabethans. He based one of his projects for Gassner on Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase, about a soldier who comes home from the wars. Gurney’s hero was “a guy who comes home from the navy and is not sure whether he wants to get married.”6 It was a farce, with “rather elevated language” influenced by Christopher Fry. I read it aloud in class and the class liked it. We’re talking about fifteen or sixteen people. So in the middle of the reading aloud, Gassner said, “Now hold it.” He got on the telephone and called up Psacharopolous and said, “Come on over here, Gurney’s reading this thing. I don’t think much of it but you might like it.” Psacharopolous…heard the rest of it and said, “I really like that. Let’s turn that into a musical.” The result, Love in Buffalo, with music by fellow student Gilbert Leitinger, became the Yale School of Drama’s first musical production. Psacharopolous mounted it on the main stage with “very elaborate sets.” Gurney remembers that Psacharopolous “taught me a lot about [what] worked. He’d say, ‘cut that, Pete. That doesn’t work. That’s boring.’ Just tough, no-nonsense stuff. And I was very affected by that. And the show was very good. It’s very dated now. But it worked like gangbusters at the time.” The success of Love in Buffalo yielded a phone call from Richard Halliday, Mary Martin’s husband. Halliday invited Gurney to New York on the coming weekend to discuss the possibility of developing a project for Martin.7 Gurney’s parents were scheduled to visit Gurney that weekend and Gurney dutifully chose to host his parents rather than cancel their visit and accept Halliday’s invitation. The meeting never occurred. “History does not disclose her alternatives” but….

A.R.GURNEY: AN INTRODUCTION 11

A Sense of Timing Following graduation from Yale, Gurney accepted a teaching job at the Belmont school in Belmont, Massachusetts, and then, in 1958, won a job in the humanities program at MIT. With a growing family and heavy teaching responsibilities, he found time for writing plays mainly during summers. His one-act plays date from this period. But in 1969, he began working on Scenes from American Life, a play with 140 different characters. Gurney’s recollection of the genesis of Scenes evokes a brief period in the history of American playwriting that now appears to have been a turning point for scores of writers: I wrote that in 1969 and ’70, a pretty tumultuous period. The Vietnam War was going on and I became aware more than ever before how different the world was that I grew up in from the way the world seemed to be going. So therefore this was the first time I really started writing about the world I knew. There were many reasons why things happen. I had been a part of a workshop run by Boston University at Tanglewood. And I remember we worked on The David Show there and that worked out very well even though the play ultimately didn’t. But they had asked me back for the summer of 1970. And I had these scenes. They were just scenes. I think the first scene I wrote, one of the most satirical, was that mother and the daughter having lunch at the Plaza and the mother trying to persuade her daughter to get a diaphragm. I just knew that was a nice strong scene. What could happen to it? I submitted that scene and several others to this wonderful man named Mouzon Law…who ran the theatre department at BU and had some money that he used with this Tanglewood operation in the summer. Harold Clurman [who] was up there was also a big influence at the time [and] gave me a sense that I was better than I thought I was. They were all New York playwrights and me. Because it was BU they had to have one Boston play wright and so they picked me the first time and my play turned out to work better than the other ones. So then the second time they asked me back. And I had these scenes. So I said, “Can we just work on these scenes and maybe get them into some sort of shape?” The ’60s and ’70s were tumultuous times but there was a lot of money around, if you remember, for academic projects. They had very good directors, very good actors. Michael Moriarty was in this play. Rue McLanahan. Several really first-rate actors. So I got up there and I started writing more scenes. And they just started to come. For instance one of the best scenes in it, one of the most moving scenes in my opinion, is toward the end where that woman want[s] to sing Lucia Di Lammermoor. And that was strictly Rue McLanahan coming up to me on the side and saying, “Everybody else has got a big moment in this play and I don’t have anything and I want something toward the end.” Already Rue was a good actress and famous enough and so I wrote that in about a half an hour. We had rented a house up near Tanglewood and I had four children and they were all crying and I kept saying “Shut Up. I’m trying to write.” And I remember having to put in some kind of a thread. Here were these scenes and how [could] I hook them together. I remember contriving it but what’s the thread, I said to myself. The paranoia, the fascist takeover that was going on in the country at that time. So I got that in. One

12 ARVID F.SPONBERG

thing led to another. There must be as many scenes [that I took] out of that play as I put in. And several of them I put in after Tanglewood when we did it at Lincoln Center…the point I’m making is that BU gave me a nice canvas and some excellent paints, the paints being Rue McLanahan, Michael Moriarty, a good director named Jered Barkley, and several other first-rate actors. And I said here’s a little sketch and BU said here’s some money, go to work. That doesn’t happen to many playwrights these days. I went to work and said, well, we have a group scene here, maybe we ought to have a twosome following it. And we worked it all out in a somewhat mechanical way but the play seemed to connect. The play did indeed connect and from this time Gurney considered himself to be a professional playwright. But the arc of Gurney’s development displays several features that may be regarded as characteristic of American theater in the second half of the twentieth century. His Interest in Musical Theater

At the time that he entered Yale, the American musical, as a theatrical form, was flourishing. Gurney desired to connect with the glamour and influence of this style of theater. The tastes of his grandmother, his parents, and those of his classmates and one of his most influential teachers refreshed the vitality of this most American genre. However, within a decade of his graduation from Yale, the power of the musical—and of commercial theater generally—to hold the attention of the American public began to wane. Gurney and many others who love the form lost their opportunities to contribute to its development. Gurney’s love of the musical echoes in the melodies that the characters in his plays listen to, whistle, hum, and sing. Fifty years after Love in Buffalo, Gurney is collaborating on a new musical based on Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. His Embracing of Family Responsibility Before his Theatrical Ambitions

The withdrawal from theatrical performance during his years at St. Paul’s, as the result of adolescent embarrassment, illustrates the arm’s length posture that most Americans adopt toward theatrical life. Simultaneously, though, Gurney’s immersion in literature provided the foundation for his mastery of dramatic technique. It stimulated his interest in dramatic form and structure. Most important, it contributed to his love of language. A Gurney play delights audiences and actors who appreciate wit delivered by an agile tongue for a discerning ear, serious conversation intelligently enlarged by apt allusions to literature, music, and politics, all serving a story that truly represents what is happening today. Finally, his literary training conferred the important ability to earn a living in the comparatively stable world of fine schools and universities. His Development within the Precincts of Nonprofit Theaters

By the time Gurney emerged as a professional playwright in the 1970s, nonprofit theaters produced the most important new American drama. The influence of this type of theater organization on Gurney’s work—and the work of hundreds of other playwrights—has been

A.R.GURNEY: AN INTRODUCTION 13

widely acknowledged but insufficiently studied. Very few nonprofit theaters can afford the high payrolls and complex expensive productions that define Broadway shows in particular and commercial theater in general. To have his plays produced at all, Gurney learned to write for theaters that had little money. At least two obvious features of Gurney’s plays can be attributed to the production capabilities of nonprofit theaters. First, his stories require small, flexible casts and emphasize ensemble acting rather than starring and supporting roles. In ensemble acting, the work and the satisfactions of performance are shared more or less equally among the actors. The company endeavors to “serve the play.” Second, the minimal, flexible settings can be adapted to a variety of performance spaces. Both these features suit the philosophies of most artists and managers who direct the productions and business affairs of nonprofit theaters. In the pages that follow, we will be able to see how these features inspired actors and directors who staged Gurney’s plays. And we will be able to read how Gurney’s art has been assessed by scholars. NOTES 1. Gurney has written about his parents’ dinner parties in “The Dinner Party,” American Heritage, 39: September-October 1988, 69–72 and reprinted here, 177–80. 2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from an interview with the writer conducted in Chicago in March 1993. 3. “A.R.Gurney,” in Jackson Bryer, ed., The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995, 92. 4. See pp. 21–2 for Gurney’s comment on this technique. 5. Among others known to the author are Paul Libin, co-founder and managing director of Circle in the The Square from 1955–1988 and managing director of JuJamCyn theatres since 1988, who founded the Fort Hood Players while on active duty at that Texas army base; Emanuel Azenberg, producer of Neil Simon, Tom Stoppard, and Athol Fugard, who regards his stint as an infantry lieutenant as his best education; and Bernard Gersten, cofounder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and current chairman of Lincoln Center, who received early training in Maurice Evans’s USO Shakespeare troop; John Cunningham, interviewed in this volume, learned some of his craft while serving in the seventh army in Europe. See page 35. 6. Gurney had almost married a Japanese girl while he was in the Navy but, yielding to his family’s wishes, had broken off the relationship. That experience forms the central dramatic question in Far East. By the time he entered Yale, he had married Molly Spaulding and they were expecting their first child. 7. Love in Buffalo launched John Cunningham’s career, too. See interview with Cunningham on p. 39.

14

PART I Interviews

LOIS: …What gave you the idea for this party, and what do you hope to achieve by giving it? Remember, while you’re talking, that I come from New York, which is a hectic, fast-paced city that makes us easily bored with unnecessary exposition. TONY: A perfect party. Well. I think everyone in the world secretly wants to give one. It’s at the heart of the social impulse. The caveman calling his fellow tribesman to the fire, the astrophysicist cupping his electronic ear to space—we all have this yearning to connect in some ultimate way with our fellow man. LOIS: Or woman? TONY: Of course. Sorry. The Perfect Party, 1986

16

An Interview with A.R.Gurney ARVID F.SPONBERG

From 1958 until 1983 Gurney’s career followed parallel lines in the theater and in the university. This long phase of his life parallels the key feature of Sweet Sue. In that play Gurney doubles the central character and calls for two actors to play Sue and Sue Too. Between 1958 and 1983 there was Gurney (the playwright) and Gurney Too (the professor). For a theatre historian, this fact deepens the intrinsic interest of his plays. Among major American play wrights before Gurney only Thornton Wilder and William Inge were both professional playwright and professional academic. Among play wrights born between 1930 and 1970, none of greatest importance has repeated the performance (see note 10, p. 167). This is not to say that, under different circumstances, Gurney would have chosen dual careers. The success of his plays in the 1960s and 1970s did not yield enough income for him to give up a professorship of humanities at MIT, especially with four children to help rear and educate. Acclaim for The Dining Room in the early 1980s brought the opportunity to devote full attention to the theater and Gurney took it. The unusual circumstances of Wilder’s, Inge’s and Gurney’s careers, however, prompt questions about the relation of theatrical achievement and university training in the twentieth century, a period of our theatrical history in which most universities established theater schools and departments. Chief among the questions raised is why there are not more Gurneys and Wilders? Gurney asserts that he tried to keep his academic and artistic lives separate, but, as both professor and playwright, questions about society, history, and their relation to the quest for dramatic form always held center stage in his attention. An important facet of that quest reflects his abiding interest in the nature of comedy. AFS: Would you describe the course in comedy that you taught at MIT? GURNEY: It was a broad survey of various comic works. We normally began with Aristophanes and we followed the tradition of European comedy up to around Shaw. Then we took a branch and talked about American comedy, starting really with the tall tale and Twain and then following that up to the urban comedy of Jules Feiffer, Woody Allen, and the Marx brothers. So as we moved into the twentieth century in American comedy we showed a lot of movies so that we actually had a chance to hear laughter in the classroom. We dealt with a number of comic theories along the way and I tried to connect the theories to the particular work which to some degree inspired the theory or were inspired by the theory. For example Bergson and Shaw went very well together. Freud and

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Woody Allen. And Aristophanes and Aristotle. And then for some of the nineteenth century we read a little Meredith, for example, and we read Schlegel on comedy. I felt, and most of the students felt, that comic theory was always limited and that the works always expanded beyond the comic coordinates that these theorists tend to put on them. But many writers on comedy were illuminating. For instance, we did a lot of work with Northrop Frye when we talked about Shakespeare. I remember that was always helpful. I remember the discussions of the “green world” comedy when we were talking about The Merchant of Venice or Twelfth Night. So it was a broad course, but I always enjoyed it and I think the students did. AFS: As you continued working on your own plays, did you find reflections and conversations in the classroom infiltrating your work? GURNEY: Not really. I’ve always tried to turn off the academic side of myself when I’m writing. Maybe some of that stuff sneaks in the back door. But, in general, I’d say no. I really tried to keep both modes of thinking separate. AFS: In the Alex Witchel article,1 you draw a distinction between American comedy and European comedy. Would you review that distinction and add any thoughts you might have had about it since’89? The basis for the idea was the difference between the reconciliation that seems to occur in European comedy versus the anarchy in the endings of American comedy. GURNEY: Yes. That’s the general thing. In European comedy normally the social world is put back together in a modified way. The senex figure, the authority figure, is appeased, a marriage occurs, in some way, and the continuum of life is embraced within the social context. In American comedy, normally, not always, but normally, there is a celebration of freedom rather than socialization. And from, say, the ending of Huck Finn, when Huck lights out for the territory, or the ending of the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup, where they end up just throwing potatoes at Margaret Dumont, there tends to be this kind of commitment or embracing of individual freedom, and even chaos and anarchy at the expense of the social order. We talked somewhat about The Graduate, I remember, in class, when you do have the establishment of social order. At the end of The Graduate, the young man defeats Mrs. Robinson, gets the girl he wants, and they get on the back of the bus and start out for a life of their own. In the first place, they’re moving, they’re not going back to Mrs. Robinson’s house to celebrate the wedding reception. They’re moving. But even as they’re sitting in the back of the bus and looking at each other, everybody in the bus is looking at them. And then [the ending takes on] this strange, odd tone of “Did we do the right thing? What are we caught in now?” And everybody on the bus looks at them very peculiarly. They ’re not [cheered] on to the bus, “Oh, here comes some newlyweds!” Clap, clap, clap. It seems as if they’re treated like strangers and outsiders. They’ve got their own world only. That world seems to be moving somewhere, we don’t know where, and as they look at each other they even wonder whether they’re right for each other. [This] is the reverse of what you

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 19

normally get in the European comedy when there’s a kiss and then an embrace and then a comus and antic dance, or whatever it is you get from Shakespeare on through to Shaw and Wilde. That in general would be my sense of the distinction. AFS: Do you think the general trend of situation comedies in American television over the last generation or two has tried to find ways of bringing reconciliation into the structure of that comedy form? GURNEY: Yes. I haven’t studied that as much. I didn’t teach much television, frankly. When I was teaching there at MIT, the technology of being able to show tapes in class was really not perfected yet. Occasionally I’d show an Archie Bunker or The Honeymooners. But I think your general observation is absolutely correct. There has to be some kind of continuity in the sitcom. And there has to be some sense of reconciliation at the end of each segment. There has got to be some sense of completion and yet enough of a hook so that you want to come back next weekend. The situation can’t be so totally complete. Take Cheers, for example. The Ted Danson-Shelley Long relationship could not ultimately end in happy marriage and yet there is always at the end of each segment of Cheers the song and the sense that the bar will continue and the community will be reasserted. So, yes, I think that television is a very interesting modification of the American thing. AFS: In The Fourth Wall, Roger makes the comment that plays don’t change the world and those that try don’t last. It seemed to me that The Cosby Show worked awfully hard at trying to change the world. In a lot of situation comedies in television, particularly since the Cosby show came on, there has been [a] desire to do good. Have you had any further thoughts about this? In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings about comedy, Dryden and others are concerned about the extent to which comedy can really correct behavior. Did you wrestle with that? GURNEY: Yes. I always thought about that, though I think it’s kind of disastrous to think about it as you’re writing. I think after you’ve written something, you can then say, “Oh, boy, this is going to really do some good.” But I’m more in the oldfashioned classical tradition that comedy works by pointing out the vices and follies of society rather than trying to elevate or improve in a positive way. I think [Cosby’s] show did a lot of good in one sense. It gave African-American people an image of middle-class life, however distorted and idealized. It did give them that sense that this was possible, this could happen. And in that sense it was very healthy. The actual stories themselves were so boring and bland [they weren’t] in any way helpful in my opinion but the central image of Cosby and his wife and those kids, I suppose, might have done some good. AFS: In Alex Witchel’s article you said, “I see what I do as going against the grain of the American embracing of private freedom.”2 As you just said, your work has been influenced also by the European tradition of pointing out the vices and follies

20 ARVID F.SPONBERG

GURNEY: Yes. AFS: rather than trying so hard as other forms of American comedy do, to present the idea that everything we do has to improve our lives—what we eat, what we drink, what we wear, the entertainments that we have— GURNEY: That’s right. AFS: and I connect this idea to that “green world,” and the dance elements that are part of the broad western comic tradition and that I think are in your work as well. GURNEY: I was talking to someone just on this same subject about Ayckbourn. I feel in some ways very close to Ayckbourn. He and I both love to experiment, to challenge the limitations of theater, and also constantly to call the audience’s attention to the fact that it’s theater. And we both have a certain sardonic attitude toward middle-class life. What makes me American and Ayckbourn English is the fact that there is in my work, I think, a kind of idealism that is not in his. There is always either a lost city on a hill, a lost community that was once good, or a possibility of a better world that we should strive for where there isn’t in Ayckbourn. Ayckbourn always seems to end his plays with a kind of dark shrug. AFS: I felt that very much with The Fourth Wall, particularly with Peggy, whose character is the most extreme, and yet you recognize the value of what she is aspiring to even though her behavior is causing difficulties for everybody else. And also, in The Cocktail Hour, the sister who wants to go off and [deal with seeing-eye dogs]. The element of folly is there and yet it is implicit in the way the story unfolds on the stage, and the way the characters treat her, that there has to be a place found for her in this community somehow. So it’s a positive element. GURNEY: Yes, and of course it varies, I think, depending on my play. I do think there is always a democratic ideal that—it’s hard to comment on your own work, obviously,—I hope I have and I think I have a sense of the ideal democracy, whether it’s that ideal dinner party at the end of The Dining Room, or opening of the club at the end of The Middle Ages or whatever it is. In Later Life, there is this ideal community that’s singing American songs around the piano. That’s what we’re all aspiring to. Because Gurney writes comedies about Americans who live in comfortable homes, belong to clubs, have generous incomes, excellent educations, and speak grammatically, his plays have been compared to those of Philip Barry and S.N.Behrman. Gurney sees important differences between his plays and theirs. GURNEY: Both those guys were a little bit the outsiders looking in. Barry was a lower middle-class Irish boy from Rochester who married a rich girl and who, for all of his wonderfully articulate [dialogue] and good plots, I think has his nose pressed to the glass a little too much. He idolizes the rich too much. They’re all so elegant and ultimately so forgiving that I don’t think he sees the skull beneath the skin. And Behrman [is a] wonderfully elegant writer. He was a

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 21

Jewish boy from Worcester who loved the high life in New York and [was] great friends with the Lunts, and he knew how to carpenter together a play. But again it’s all just a little elegant and therefore just maybe a little precious. I don’t think he get[s] into the hearts of his character[s] as much. When he moved, toward the end of his career, into examining his own soul a little more—he wrote a wonderful biographical play called The Cold Wind and The Warm and he wrote Jacobowsky and the Colonel—when he became concerned about the world, just the issues of refugees, then I think he was richer than in those early things that he wrote for the Lunts and Ina Claire. AFS: And in the fifties and sixties who carried on that Behrman/Barry tradition? Does that come to an end? GURNEY: I don’t see myself totally carrying on that tradition. I know I’m put into that category but I don’t think I have the same attitude. I’m [not] trying to present an amusing, cultivated world for the audience to enjoy. I don’t think that’s what I’m trying to do on stage. And I think that’s what Barry and Behrman were trying to do because they had that audience to talk to. But that audience is no longer there. I’m much more of a cultural anthropologist in the way I work. I’m describing a world much more under pressure, much more in trouble, much more trying either to change or to grimly hold on to its values. And I think the audiences I write for are much more outside that world, and my job is to make my people relevant to that audience, make my characters have some general appeal so somebody who comes from a very different background can go to my play, even though my characters may be talking about cocktails and dining rooms, [and] say to themselves, “Yes, that’s me, too. I have equivalent things in my own life.” I don’t think Barry and Behrman had to worry about that. AFS: How has this task directed or guided the quest for form in your plays? In the whole body of work, what has come to fascinate me most of all is your determination and ability to give each dramatic work its own shape, its own form. GURNEY: Yes. Yes. You’re absolutely right…. Obviously I try to do in my plays what I’m trying to live out in my own soul. It’s not simply that it interests me to convey the world I’m writing about to people who are not familiar with it. It’s who I am. I came from that world. I’m trying to live. I’m trying to be real in a world where those values are under question, so it’s not simply that it’s an amusing undertaking for me. In order to live I have to write these plays, in order to live with myself. I live these problems every day. But just as I see the decline and decay of values that were once instilled in me as ultimately important, and [of] a way of life [that], I thought, when I was growing up, was nonnegotiable, so do I see the theater itself under increasing pressure. More and more are we aware of the artificiality of theatrical forms. So it seems to me that in order to write a word, I have to somehow embrace and accept and dramatize the very artificiality of the form I am trying to write in. I just cannot take it for granted. I just cannot take realistic drama for granted,

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no more than I can take the world I grew up in for granted. I have to explore the form even as I am exploring the values that I am trying to write about within the form. AFS: In your early plays, this exploration seems to me to take the dominant shape of an intense concentration and simplification of the elements of drama. In The Rape of Bunny Stuntz, we have got a desk or table at a public meeting, and a couple of chairs and a couple of very simple hand properties, and then we set these characters in action. It’s almost as if you were trying to say, “OK this is a blank slate here. All we need are two players and a passion and a board for them to stand on.” GURNEY: You’re absolutely right. Now there are many influences on me, I’m not alone in trying to do this. Thornton Wilder is a very important influence on me in his attempt to clear the slate. Harold Pinter in his kind of minimalist emphasis on subtext and the essences of dialogue was a big influence. Those are people who have done it. I seem to be only at home when I am doing it. I can’t do anything else. And I cannot sustain a play unless I can find a form which somehow emphasizes the theatricality of what I’m saying and justifies the use of the theater to say it. AFS: But Scenes from American Life, to the reader coming through the sequence of your plays, just seems to come out wham! somewhere else. The cast is bigger. You’ve been using two, three, four actors. Now your notes to the cast say eight. GURNEY: Eight. I don’t think you can do it with less than eight. AFS: I counted 140-some different characters that parade across the stage in the course of the play. What happened? Gurney answered this question with the story that I have included in the introduction (see pp. 12–13). That story prompted me to ask: AFS: So it was a combination of your own working out of values that you saw being pressured by the events in the society coupled with this opportunity, which you hadn’t had up to that time, of working with Clurman and Moriarty. GURNEY: That’s right. Exactly. There are many reasons why things happen in this world, as we all know. It wasn’t simply that at that time suddenly, because of the turmoil in American politics and American capitalism, I had to express myself. But the fact that certain people at that time were also saying to me, “You’re good, Gurney. We’re willing to spend some money on you.” Therefore I could use a larger canvas, more characters, and I could call for a piano. And there were also people, once I did that, who were there, like Rue [McLanahan], or Michael Moriarty, saying, “I can’t say this line” or “Can you give me something more here?” or “How about if you take that scene back there” so that was the lucky confluence. AFS: Ten years later in Dining Room the idea of having the actors double the characters [reasserted itself). I want to connect that to Sweet Sue. It was your only Broadway play and it hasn’t had the kind of impact that Cocktail Hour has had. GURNEY: Oh, no. It got nailed.

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 23

AFS:

It got hit pretty hard. And the regional theaters haven’t picked it up they way they have picked up Cocktail Hour and Love Letters. GURNEY: They haven’t at all. Amazing. AFS: What was the nature of the quest for form there to lead you to split Sue in two and Jake in two? What was going on? GURNEY: It’s partly a psychological exploration. I wanted to tell the Phedre plot, really. And I wanted to tell the story deftly, quickly. And I didn’t want to get caught in soap opera. And I certainly didn’t want to get caught up in Greek choruses and old-fashioned devices. Also I think again there are a number of influences on me. By then I’d had enough of my plays done to know that there were many different ways of doing a play that were equally valid. I’d seen a number of productions of The Dining Room, a number of productions of Children, and I’d say to myself, well, she’s good, and she’s good. That scene works that way but it also works this way. So I thought why not tell the story twice, simultaneously. Not only can you illuminate a complicated subject, getting the different attitudes of two different actresses and two different actors playing the same part but with different attacks on it, you get a kind of counterpoint. Also technically I could move the story along much quicker. If you examine the play you’ll notice how easily, easily you can do those things that might take so much longer if you just had one person playing. So it came out of The Dining Room in that sense, too. But then the next question is, why doesn’t it work, and I’m not sure…. We did it, as you know, first up at Williamstown. It was such a huge hit that immediately these producers wanted to move it to New York. We did it. It was directed by Joey Tillinger and it had Maria Tucci rather than Lynn Redgrave in it. But Mary Tyler Moore was in it from the start. She’s a very cagey person. She wouldn’t have hooked on to a play that she thought was a loser. But for some reason, even though it seemed to turn on audiences, the critics could not abide it. They wanted to say, “One Sue stands for the id and the other for the superego” or something like that. They kept trying to impose a scheme on it. AFS: Any way to make an equation out of it. GURNEY: Right. Right. So maybe its time will come. I’m not embarrassed about it at all. I really like it. AFS: After Sweet Sue, from 1986 up to the present, you seem to have moved into an area where the set now is going to be a recognizable place. With Perfect Party, and Cocktail Hour and Fourth Wall we’re in a room that seems to be strongly connected to the kind of room that you knew growing up. GURNEY: That’s interesting. AFS: Another Antigone is a little bit different. It does move around, but we stay in one room in Perfect Party and The Fourth Wall and as in The Problem and Rape of Bunny Stuntz, the emphasis now goes to the relationship amongst this set of characters who come from a very recognizable world but also—as you have been talking about—feel that their world is under considerable pressure. [Henry] Harper’s world [in Another Antigone] is under enormous pressure. [In The Perfect Party]

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Tony’s left the academic life to put on this party and he’s under pressure from all kinds of sources. Roger and Peggy feel the fourth wall. Are the experiments in character doubling and size of the cast over? GURNEY: Well in Later Life there’s character doubling again, though not all character doubling. [Later Life] attempt[s] to combine the character doubling, which I did a little in Richard Cory, but it’s one space and you’re absolutely right about the space. It’s interesting about the space. I do feel inhibited, and I say to myself as I write, “Gee, am I caught in this room for two hours?” And yet you’ll notice that the space is different in these plays from those ultimately resonant spaces. You take, say, Stanley and Stella’s apartment in Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche had to live or die in that space. That environment which she has come to is the last stop on the route of the streetcar named desire. That space is ultimately resonant. The bedroom, the bathroom, the living room where the poker game [occurs], that all feeds very strongly into what happens to her. The spaces that I’ve used, those stationary spaces in the last four or five plays are temporary spaces. They are places where people stop but they are not absolutely crucial. And maybe that’s a flaw, I don’t know. In Another Antigone, if you want to say that Henry’s office is the anchoring space, then ultimately he’s no longer in it. And he’s not anchored [only] in that space, he’s anchored in the class room, too. In The Perfect Party, the real space takes place offstage and this is just a study. It’s like the locker room. AFS: Or the green room? GURNEY: Right, the green room. That’s a better analogy. In Cocktail Hour, John comes home to the space where he once lived and which was once important to him, and he’s got to go through with this kind of exorcism. But in the end it’s not where he’s going to make his life. It’s not really where anybody is going to make a life except the old folks and they’re probably not going to be there that much longer. AFS: And does Later Life use temporary spaces? GURNEY: Later Life [occurs in an] even more temporary [space]. It’s a place where the play can happen, where you can use certain evocative stage images. It’s the same thing with the space in The Fourth Wall. It’s a tough space for the designer to design because it’s not really their home, is it? AFS: No. GURNEY: [Peggy] has moved in but she didn’t really want to be there. AFS: Precisely where Roger’s complaint begins. GURNEY: That’s right. AFS: It’s not my space. GURNEY: Roger’s space is back there and her space is out somewhere else. So they’re stopping there. They are transient spaces. They are stopping points so the play can take place. They’re rest stops, you can say, where the play can take place. They’re different from where the characters have been, and they’re different from where they want to go.

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 25

AFS:

Wayside Motor Inn has got doubling and pairs of characters occupying, from the audience’s point of view, the same visual space but from the characters’ point of view they’re all in different motel rooms. GURNEY: That’s right. AFS: And Middle Ages takes place in the anteroom to the main part of a club. GURNEY: That’s a crucial space because that is the place which ultimately becomes where they fall in love, where they go to bed together, where, at the end of the play, they’re finally going to consummate their relationship. The world swirls around outside this room they have appropriated and made their own. Now The Wayside Motor Inn is another example of transient space. These are all people stopping on their way to crucial places that they want to go, or [from] crucial places they’ve been. AFS: In Children and What I Did Last Summer there are spaces which the characters feel deep connections with but which are also temporary with respect to the rest of their lives. Their home is someplace else. GURNEY: Yes. But it’s where they live, that summer world of What I Did Last Summer, certainly that terrace that the children take over. AFS: There’s an alternate space where the boy goes. GURNEY: Yes. But that’s still part of the stage space. That’s the closest I’ve come, in The Old Boy, What I Did Last Summer, and Another Antigone, to a quasi-Elizabethan fluidity. In other words, there is normally an anchoring space—and these are very hard for the designer—and sometimes they’re successful and sometimes they’re not—I don’t want to get too abstract. In What I Did Last Summer, there’s that house where they live, but then also there is the intruding space of Anna Trumbull and the space [Charlie] goes to but that’s all on the same stage. Same thing with The Old Boy, it’s that alumni VIP room that they come [to], but we also go out west, we also go out to the boy’s dorm, we swirl around outside. So I try to open it up. It’s hard. It’s hard to find a defining visual metaphor and I’ve never been totally successful. But it’s a problem that all contemporary playwrights have. How do you reflect the fluidity of American life, the geographical variety of American life, and still keep the concentration that the theater requires? AFS: One of the defining terms that I have already used in the Broadway Talks book is this quest for community. Peggy’s speeches in The Fourth Wall make her your sharpest and clearest dramatic expression of the yearnings for that kind of community. Your use of language, the way you write for the characters, their capacities to express their own feelings, your use of music in the plays, in some places your frank borrowings from literature, in other places your subtle borrowings from literature, all seem to me to connect to a strong concern about what holds communities together. GURNEY: There’s so much you can say about that. The theater is such an ultimately communal form because the audience is right there, and it’s normally polite enough so it doesn’t get up and go and get popcorn. You can create a community.

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[Peggy] says, in The Fourth Wall, they come there, they pay money, they want to be there, maybe they want something that we can give them. So the form of theater is, by nature, a celebration of community. The use of literary quotes is an attempt to hook people into the community of man, the tradition of western literature, at least, to the degree I know it and hop[e] that the audience knows it. I got really excited, I don’t think people knew this, but William Congreve got one of the nicest laughs last night.3 Do you remember “Don’t dwindle into a wife.” It’s just such an elegant phrase. They didn’t say, “Ah! That comes from the The Way of the World but they appreciated the phrase coming from that man. And I just thought, oh, that’s great. I felt really good about that. So, yes, the sense of community comes by trying to hook them into myths, such as the Antigone myth or the David myth or the Medea myth which once spoke to a community. To try to hit those chords again, to try to hit those recollections we have of particular phrases, yes. Anything to create, in this room as they’re watching, the sense that we’re all in this thing together. That’s very important to me. AFS: And is that a primary justification for the music? GURNEY: Music, of course, does that and it’s not just music. The image—and I’ve got to stop using it because maybe I use it too much—is people singing around a piano. I have that again in Later Life. I can’t seem to get away from it. AFS: And then somewhere in my notes I’ve got a list of all the hymns in Old Boy. So it’s hymns in Old Boy. Cole Porter in Fourth Wall. GURNEY: Yes. AFS: I still have not found the tune for Sweet Sue. GURNEY: That was very popular. I don’t know how that came up. It’s from my generation. It was just a common song. Everybody knew it. It wasn’t written in our generation. It wasn’t written in the fifties or the forties, but it was one of those songs that people sang around campfires or around pianos. In those days, when I was growing up, every living room had a piano and most kids had to learn the piano, myself included. I never was any good at it and I’ve certainly forgotten it, but my brother, my sister, and I all took piano lessons. My father played the piano. My mother played the piano. Whenever you went to a party, people wouldn’t immediately put on the CDs, but somebody would sit down at the piano and we’d all sing these songs and “Sweet Sue” would be one of them. But it was a wonderful way of the community celebrating itself. AFS: In plays like The Comeback, and The Golden Fleece, you directly insert a myth and re-tell the myth in a modern idiom. GURNEY: Yes. That’s right. When I was younger, that’s what I liked to do a lot. Partly I was influenced by Shaw, who obviously did a lot of that and a lot more subtlely than I did. Anouilh is a big influence on me, he was doing a lot of that then. Also maybe I wasn’t ready to explore my own soul enough, so I was leaning on these older stories as a way of trying to sound chords with the audience, build a relationship with an audience, a communality, by telling a story which they

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 27

already knew but telling it in a new way. Also sometimes when you’ve written a play—and you’ve explored some aspect of your own life, you want to [say] OK, enough already of me for awhile. Let me lean on something else. Now, Later Life [was] triggered by a Henry James story called “The Beast in the Jungle.” I’m nervous about how to describe it because I don’t want to send the critics rushing to “Beast in the Jungle” because they’ll say “This isn’t The Beast in the Jungle.‘“ I did that with The Golden Age, I said “based on ‘The Aspern Papers’” and then they all started comparing it to me. So all I say at the end of the program on Later Life is “the author is indebted to Henry James” and they have to read all of Henry James to find out where. But it’s about a man who’s so terrified that something awful is going to happen to him in his life that he refuses to live and therefore the terrible thing is that nothing ever happens to him. And that’s kind of the core of Later Life. Though it’s set in America, it’s another old story. It’s not as well known as Medea but it’s a story, a melody that’s been played before that I’m doing a riff on. AFS: Another detail of your writing is the presence of absent figures, if I can put it that way. You talked to me a month ago4 about writing about what you no longer have. You didn’t have a dining room in your house, so you wrote a play about the dining room. Love Letters, about handwritten correspondence, was prompted by your introduction to word processing. Pokey in Children, is not there. In The Cocktail Hour, there’s a brother who’s absent. GURNEY: There’s Jason and Medea. AFS: In Golden Fleece. What does that help you do dramatically that you can’t do otherwise? GURNEY: Well, if less is more, it helps you simplify, boil down the issues to the essentials. It puts the offstage characters in the position of God. They have an additional power by not coming on when they’re talked about. “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.” I have [Pokey] come on at the end and you see him through the screen, probably played by the stage manager through the screen door. The pressure of the imagination, the audience’s imagination, is like the shark in Jaws. When you finally see that mechanical shark crawling up the boat, it’s not as exciting as the sound of the music, boom, boom, boom, and the sense of darkness and the camera moving through the water. So imagination works just as it worked for the Greeks. When Euripides starts bringing on his Apollos, Dionysus, it’s less exciting than those Aeschylean gods that don’t appear but that influence the proceedings so powerfully. So that’s one reason. There’s another very simple economic reason. You tend to get your plays put on more if you have smaller casts. So I tell other younger writers when I’ve had the chance “Playwriting is not only construction, but it’s learning how to know if you really need that character.” It’s learning how to just simplify, boil it down. Pokey has no problem. He’s very sure about what he [wants.] The other people on stage are the ones that have the dramatic problem. Pokey

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is the divine force of vengeance. He knows exactly [what to do], get rid of the house, clear out all of you, I need some bucks. That’s not terribly dramatic. It’s the torn, dramatic people you want to show. The undramatic characters, keep them off. AFS: We’ve already alluded to your use of mythical characters, mythical stories to create the sense of community, but you also blend eras. I’m thinking particularly of The Comeback and also the novel The Gospel According to Joe, where you retell the story in a modern idiom. In The Comeback, we are at a cocktail party when Ulysses comes home and there’s a television crew out in front, and this whole event which most of us knew only from Homer’s lines now takes on flesh and blood in a postmodern format, and Golden Fleece involves the visit to Jason in a motel room where there’s a luscious babe. GURNEY: Right. Right. And they played The Mamas and the Papas. AFS: That’s right. And I could go on. So what itch are you scratching when we you do this? GURNEY: I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s a kind of a wise-guy itch. There can be a kind of sophomoric pleasure in parody. A lot of writers start out writing parody. It’s a kind of challenge to your father, the anxiety of influence, as [Harold Bloom would] say. You have to go through that. Look, I’m telling my own story and I’m debunking or debasing the Homers as I’m doing it. How clever I am. That’s the trap. Some writers do it, and do it well enough so you get both the power of the old story and the modern version. If you do it right. For instance Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida comes close to doing it very interestingly. His audiences knew enough about Homer to know that he was doing a riff on Homer. He wasn’t just trying to redo the thing in that way. It’s always interested me. Anouilh loves to tell those old stories in new ways. AFS: His Antigone, in its historical situation. GURNEY: Perfect example. Sure. Or even something like Anouilh’s Beckett. He’s obviously emphasizing the artificial and the contemporary even as he’s telling this powerful old story. He aggressively uses contemporary language in some cases. So it’s not the worst thing in the world if you do it right. It took me a while to do it right. I like the way I do it in Another Antigone. I’m not sure I like the way I do it in The Comeback. I like the way I do it in The Golden Fleece because there I keep the myth offstage and the contemporary suburban couple on stage. The David Show, I think that’s too clever by half. Just saying, “Oh, boy, look at me. Look at how well versed I am in Biblical awareness and contemporary things.” And that’s the trap. It can become show-offy. The Fourth Wall doesn’t tell [a mythical] story, but it’s very intellectually self-aware. I just hope that the intensity of the concerns of the characters, the needs of the characters, drive through that. GURNEY: Sometimes your language combines with this blending of stories to give the audience a double vision. You make the audience use what they know to help them see the action. In The Perfect Party, even on the page, I took great delight

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 29

in your catching a Wildean rhy thm, in the American idiom, without using the Wildean vocabulary. GURNEY: Yes. Yes. AFS: If I could look at the drafts of that script, would I find a lot of working over those passages where Sally and Lois have the Cecily and Gwendolyn dialogue or did that just sort of spring into existence? GURNEY: I’ve taught Wilde a lot. I’ve a colleague at MIT, just a friend, we’re always quoting Wilde at each other. And we both know that movie quite well and we both love The Importance of Being Earnest. So I think that I didn’t calculate that, it just seemed to come out on the page. AFS: The reader who knows Importance of Being Earnest will not only pick up on Tony’s references, but then a scene later, we’re suddenly into the Wildean world. GURNEY: Oh, very much so. AFS: And the rhythm of Lois and Sally talking to each other. GURNEY: Yes. Yes. Well and I think a little bit in The Fourth Wall. At the beginning of the play they ’re talking about how the room makes them feel artificial. AFS: We’re back at Jack and Algernon discussing how we behave. Public meetings of various kinds figure into this. We go all the way back to Turn of the Century. Here’s this family gathered. What are they going to do about Mama. You bring all those characters together and it’s a very public forum, although it’s a family meeting. Open Meeting and Bunny Stuntz occur in definite public meetings. The professor—I think you must have put more professors onstage than any American writer—who lives a semipublic life. Nothing is more intimate than teaching, in many ways, but it also occurs in this public kind of forum. GURNEY: That’s right. You have to play a role. You have to speak to a large audience. It tends to reflect the theater experience. AFS: Do you think of it in those terms when you’re in the creative process, that you’re dealing with public meetings, or is it just a continuing fascination with the public aspects of our behavior? GURNEY: It’s hard to talk about the creative process, to know what’s going on. The older I get, the more I’m puzzled and perplexed by it, the more I’m terrified, for example, of losing what I’m in the process of writing, because there’s no way of retrieving it. Sometimes a very good scene I’ve written, I come back to it the next day and I’ve forgotten I’d written it because the creative mode is so different from the rational, ordinary mode. So it’s hard for me to talk about the creative process. I do like the idea of public meetings a lot. Again, reflecting, giving the audience a sense of itself. Because in most cases the audience becomes a part of that meeting, whether it’s Bunny Stuntz or The Open Meeting. AFS: And Love Course. GURNEY: Love Course, The Golden Fleece, The Old Boy, Another Antigone, the audience becomes the class a good deal of the time. We go from the public to the private, I’m always having people address the audience when they can, and the audience becomes for that moment the group at the meeting. I love that.

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AFS:

About the professors that you’ve put on the stage, there have been four or five of them, going back to The Old One Two, I think. Tony in The Perfect Party has been a professor. Professor Lesser in [The Fourth Wall]. And Harper in Another Antigone. Then in Entertaining Strangers the whole story is about professors. This is perfectly natural because you’ve been a professor yourself. You’re writing about what you know. But Professor Lesser is probably most a figure of fun. Harper is pretty serious. GURNEY: Yes. He and the professor in The Old One Two are pretty much the same. They’re both classical scholars. The professor in The Old One Two is the less serious version of Harper. Yes. He’s serious. Good man, Harper. AFS: Other than that, you don’t specify occupation too much. It doesn’t figure in the characterization, if you do specify. GURNEY: Roger [in The Fourth Wall] is a businessman. I think I do. Normally stockbrokers, lawyers. Richard Cory has a business. Yes, I don’t show many people in the workplace. That’s what I’m saying. Except for professors. That’s a workplace that I know pretty well. I don’t have many offices, with the possible exception of Richard Cory. I don’t have many scenes about men and work. I guess maybe there are a few in Scenes from American Life. I know there’s one. The banker— there’s the scene where the banker is forced out of his job [when] there’s a takeover. Yes. That’s true. But I think the answer to that is obvious. I don’t know those other worlds very well. AFS: In Sweet Sue you deal for the first time with a woman who has a profession, a job. She’s an illustrator. And her move from illustrator to artist forms a very key thread in that story. GURNEY: Yes. AFS: In Another Antigone, the character of the dean, the dean is a woman, and her position as a dean and her responsibilities as a dean figure very much in the play. GURNEY: Yes. AFS: But aside from those characters, women in your plays are wives and mothers concerned with the well-being of the community, the sustainers of the community. GURNEY: I want to argue with you a little. Take Melissa in Love Letters. She’s an artist [and hardly a] sustainer of the community. Peggy, in The Fourth Wall, has been a social worker. That doesn’t do it for her anymore. Let’s see what other women there are. Certainly the women in The Cocktail Hour are, they sat on hospital boards and [have] done all that, but they are sustainers of the community in that sense, you’re absolutely right. Yes. So in general you’re right. There are certainly exceptions to that.5 AFS: And the exceptions have been more recently. So I’m wondering if you connect this in your own mind. GURNEY: To what’s happening today? I hope I am resilient enough to bring in the changes in the women in the work force, the function of women in American society. I hope I am responding to that. I hope I can.

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 31

AFS:

Having made that sociologically reductive statement, I hasten to add that the actors report, right the way through, the women characters strike them as more complex and interesting, on the whole, than the men. I think Peggy and Julia in The Fourth Wall are somewhat more vital and complex and psychologically and spiritually attuned to their environment than the men are. GURNEY: I think that is a valid observation. I don’t know what it says about me but I do think it says more about American society that the men, at least as I see men, tend to be more rigid, tend to frame the world in a more rigid way and are less able to adapt, to respond, to change. I’m writing about change, which is what I’m really writing about all the time. Social change and cultural change. Women seem to be able to respond to change in a way that men can’t. Men tend to be obsessed with their idées fixes. I think of The Fourth Wall only because that’s currently on my mind. Roger brings his piano with him from Buffalo and wants to play Cole Porter and wants to go back and likes to watch sports on television. He’s got a very narrow range. Whereas the women are reaching. Julia is ultimately resilient. She’ll go anyplace. Peggy is yearning for some kind of newer world. AFS: And even Floyd, who fancies that he is attuned and on top of things, is so in a very artificial and completely serious kind of way. GURNEY: That’s right. AFS: He ends up missing a good deal of what’s going on and misinterpreting what he could possibly do to affect it at all. GURNEY: That’s right. Because he and Julia can’t go through the wall at the end. They end up on stage. They’re playing an old-fashioned role. They’re stuck. AFS: You’ve already spoken about the desire for community. We talked about that in connection with just about everything that you’ve written. And you have talked about the need to justify your use of theater. You want to be sure that everything you do as a writer for the theater makes use of the theater’s genuine qualities. GURNEY: Communal aspects. Very much so. AFS: Because there’s so much out there in the way of other options for people— television, film—that attracts us all strongly but which does not strike to the heart of the community the way the theater can. So let’s be sure that we’re using what the theater does well as much as we can and as excellently as we can. GURNEY: Right. Absolutely. AFS: Could we put some definitions to the virtues that the theater strives to sustain beyond community. If community is the goal, what are the objectives that we achieve on the way to that goal. GURNEY: Well, in the first place the theater is live and immediate, not just on film or on tape. Every performance is new and fresh and different, so you have the immediacy of life in three-dimensional human beings on stage. Also it’s an old, old medium. It’s a traditional medium. You are not simply putting on a play, but you are putting on a play in the traditional manner since the caveman told

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a story around the fire. You are hooking your audience and yourself and your actors into a very old ceremony, which I like. It’s free. I don’t mean it doesn’t cost money. But a writer is free in the theater to say things that he or she wants to say which is not true in the movies or television where every word is vetted and changed and thoroughly questioned by various executives. So there’s a kind of opportunity to make a personal statement in the theater, an individual statement, for the writer and for the actors. The actors are freer on stage than they are in the movies and television because they’re not cut away from. They don’t end up on the cutting room floor. The performance they create is there. Every night it’s there. Arbitrarily the camera doesn’t look away from them. They are there. They might not have the scene but they are there. So all those things, the immediacy, the sense of community, the sense of continuity, sense of freedom, all that. AFS: And how much do the practices of theater today assist in achieving those virtues and how much do they impede progress toward them? GURNEY: That’s a very good question. If you’re talking about Broadway theater, the economics involved, the number of producers that have to be involved because of the economics you’re moving more toward something like Holly wood or film or television. More adjusting the product, telling the author to take out that speech, put in a star. The question of freedom is jeopardized. You’re not as free when you’re writing for Broadway. The critical picture today is very tricky for writers, particularly if [they] want to succeed beyond their local community. You still have to go through New York. New York is still the imprimatur of theater success in this country. And when I say that, I mean the New York Times. You can survive a bad review by Frank Rich. Some writers do. Herb Gardner does. Neil Simon has. But nonetheless, for a young writer coming up, it’s very hard. In fact a young writer has to be approved by Frank Rich in order to really succeed and get out there in the world. And that’s unhealthy, that one individual, no matter how bright he is, and I shouldn’t say Frank Rich, I should say the critic of the New York Times. That’s not freedom, when you are at the mercy of one opinion. That is not an indication of freedom. So that’s another problem. Your actors more and more are unwilling to commit themselves for very long to a play. Not that they don’t want to. It’s that they need money. They have to live. Fortunately, for them, they have many other opportunities now. Not simply in the movies and television but soaps, commercials, voice-overs. They have to do it. This is a tough thing, when you consider The Fourth Wall, four actors to commit four months of their lives, living in Chicago. What about their pets? What about their children? That’s tough. It’s hard for them to do. Even in New York it’s hard to get them to commit for very long. So that the tools of the trade are tricky these days. You no longer can call on actors in New York, particularly. Many of the actors have moved, as Debra Mooney has, to California. So those are the problems.

AN INTERVIEW WITH A.R.GURNEY 33

There are minor problems for younger writers. I keep thinking of them. They don’t have the opportunity today to cut their teeth as I did with one-act plays, workshops, and coffeeshops and all those little places where we put on these plays not for critics, just for audiences who wanted to go there, where we learned how to do it. NOTES 1 . Alex Witchel, “Laughter, Tears, and the Perfect Martini,” New York Times Magazine, November 12, 1989, p. 105. 2 . Witchel, p. 105. 3 . This interview occurred on the morning after a performance of The Fourth Wall. 4 . See “A.RGurney,” in Jackson R. Bryer, The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995, p. 89. 5 . Gurney also could have cited Professor Carroway in The Love Course, from 1969, who teaches literature. Lois in The Perfect Party is a newspaper critic. Portia in Overtime is an attorney and Kate in Sylvia is a teacher. In all four plays, the occupation is integral to the characterization and motivates the action.

34

An Interview with John Cunningham ARVID F.SPONBERG

AFS:

How old were you when a career in the theater became a serious idea for you? CUNNINGHAM: At first it was a kind of sensual awareness of the beauty of the English language. I was a freshman in high school, I think. We were taken across the Hudson River to Vassar to see Laurence Olivier’s movie of Henry V, and I was just astounded by his performance in the title role. I still remember how the St. Crispin Day speech made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I had a kind of an aural awakening to Shakespeare’s poetry…. I grew up in a family where language was important. My mother was a writer, would-be writer. My grandparents, my father all derived great pleasure from words. So, here was language at a much higher level. I’d been to a Shakespeare play or two when younger, but Henry V was really the beginning—I was beginning to think about it at fourteen or fifteen. I wasn’t really considering it as a career until I got to college, but I was being told by people off and on when I was in a play, “Oh, you ought to be an actor.” Sometimes I would think it’s because they think I can’t do anything else. I didn’t decide about the theater till I got into the Army. In college I had done both the glee club and acting. In the Army I was able to get into an acting company while I was in Europe, with the Seventh Army and that’s all I did for twelve or thirteen months, touring with three plays. AFS: Which plays? CUNNINGHAM: Our big hit was the Caine Mutiny Court Martial because the soldiers loved seeing an officer in trouble. And My Three Angels and The Rainmaker. We toured those in repertoire. It enabled me to work as an actor with people who were professionals. AFS: And this would have been the Korean War era? CUNNINGHAM: Yes, this was ’55–’56. During that period I decided I wanted to go into the theater. I didn’t know quite how to proceed, but I contacted my professor [Henry B.Williams] at Dartmouth and he’d gone to Yale, so he wrote a letter for me. I didn’t have to audition or anything. I just went upon leaving the Army. My dear wife Carol and I got married and

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we went off to New Haven where she taught school and supported us while I went to Yale Drama School. That’s where I got my basic training. I was a directing major, so I got a broader program than I would have as an acting major. AFS: How did they train directors and actors at Yale in the middle fifties? CUNNINGHAM: The directing program was the broadest of the two disciplines because you took acting, of course, directing courses, scene design, costume design, scene construction, lighting, dramaturgy. AFS: Among the professors that you worked with at Yale, who was particularly effective and memorable? CUNNINGHAM: I think Nikos Psacharopolous, who, alas, is now dead was the one guy there who was inspirational, and trying to prepare us for the commercial theater. Nikos founded the Williamstown Theater Festival, I think the best off- or out-of-New York theater situation that you can have in the summertime because you really do the great plays, as best you can, with the best actors available. Nikos had originally taught at Williams. The terrific theater plant there, that Adams Memorial Theater, and the surrounding audience available in the summer, and money, because it’s a wealthy part of the country, all help to make the festival the continuing success it is. But it was also because he was the tireless, energetic, focused person that he was in making Williamstown the institution that it has become. And because he held everyone to high standards there was in his class a kind of disdain for inadequacy. Other Yale teachers were much more tolerant, I think, of less talented students. I remember the acting teacher, Connie Welsh, who was quite wonderful, spending a great deal of time coaching people who obviously were never going to make it as actors. When asked about that she said something like, “I know they’re not going to make it so they need my attention now. These other people are going to make it whether I’m paying attention to them or not.” She wasn’t therefore someone who was going to build her reputation on the basis of people becoming stars and saying “Oh yeah, she was my teacher.” She had a different agenda. AFS: Can you remember a particular teaching moment or encounter with [Psacharopolous] that reveals the kind of teacher that he was? CUNNINGHAM: I’ll just say that he was emotional about it and the others were kind of dry. He really got turned on by something and would enthuse. If he didn’t like something he would be equally passionate in his attack on it and you began to say “Oh, this is the way I feel about it, too.” The rest of the teaching was much more academic, much more laid back, much more uninvolved. I think that’s basically the difference. He had a bit of a fire burning in him and the others didn’t. AFS: Was it at this stage that acting became the more dominant interest for you as opposed to directing or did you go into the profession as a director?

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CUNNINGHAM 37

CUNNINGHAM: No, I went in as an actor because I guessed that I was going to be more successful at it sooner. I needed money, because we were a planning a family and also I didn’t want to give up all that fun. Directing was a great pleasure and it’s something I’ll get back to, but it’s an entirely different experience. AFS: You said “guessed that you were going to be more successful.” Could you point to a couple of moments? CUNNINGHAM: Well, I just looked at it. I could immediately go get employment it seemed to me. As a beginning director I would have to go off to an academic situation. How could I go get a job in the professional theater as a director without any experience? I could get a job in the professional theater as an actor merely by showing up and being the right person. AFS: So it wasn’t a matter solely, then, during a rehearsal of a particular play, or over the course of a particular semester, of seeing yourself in contrast with your fellow students and saying I’m as good as these guys, and I’m better than most of them. CUNNINGHAM: Being a bit older, and being who I am and what I looked like, I got to play a lot of parts in a lot of full productions. This was prior to any kind of residential theater in the United States. One of the reasons I went to Yale and one of the reasons it was satisfactory to me was that you could do whole plays. You didn’t do scenes. If you go to New York and go to acting class, you get to do scenes but you don’t get to do plays. So I was in six full productions of plays new and old at Yale each year. Being the craft that it is, you have to do it. It’s very different to do a whole play and to follow the development of the character within the context of a whole play rather than just doing a scene. That was a big help to me as an actor, learning in those circumstances as compared to only doing scene study in some studio. AFS: Could you then contrast the way you build a character now to the way you did as a young actor and describe some of the process? CUNNINGHAM: In my first summer after Yale, Carol and I went up to the Cape with a group of Williams College people who had started a theater there. I got to play some wonderful parts, one of which was Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I, with a great fat suit. At one point, in one of the tavern scenes, the kid playing the tapster knocked over my large tankard of ale. I didn’t do it, it seemed to me, but somebody else let out this great roar and threw the tankard at him. And I said to myself afterward, “What was that ?! It was like some other person taking over.” That’s the freedom I try to find each time in a production: to not lose the sense that you are acting something, but instead somebody else (the character) is doing it. The results are more believable. As Spencer Tracy once said to a kid who was wandering about the set, “Are you interested in this business?” He said, “Yes.”

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He said, “Acting?” The kid said, “Yes .” Tracy said, “Never let them catch you at it.” And that’s kind of a guiding rule for me. Whatever you’re doing, don’t let them catch you acting. That’s what I try to end up with, that a character is so in place that all I end up doing is listening and answering. In its most basic sense that’s what acting is anyway. Perhaps when you are a young student, it’s hard to believe it can be as simple as listening and talking. Self-concerns—How am I standing? How do I look?— sometimes supercede the needs of the character. But you pick up things, too, basically, as a student that carry through for the rest of your life. Connie Welsh taught that the revelation of the character comes in blocks. It isn’t just breaking the scene down into beats, the little emotional scenes that fall maybe ten within a twenty-page scene. The character revelation is in a series of blocks so that for this seventeen lines you are working on revealing the character’s humor and his anger in the next section. It’s like the colors in a pointillist painting and you try to reveal something different each time. These are techniques that you pick up and use for the rest of your life. Building a character now, I’m not even aware of a system. In the ’50s when I was at Yale, I somehow rejected the Actor’s Studio concentration on one method. I said, “No. It’s a much more eclectic process for me. Something that works in one play might not work in another.” So a very large bag of tricks is a good thing to acquire. AFS: Could you describe another actor whom you’ve observed or a scene or a play that has helped you enlarge that bag? CUNNINGHAM: I’ll go back to Tracy because there’s a focus and a reality about what he does and a great simplicity which is not the result of inspiration only but the result of a great deal of work. Laurence Olivier would try to find the right way to sit down, and after 320 times, maybe he found the right way to do it. The inspiration for me comes after you’ve done all that work. Inspiration arrives when you’ve cleared the decks, you’ve removed all the little impediments to your focus on just listening and talking. I like DeNiro; I like his approach. I have fond memories of Alfred Lunt and Fredric March. AFS: Pete often uses the phrase the “community of the play “and it’s become kind of a motto for me as I continue to study his plays and to write about him. Can you recall moments in rehearsals when this sense of working effectively with another actor seems to be most strong? Whose name evokes an affirmative leap of your heart as if to say “Yes! I’m going to work with….” Whose names would complete that sentence? CUNNINGHAM: I’ve been very fortunate to work with a number of marvelous actresses: Glenda Jackson, who is one of the most intelligent human beings I’ve

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CUNNINGHAM 39

ever met—and she’s completely honest. We worked both in the movie Lost and Found, and in a play on Broadway, Rose, in which I played her husband. I was rewarded with both her friendship and just being on stage with that combination of powerful intellect and talent. Most recently working with Stockard Channing, in Six Degrees [of Separation]. There was a problem of who was going to play that central role, and the first actress decided she didn’t want to do it. And we went on rehearsing for several days without knowing who was going to play “Ouisa” and then [Stockard] had just finished a play in San Diego and was available. She said to John Guare, the author, “I’ll do this but I want to see that I fit into the people that you’ve already cast.” And I had certainly believed that she would fit into whatever we were doing, admiring her as much as I did. I had seen her recently in Woman in Mind, the Ayckbourn play. She was just splendid in that. Anyway, we had the first reading and from then through all the performances I did with her, we had a growing, deepening understanding of each other. I sensed perhaps more than with anyone else… I just knew… One knew what the other was thinking and doing. And that’s very unusual. Our rhythms are the same, our sense of the language. Particularly in a John Guare play, the music of the text is terribly important because he writes with an instinctive joining of sound and sense…the language is… I’ll go back to that first time I said, “My God!” when the English language and Olivier just put my hair on end. That’s always been very important to me. A play properly written has a musical score. The language…the rise and fall in it. The author becomes a writer because he’s language sensitive. And the language of Six Degrees had a particular heightened quality that Stockard and I felt in much the same way. We were singing off the same page of music. You can’t teach individuals that. You just hope to bring that certain similarity of instincts to the project together. And when you have that, you’re already miles ahead. AFS: Tell me about your first meeting with Pete Gurney? And the first time you worked in a play of his? CUNNINGHAM: The first time I worked in a play of his was at Yale, which was Love in Buffalo, a musical. Nikos directed it and it was modern dress. I had done plays where I was in costume or in makeup or, you know, something other than myself—wearing a mask in some sense. There I was. As myself. A young man, not bearded and in tights. It was the first play I had done at Yale where I got interest from New York agents. AFS: And what was the role? CUNNINGHAM: I did not have a singing role… I think I was just kind of “the young man”… I can’t remember… I remember I had a scene with Marge Andrews, sitting down right at a table. And again, it was just a very realistic role. Something I had not done to that point. I’d done

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everything…style, costumes…and here was my first contemporary piece. And it was the first time I got interest from agents. Love in Buffalo was the first thing I did with Pete. Actually I’m trying to remember whether prior to that first time he and I were in a play together, I even got a picture of it somewhere…. AFS: Oh, do you? Of Pete acting Caesar and Cleopatra? It’s the Shaw play. CUNNINGHAM: He was a Roman soldier. The Dean had gotten all the play writing students to fill out crowd scenes, so he had some of the play wrights playing soldiers. I remember we had to have improvised moments of anger from the group of soldiers and several playwrights could be counted on for modern slang that wouldn’t fit in the period, not that Pete wasn’t always perfectly in the century he was supposed to be in. I think that was the first time I met him. AFS: And then subsequent to that, were you in other plays of his? CUNNINGHAM: When The Dining Room was doing its lengthy run, each time they asked about me I was doing something else, so I guess the first play of his I did in New York was Perfect Party. AFS: Let’s talk about Tony, then, as the role, and how you went about finding the kernel? CUNNINGHAM: An interesting question was how are we going to do this twin brother? For some reason I thought of Marcello Mastroianni, and I said “So why don’t we mess around and try him as an Italian?” We did and it seemed to be very funny, so then Pete wrote in that stuff about his being taken away to Italy as a child. All that came in as a result of the rehearsal discovery. It seemed to be the funniest take on the Twin. AFS: And then did Tony begin to develop other aspects as a result of that decision? Or had Tony been pretty much in place? CUNNINGHAM: Tony was in place. I tried to make sure I was as committed to his attempt to create the perfect party as anybody could be. AFS: And do you recall much of the conversations that you had with Gurney and Tillinger about Tony’s character? CUNNINGHAM: No. Professionals at that level don’t discuss something that isn’t a problem. If it’s working you presume the actor has made all the right decisions. AFS: And Tony wasn’t a particular problem? CUNNINGHAM: Yes, that was not a problem. The ending of the play was never completely satisfactory to me. There was a final summarizing statement by, I think, the wife. But this never seemed organically just to come out of the action. Pete’s idea as I remember was that there could be this kind of statement at the end as in a Restoration comedy which would make it work. Intellectually, arbitrarily, it seems all right, but dramatically it never quite seemed to put a final kiss on it the way you’d like it to. But overall

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CUNNINGHAM 41

it was, of course, great fun. And I think an example of when he lets it go cuckoo he’s very, very funny. It’s a funny play. AFS: As an actor at the top level who has worked in both a Gurney play and a Guare play, what differences and similarities do you see between their skills? CUNNINGHAM: Both John and Pete, interestingly enough, write about their families. Pete has focused very much, as an artist should, on his own life and trying to explain it to himself and incidentally to everyone else. He’s been so faithful in his dramatizing his milieu growing up, and Buffalo is not a major metropolitan area, it’s basically a small town. And John has, in a number of plays, taken from his own life, his own growing up in a much different urban environment—New York City. But just as often he releases his imagination and flies with it to some other place. AFS: Is Four Baboons Staring at the Sun a pretty good example of that? CUNNINGHAM: Yes. Baboons certainly is…. I think John also listens to his dreams and he reports them to us edited but undiluted. So, yes—Baboons which tells the story of an attempt at making a new family by a man and woman and their respective children who are back together again after years apart in marriages to other people. The failure of that attempt is perhaps a comment on modern family life? I don’t know. But John places the action in Sicily at an archaeological dig so that the bonding effort is surrounded by the mysteries of mythology. The god Eros is onstage—singing. A girl is transformed into a deer. An earthquake splits the stage. John Guare effortlessly creates a fantastic world. Pete is grounded in reality more often than not, I think, even when the play, like Perfect Party, is highly theatrical. AFS: Does being grounded in reality have particular resonances for Gurney’s language whereas the dream-telling of Guare has a different kind of resonance, to an actor’s ear? CUNNINGHAM: John will give the actor arias very often—long speeches that are distillations of an experience, which are musical riffs. A speech I had as Flan in Six Degrees describing a dream is very dense, but it makes sense on an emotional level. Like a modern painting; you kind of have to let the speech flow over you. Pete can have long speeches, but they’re usually in dialogue. He has a long address to the audience in Old Boy and Fourth Wall. So it isn’t that he doesn’t do that but usually they are much more rooted in the situation. Whereas John’s can be more fantastical— poetic, if that description is apt, even though they’re not written in iambic pentameter, and can seem less directly integral. But as you so rightly say, both of them are so completely skilled as writers that both means to get to that aria are equally successful.

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AFS:

Do you recall anything else about Tony as a dramatic character and the way he fits into what Debra Mooney called “the arc” of that play? He’s the main point of light in the constellation if you can put it that way. CUNNINGHAM: Everything usually is based on the wants of one of the characters. It never came more clearly home to me than when I did Higgins [in My Fair Lady]. That was my first job, doing the national tour and every so often I got to play Higgins. I was standing by at a very young age. I realized that the success of the musical was based on how much you wanted to make her into a lady, how much you wanted to win the bet. How much you wanted to be a successful teacher and change her, transform her. Early on in your training as an actor or as a director you realize that the energy of a play, the success, therefore, of a production of a play, depends on finding that spine or the arc. Whoever has the wants, the needs, the desires to make something come about, to realize some goal, is the driving force. Higgins certainly was in My Fair Lady. Tony’s desire, his need, his craziness in his need, to have the perfect party is the engine of that play. So that when you’re playing it, the passion with which you proceed toward that makes it funnier and funnier and funnier. A lot of comedy has to do with people desperately trying to get something accomplished and encountering impediments along the way and how they overcome those impediments and how much focus they have on achieving their particular goal. That’s what makes this play or any comedy funny. AFS: Do you recall particular points where the audience connected especially well with Tony? CUNNINGHAM: The first time I came in as the twin was when I heard them hoot. That’s when they knew something really radical was going to happen. Not only Pete’s work but the play itself was taking off in a much stranger way then they had thought it would. Once you showed them the twin, the personification of just how desperate Tony was, a more intense level of comedy began. I go back to what I just said, that so much of what is funny in a play depends on the intensity with which somebody rushes toward whatever it is they want. The Italian twin is the personification of how desperate Tony is to get a good critical notice. This is Pete’s obvious knock on reviewers. If Tony doesn’t get the Times to review, the party really hasn’t happened. It has got to get a good review. That’s where it all gels for me because you can play someone like Tony who is not radical enough in any sense for the audience to say “ooh this is new and different” and the minute you return as the twin brother they all see the play pumped up to a new level. AFS: Three years later you played Andrew Makepeace Ladd III. Was that the only time or have you repeated Love Letters? CUNNINGHAM: I did it first up at the Long Wharf Theater. And I did it with [Debra] Mooney at the Promenade and I’m going to do it this summer with

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CUNNINGHAM 43

[Frances] Sternhagen at Lake Mohonk. It’s a remarkable piece of writing. Pete’s plays rarely have so direct an effect on feelings. In The Dining Room, the scene between the father and son about how the father’s funeral is going to be organized has enormous emotional impact. But most often with people he’s writing about feelings are not demonstrated. They are damped down. Love Letters has a different effect. It never fails to just destroy me in the final moment when he’s speaking that last letter to the mother. I start weeping. Remak Ramsey said to me that when he did it, he just felt that you never let the tears show. And I said well, yes, but, in fact, if that’s what happens to you, it is silly to try to not have it happen. There is a great emotional wallop in Love Letters that I’m not aware of in any of his other plays. AFS: Andrew Ladd is a character who is not only rooted in Pete’s understanding of a whole generation but of the political/social realities of that generation. I have a weakness for plays that not only show you the interactions with the characters but also the sweep of the social change going on behind them. How aware are you of that dimension of a play when you are reading? CUNNINGHAM: Certainly in an overall sense you have to know what the play is about, but if you demonstrate that, if you have some educative agenda, if you try to direct the sensibilities of the audience toward a particular reading of the material as an actor, you’re not really doing your job. In the truest way we can, we have to bring to the audience the reality of the character in the situation. That means, not unlike life, that while you’re doing Love Letters, you can really concentrate only on the next particular thing you are trying to get through to that woman as you’re writing her a letter. The audience will make, if not then certainly later, some kind of associative conclusion about the sweep of the play. But you can’t act that. You’re not serving the play if you do. AFS: As an actor, you trust Gurney to give you that particularized momentto-moment “arc” to follow? CUNNINGHAM: Yes. Because he knows that. He knows how to do that. He knows that he has to do that and he knows that he can do that. He knows that that’s what we need, or it won’t work. I’m doing now [Wendy Wasserstein’s] Sisters Rosenzweig, which is wonderfully funny, very much like Chekhov, like Three Sisters. But she and Pete and John [Guare] are all very serious playwrights who write very funny stuff. All these are able to create a moment that is very frightening, or very touching, or very moving at the same time that it’s very funny. You can only get that with something that’s been polished both in the writing and the production over a period of time. You certainly don’t get that in television very often because not enough time is given to it. In film you get it some time, but that’s not really a usual part of the film experience for me. I prefer to work where

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writing is valued rather than treated as a means to another end. These three playwrights are social satirists. They are very much aware of the lives we live, how we used to live as compared to how we live now. I just asked Wendy last week, “Do you remember everything that people said or how they looked?” and she said, “Yes, I do.” Which is a facility I don’t have. I don’t have memory of specifics the way these three playwrights seem to have. And thank God for that, because the veracity with which they are able to recreate, investigate, think about, and comment on their lives carries over to us with great impact. They’re very American. They are reporting very different American experiences. But it’s also again why I love to work within this sort of play because it is a lasting pleasure to try to help my self and the people that watch to think about the particular American experience we each have known. AFS: I’m struck by the contrasts between Tony and Andrew Ladd. Tony is focused in that particular moment and has to get that party just absolutely right, and everything happens in that unified context. Andrew Ladd we see from childhood to the threshold of old age. It seems to me that finding the spine of Tony’s character would be an easier task for an actor than finding the spine of Andrew Ladd’s character. CUNNINGHAM: I think you’re right. AFS: How did you go about finding Andrew’s spine? CUNNINGHAM: I didn’t go to prep school. But because Pete and I are of an age, we’re both WASPs, we have the same value system, the same nuclear family growing up, I have—I feel—total comprehension of the character and his growth and his experience and not dissimilar experiences of my own that I call on. It’s a very easy fit. All I have to do is think myself into what he’s saying, and who I am and my life’s experiences are so coincidental in some ways with his that it’s not a difficult task. AFS: What do you regard as the principal satisfactions and attractions of his plays? I think you’re probably familiar with the kinds of criticisms that have been made about his plays. One of them has to do with, as I heard one person express it, “his going up to the abyss and then retreating.” Some persons of the American theater believe that writers are not authentic unless they plumb an abyss of the soul in a graphic, grand way. That may be a valid way to do theater, but it’s not the only way. There are other satisfactions, there are other works to be done in the theater besides thrusting our faces into bleakness and despair. CUNNINGHAM: The same could be said of Chekhov. If you’re looking for some incredible dramatic high, you don’t find it there, either. I think you find in both cases that they report life the way it is. I don’t mean that everybody goes through with a whimper instead of a bang. In The Cocktail Hour when the sister talks about going to Cleveland to train seeing-eye dogs, there’s something in that moment that is so inexplicably sad and funny at the

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CUNNINGHAM 45

same time, but it’s real. The eccentricity of it arrests you. To me, that’s enormously satisfying, because that’s my grasp of life. Most of us don’t live in a Puccini world. We don’t do Verdi things. We do smaller things. We do Chekhovian things. We do Gurney things. I realize that I am limited in what I’ve experienced in my life, but his reporting is much closer to my grasp of how most people go about their lives. Yes, you can say he hasn’t taken us to the abyss, but if Pete tried to take us to the abyss, we might not agree to go. An artist can only recreate his vision for us, whatever it is, by whatever medium and means he uses. To compare him to others is odious. It’s not to be done. How skillful is he in presenting his report to us about his rumination, his memory, his dream about life? He’s obviously skillful in that. His control of the language is sufficient unto itself. Go back to The Dining Room where the father tells his son about what sort of funeral he wants. Its very powerful. If you’re going to do the scene of the father’s death à la Puccini, everyone singing incredible arias about Papa dead, Papa é morte. Okay, that’s one thing, but I’d rather see Pete’s scene, where you learn about the father and the son and the relationship and the life they’ve lived together in the six pages or whatever it is that scene takes place in.

46

An Interview with Holland Taylor ARVID F.SPONBERG

AFS: You’re a graduate of Bennington College. Did you have other training? TAYLOR: Bennington is a school that gives a degree in the theater as it gives a degree in music and dance, and so as a performer I had a great deal of training that was at a pretty professional level. Several gentlemen who taught there—Manuel Duque and Bill Walton were professional theater people who taught acting and scene design. That was fairly serious training there and one was in an awful lot of plays while in college. So when I first came to New York in ’65, I was very lucky and worked right away. I got a job, actually, in a Broadway play after I’d been in New York a few months. And I sort of studied in a spotty way with flavor-of-the-month acting teachers. And my experience of them, although they were sensitive and interesting men, as it happened, I didn’t feel that they were teaching any kind of technique or dependable material for me to use in a practical way. It was really just a matter of taste and a matter of their encouraging honesty and spontaneity and stuff like that. So I did not study in any regular kind of way until I was in my mid-thirties and finally, somebody was speaking about Stella Adler as someone who did have just a tremendous wealth of usable, functional, information to give you about how to use yourself and how to think about acting and how to look at acting. I was not particularly interested in Strasberg’s training from various students of his who had spoken to me over the years about the way they worked which did not seem to me to be the way I wanted to work, using my personal inner life while acting. I understand very well using it in preparation and in homework, but I did not understand thinking about myself or my life or my history or any emotional moments in my life while acting. And so Stella appealed to me very much in concept and when I went to her, I was staggered by her and I instantly took every course she had. She was seventy-nine, then, and for the next two years I just completely submerged myself in Stella’s teaching. And so that was the big influence in my life. AFS: Have you done any teaching? TAYLOR: No, I haven’t. I’ve been encouraged to but I’ve always felt it was folly. I’ve never felt at all equipped to do that. I suppose I could transfer some of the things I learned from Stella but not the way Stella did it. I’ve never felt adequate to

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that. And I’m always sort of stunned by the people who do. But acting seems such a difficult thing, a complex and—what’s the word I want—not difficult and complex; that doesn’t say it at all because the violin is difficult and complex. It’s confused because it’s mixed up so with one’s persona in such a literal way. Thoughts, memories, words, isn’t like music outside you coming from an instrument. It’s such a rooted and twined kind of use of the self that I’ve never felt confident about speaking to other people about how they should do it. AFS: Have you any other significant interests? Any other collateral arts? TAYLOR: Well, it’s interesting. I think those things tend to flower more later in one’s career when one’s career has a life of its own. It’s very hard—I think I speak for a lot of actors when I say this—it’s not so much loss of identity but loss of foundation when you’re not working. And very few of us seem to make very good use of that time because it’s so uncertain and so filled with the effort to find work or to wonder how one will carry on. I think that now in my life I’ve become very much more interested in my home. I never used to be interested in my home at all. It was just a place to hang my hat. And I’ve become very interested in making it a home that is comfortable and beautiful and sort of a dream world. And I’m very interested in having an English career. I want very much to work in London and broaden myself in that way. I think the English—I’m not speaking about acting at all now. The institution and the society of the theater in London is much more attractive to me than it is presently in New York, I mean Broadway. AFS: Could you name a feature or two in particular of the London life that appeals to you? TAYLOR: Well, certainly, there’s much more of it. It’s much more active and bustling. Very typically plays will have an intended short run, three months, six months. You can do a very distinguished classical work in London at many, many small theaters. That simply doesn’t happen in New York. It scarcely happens in the regionals. In English theater, in the English entertainment world, so much more happens around London, and it’s all so much closer together, whereas here in America, as you know, if you want to do a play at the Goodman, that’s quite a long way from both California and New York where I have two residences. Most regional work requires real departure from home. In London they have the equivalent of our regional theaters right in London. Lots of classical and work of literary quality going on and that is not true of New York at all. AFS: Tell me how you first became aware of A.R.Gurney’s work and what were the circumstances of your first meeting him. TAYLOR: Well, it was very fortuitous. I had been in New York maybe three years, which is not a very long time, but I was sort of swimming around because it is very hard to begin, as I’m sure you know. And there was an announcement about the casting of a play which asked for a young, WASP woman with sort of a wiseacre attitude—

AN INTERVIEW WITH HOLLAND TAYLOR 49

AFS: And you said, “That’s me!” TAYLOR: I said, “Well, I certainly can fill that bill,” so I went down for it and when I read the script I knew that I was reading a unique voice in American theater. This was called The David Show and I absolutely knew in reading a few pages that there was no one else who could write like this, that no one had an ear for a particular kind of self-satisfied WASP attitude that I find kind of endearing and funny. I can imagine being from a different background and finding it really obnoxious to a degree but I find it very funny. And he just had this peerless ear. And also his use of literary conceits in a theatrical way amused me a great deal. And as you well know he’s really done some sort of trick, some sort of conceit in every play he writes, Cocktail Hour being his most graceful use of an idea. I found these things extremely appealing intellectually. And then creatively as an actress I responded very much to this particular persona, which I had never encountered but that I had some special insight into and a special affection for. You find some of the same qualities in Ruth Draper’s work, which is of course not that well known and not played. She died in ’56. You ought to get a tape from a drama store or something of her Italian Lesson because it’s a masterpiece. But I mean there is a certain kind of satirical, affectionate attitude about the WASP mentality that she had that is a cousin to Pete’s attitude, which is, I think, far more critical and more intellectual in the sense that he has real ideas about where it’s going and what it does to relationships. AFS: And so you met at the first day of rehearsal? TAYLOR: No. I met at the audition and I recognized him as a cousin, immediately, and just felt very attracted to him and interested in him and got that part. And he was around during rehearsal—not all the time because he was teaching at MIT at the time. And that was a play that got a bad review—a weak review—not even a bad review—a weak review from Clive Barnes in the Times. (quoted, 186) AFS: Clarify that distinction for me. TAYLOR: It just wasn’t “damning with faint praise.” It wasn’t a review that one could build on at all. And our producer at that time felt that if we did not have the Times, we did not have anything. And he closed us in one night. Which is rather too bad because the Post and other papers, and The New Yorker heralded it, as I did, as a new voice in American satire. And the Edith Oliver review in The New Yorker was extraordinary. (quoted in note, 188) And if the producer had waited a bit —but I believe he was angry as well as disappointed, and he just said, “Well, so there.” So that was our first encounter, and then we became friends and I think that Pete enjoyed my relish of his understanding of this kind of person and so would periodically send me something that he has written because, as you know, he’s amazingly prolific. And then I was going to do Scenes from American Life at Lincoln Center and that didn’t work out. And there were other things that we were going to do together. It’s hard to be in two places at one time. It one of the difficult things about having an acting career. I mean I don’t believe I have ever

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gotten a job when it didn’t mean turning down another one, even if I’d just gone six months without work. In any case, I think the next thing we did was Children at the Manhattan Theatre Club, which was my first encounter working with Nancy Marchand, which I have done several times since and that is certainly one of the great joys of my history. And so then we worked together again. And that was with Swoosie Kurtz as well, who’s a friend, so that was very joyful. And again it was the same, that play was particularly fun to act. There were lots of very active scenes and there were fights between the brother and sister, a couple of fights which I enjoyed particularly, sibling spats and carrying on. And they were written with great cleverness. And certain tones of voice and certain smart remarks that I found very familiar and very fun to act. A certain kind of WASP whining that I have a particular ear for and enjoy duplicating, replicating. AFS: It sounds like it’s been a very smooth and rewarding professional relationship all the way. TAYLOR: Extremely happy relationship, I mean extremely happy. And Cocktail Hour was really the fruition of many seeds that had got sown in our relationship as playwright and actress. In fact it’s really very sad. He’s got a play called The Fourth Wall, which has a simply wonderful role that again, as some of his roles are, just sounds like it was written for me. And in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he sometimes does think of me when he’s writing because I do play a certain kind of woman that he writes very well and so I think he can hear a voice doing it. AFS: I’d like to turn to some of the characters and dramatic qualities of the plays. Were the qualities of Gurney’s plays that appealed to you apparent from the first? TAYLOR: Yes. AFS: Were there others that emerged in the process of production? TAYLOR: The astonishing thing about Pete is that you have this sensitivity to and observation of the foibles of these characters with this background. And you have this superb ear for language. Then you have the intellectual, the teacher, who is extremely well-versed in literature and thinks about it in a very— mechanical is not the right word—a very functional way. He knows how novels are structured. How they are effective, how they are ineffective. He knows plays very well. He knows the world’s literature of the stage and fiction and poetry, in fact. So he has many, many references and subtle unconscious references to other works of literature. So intellectually the plays are a pleasure to read and to see. Then he has this quirk, this trait, of usually having an ironical, funny, self-referring conceit operating in every play. In The David Show, the modernday characters were Bathsheba, and David, Uriah, and Goliath. He used that in modern terms. In The Cocktail Hour the play that the playwright is referring to is the play that you are seeing unfold. So I mean it’s endless spirals and halls of mirrors. In Golden Fleece it was using that myth. Perfect Party again was selfreferring. The Fourth Wall is about the fourth wall of the theater and is there really an audience out there? Are there really people out there? The play that

AN INTERVIEW WITH HOLLAND TAYLOR 51

you are seeing is dealing with the issue of communication and people being there and reality and unreality and is the theater really happening and is life really happening. I can’t think of any play of his that is just a play about something happening. And yet it can be taken on that level. You can take Cocktail Hour on that level but it’s so much more enriched by the self-referring conceit of having a moment where a character is saying, “Well, there is a big thing that happens at the end of the first act,” and, in fact, something is about to happen at the end of that very first act that he’s winding up. So he’s referring to an explosion that is about to occur and then the father says, “What are you talking about,” and the son says, “Well, you don’t want to know about it.” And the father says, “Yes, I do, tell me what it is?” And he’s leading up to the very revelation that he’s referring to in his play. This is masterful. Because the conversation was utterly real and could stand on its own as a real conversation and yet it was very deft, extremely skillful and dazzling, not a coup de theatre, but a very, very graceful jest. His writing is full of this. Now all of these qualities struck me, yes, all of these, I dare say. I was a recent Bennington graduate. I don’t think like this any more but in those days I was much more of a student than I am now and I remember reading this and thinking, “God, this is fabulous. This guy’s unbelievably clever. I’m not clever enough to create it but I’m clever enough to appreciate it.” Which is how I feel about a lot of Pete’s writing. I couldn’t do it but I’m smart enough to get it, at least, and to respond to it. AFS: Does this layered writing challenge an actor when it comes time to do the homework? TAYLOR: Yes, I think it does. It’s a challenge in concentration more than anything else. In other words, you can’t play any of those literary things. But acting is a layered experience as well, as I was saying before. It’s not playing a violin. It is something where all of you is used and your imagination and your emotional, or shall I say histrionic, risibility is just one layer of you, and that’s functioning as the character. The rest of you is doing many other things. The rest of you is counting the house, the rest of you is thinking of your laundry, the rest of you is admiring the literary joke that your playwright is doing and hearing the appreciative laughter of the audience at an intellectual thing that is happening in the play, and then the other layer of you is the character going through the character’s feelings and wants and actions and so it’s all, you’re layered, your work is layered as well. So I would say that in terms of the histrionic acting and sensitive response to the material, you have to keep a certain focus on what is the character and what are other things. The character’s concerns do not involve any of these other aspects of his work. Oh, and how could I leave out Love Letters. Love Letters is such a unique creation. AFS: How frequently have you played in that? TAYLOR: I originated it, I’m happy to say. It’s kind of a pretentious word to use. I was the first person who played it with Pete. It was sort of as an experiment. You’ve

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probably heard this story. He’d been asked to write a speech for a series that different writers were giving at the public library which is a big audience, four or five hundred people in one of the halls of the New York Public Library. And he had been working on a play that was an epistolary play because he had just learned how to use a computer. And he wrote this exchange of letters. And then it intrigued him more and more and got more and more involved and he was interested how the letters would reveal a person. And so he wrote this thing that was a series of letters that started from childhood to advanced middle age. And he decided to do that and he asked me to read it and he seemed uncertain of it. Now, Pete has a naturally deferential quality and he’s shy and he’s certainly not a pushing kind of personality. So he said to me, “Do you think this is good enough?” I said, “This is the best thing you ever wrote. This is a remarkable piece of writing. Good enough? How extraordinary that they can hear this first time out.” And he said, “Well, would you be interested?” And I actually flew in from California to read it. It was so important to me, from an ego point of view, to be the first person to do this character. I was so excited that he had sent it to me and I just wouldn’t have missed that opportunity for anything. So I came in to do it. I was quite frightened of doing it. AFS: How much rehearsing did you do? TAYLOR: Well, I don’t think it takes a lot of rehearsal. Pete and I went through it once, or twice, I think, before we read it. However, it is not an easy thing to act because you can’t learn it and act it because then it would not have the quality of a letter. What you have to do is get into the emotional place of actually writing the letter. Not that you pretend that you are sitting there writing it. Of course not. It’s almost as if you wrote the letter and while you still felt exactly as you felt while you wrote the letter, you read it out loud. So it’s a matter of an urgency of communication. You tried to read them as if it is the letter itself reaching out, vocally, to the listener. And, then, of course, the person who is not reading at that moment should be in the place of getting the letter and listening as though that is how that information was a part of listening. So it’s an interesting exercise and very, very effective. AFS: Is Gurney very active in rehearsals? TAYLOR: He was very active in rehearsals for The Cocktail Hour but I think a lot of it is quite tedious. In fact, I don’t know how playwrights and directors can stand it. Because there’s a lot of work that actors do that’s sort of water on stone. I remember Pete sort of hunching over the desk while we were rehearsing at one point in San Diego, and Nancy [Marchand] gestured to me to look over at him and he was very happily reading The Fatal Shore, away from the tedium of hearing us just missing the truthfulness of the scene over and over and over again. But, no, he was there. And he comes in, of course, once we’re in previews; he’s very attentive and he’s very astute. He’s a wonderful judge of performance quality as well as being a wonderful writer. And he’s very enthusiastic, and he’s very admiring. He’s extraordinarily sweet and appreciative and will remind you of

AN INTERVIEW WITH HOLLAND TAYLOR 53

things you have done that have pleased him and not forgetting certain high moments and echoing them in later years. He’s a very flattering playwright. AFS: It strikes me that he really likes actors, likes being with them and working with them. TAYLOR: Yes, he does. AFS: In talking about the first rehearsals of Dining Room, Gurney has used a phrase: “the coming together of the community of the play.” Do you have the sense that it’s a community? TAYLOR: Yes. Very much so. There’s a lot about getting a play up that’s never been done before that’s very scary and very venturesome, and there are stresses to it that the average person doesn’t know. And I think for a long while, partly because Pete lived in Boston and commuted, and was still a full-time teacher at MIT, and was raising a passel of kids with his wife, I don’t think he felt as much of the theatre as he in fact was. The man is very, very prolific and has written a lot plays that are very admired. But I think it wasn’t until he moved into New York that—and I don’t really know how many years ago that was—that he seemed to really get it that he was a theater person. And now he’s very active in various committees and organizations. I don’t know the names but there are a number of not-for-profit organizations and committees and ad-hoc committees that are interested in theater criticism and how the paper does this, that and the other thing, and fairness in reporting, all kinds of organizations that are theater organizations that he is active in and makes a real contribution to. He’s a really dedicated theater man. AFS: Let’s talk then about your recollections about Barbara in Children and Lois in The Perfect Party. TAYLOR: Well, Barbara is a character who is really lost because she was divorced or separating—I can’t remember the details—what I remember was that she was lost. And she was from a generation where the wealth had really petered out, had been dissipated over several generations and she was in that generation of WASPs where there were no great houses. And she was about to turn thirtyeight and was really wondering what the hell was going to happen with her life and got involved with a local roofer, a local builder or something. And it was just all wrong, her life was going all wrong. And in a way I see her as a kind of woman from that world—and Melissa from Love Letters is very much of this ilk. They’re not brought up to be anything but a wife and mother and, let’s face it, a lot of people want to do other things than that, or are inclined to do other things, that have other gifts. In Love Letters, the man is brought up to be the goddammed president of the United States. The woman is brought up to be a wife and mother. And if your persona is such that that is not what you do, you are lost, unless something supports you, like wealth and a felicitous marriage, other things that turn out happily that make your life work even though it’s totally unrealized. Barbara is someone with an unrealized life. And Melissa is, too, although in personality they are not similar.

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Lois is a professional woman. It’s a whole ’nother ball of wax altogether. The other women are, they all are wiseacres. Pete writes the greatest wiseacre women. They’re women who have a point of view and have a certain amount of attitude and they’re rather educated and they’re bright, so in their defeated corner they are often very sardonic, very funny, and are funny in their selfprotestation and their desire to stand up for themselves or defend themselves in some way. Lois, on the other hand, is witty, and sardonic, and ironic, but she has a job. We don’t even know what her background is. AFS: I wanted to ask you about that because the play mentions that she’s from the Brooklyn neighborhoods but that’s the only reference to it. TAYLOR: Yes. To tell you the truth, that, in terms of an actual character, never worked for me. I didn’t feel that there was any strong, creative throughline there in terms of her background. I felt she was almost a deus ex machina. She was less real, she was very much less real than his other characters who have a more true sense of their social origins. And she’s professional, she’s a professional woman. But the conversations between Lois and Sally are hysterical, again because of this ear Pete has for funny juxtaposition and funny conversational gambits. I still remember in rehearsal for that Debra Mooney played the wife, and Debra is a quintessential Gurney actress, sensationally good. And she has a great, great ear. The wife is lamenting how ridiculous her husband is being with this list of people that he’s inviting to the party. This grandiose list of important people. She runs off the names of various people who are on it, “So-and-so’s on it and so-and-so’s on it.” Lois is saying, “No, it’s not possible.” And then she says, “Abba Eban’s on it.” The first few days of rehearsal we could never get past this moment. I would start to laugh. And I would say, “Abba Eban’s on it?” and she would say, “Abba Eban is on that list!” We could never get past this moment. Debra and I would fall in each other’s arms, tears streaming down our face, then lie on the floor, beat our fists on the floor. First of all we cracked each other up because we are a mutual admiration society, Debra and I, and Pete would be wetting his pants somewhere and John Tillinger would be screaming. “Abba Eban is on that list!” “Abba Eban’s on it?” “Abba Eban is on—that—list!” I mean just hysterical and we didn’t even know why it’s funny. But he knew it was funny and he just knew it was funny. He created it. We knew it was funny and we laughed at it. He does have a very unique ear. AFS: Let me take you back to Children since we’re on this point. At the end of Act I, there is this marvelous scene where they bring on the father’s “family bible” and what struck me as I was reading this again was—I know he’s rejected the term “Chekhovian”—I’ve asked him about that—but it seemed to me. TAYLOR: Why has he rejected it? I see him as absolutely Chekhovian. AFS: OK Good. I’ve got you on my side. I don’t know why. I think it’s just a general resistance to labels and I’ve sort of delicately probed, in my other conversations

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with him and letters, this matter of influences and similarities and I can tell that either it genuinely doesn’t interest him or it interests him but he sure isn’t going to talk to me about something like that, one of these fuzzy-minded professors. God knows what they would do if they start indulging their pigeon-holing tendencies. Anyway, this moment is there and I wanted to ask you about the playing of this scene. It seems to me that in the character, the language, and the requirements of the ensemble at that moment, he is, in a way, as the playwright, taking away from you, as an actor, elements that you could otherwise use. Everything has to be restrained here. These characters, by their upbringing, and the language they have to use, and by the fact that they’re there together as a family are under strong restraints. Yet this is a very powerful scene and the emotions are very strong. But what does he give you to play in this scene that generates the emotion? It’s almost as if he says to you as actors, “I’m not giving you language, I’m not giving you expressive characters, I’m not giving you gesture. You must play a moment where everything that’s happening is inside. You’re not given an action to play, you’re all looking at this book.” TAYLOR: Well, but looking at the book, as I recall it, there was quite a tussle between me and my brother over it. I would yank it from him and he would yank it from me and I would say, “Let go. I’ll show it to you in a minute. I’m looking at it.” AFS: “I want to see if Pokey beat me in ’65.” TAYLOR: Right. So there’s actually quite a lot to play. The excitement of seeing the memorabilia that one had sort of forgotten and the fascination with it. And you know when you’re playing a scene in which there’s a lot that’s unexpressed, it’s just as interesting as playing a scene where it is expressed. And certainly in Chekhov you’re constantly playing a scene where everyone is involved in something, drinking tea and chatting about nothing, where a great deal else is going on. And, you know, if you have a thought, if you have a line, in which you say something that you feel, and you say it out loud to another character, for a reason, that’s no more acting than sitting in silence is acting. It’s equally acting. And thinking inwardly and saying a line inwardly, saying words, having concepts held in words, which is what thoughts are, having feelings connected with words swimming around internally, that’s just as much acting as yelling and screaming at another actor. So I never felt the lack of something to play, to feel that I had to play, and in Gurney’s case it’s a special pleasure because it’s usually fairly involved and subtle and has to be found and searched out and it’s usually threaded through with a variety of things happening at the same time. And it’s fascinating and not easy, and sort of richly pleasureful, for that reason. AFS: In The Perfect Party, Lois comes to the moment where she says, “I’m not going to review this party, after all. There’s no danger here. Where is th e threat? Where is the pain?” And in his reflexive way, I can tell this is also Mr. Gurney giving a character, who happens to be a critic and reviewer, a chance to say on stage what I think has been one of raps on him from the critics down the years: “Yes his plays are clever, and allusive, and really well crafted, but he walks right

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up to the danger and the pain in human relationships and then he stops and he won’t go all the way.” Another professional actor said that to me. TAYLOR: I don’t know that I would be quite so judgmental. It depends on whose “all-theway” we’re talking about. For some people, a restraint is true of them to the end. Therefore, “all the way” for those characters means still having restraint. So I disagree. I would disagree with that. It’s like people who said that in Cocktail Hour there should have been a real explosion between father and son. Well, then they should write that play because Pete wrote about a father and son who did not have an explosion, who did not want to, who were not inclined to, for whom it did not work out that way. If critics think everybody is capable of or inclined to—let’s not have there be any implication that capable of is more desirable than not capable of—if a critic thinks that everybody is equally expressive and equally outspoken and equally self-revealing of their insides and in an emotional, histrionically emotional way, he’s wrong. And so for some people the “all the way” looks very different from “all the way” in somebody else. I think that Pete has himself a natural reticence, and a politesse, and a reserve that is extremely profound, and certainly not just a matter of behaving nicely in public. [He has] something much more complex and deeper than that.

An Interview with Debra Mooney ARVID F.SPONBERG

AFS: You first met A.R.Gurney while you were at Circle Repertory Company ? MOONEY: Circle Rep. Uh-huh. We had play readings every Friday. And then a play that was read was chosen. If that play was something that the people who had the say were interested in working on, then you could take it to what was called a “pip,” play in progress. Then it was done for two weeks, and the author worked with you and changed and rewrote, and then you presented it for the subscribers as a staged reading or acting as much of it as you could. You used scripts in hand. It was a play in progress. They could see it. And then their comments were invited, and then the playwright rewrote more, and then you had a third reading of it. And then it would go into production, with any luck. So there was a real sort of play development. Porter Van Zandt had directed the “pip” of What I Did Last Summer at Circle. Then I was doing The Dining Room, and What I Did Last Summer was done in summer stock. Then it was going to be done back at Circle, and I left The Dining Room to do What I Did Last Summer and came back to The Dining Room. So during that time I did two Pete Gurney plays at the same time, and I learned a great lesson there; because, in rep, I had done two plays at a time, I didn’t think it would be any problem to be rehearsing one in the afternoon and playing another at night. And it normally isn’t. But, if they’re by the same author, you’re going to have a lot of things that are similarly constructed, sentence-wise, some of the same words but they don’t have— well that was very difficult because [I had] to think what play and which one am I in. But we did What I Did Last Summer and I loved that play. And that was how I began to know Pete Gurney. From the reading of What I Did Last Summer, when he brought it to Circle, and I just loved that play. Oh, I loved that play. AFS: And did you have an immediate connection? MOONEY: With his work? Yes. I think because I read a lot of English novels, and his plays —people say “It’s that WASP thing,” well, yes, it is, but the WASPs are very much of English heritage—so that [with] all the English literature, for some reason or another, I felt a real affinity to his plays immediately. And I don’t

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know if that’s why or because the characters he wrote about are people I felt I knew, but I really liked his characters and I loved the roles that I played. Talk about Grace first in What I Did Last Summer. What’s the spine of her character? If you think of that time, World War II, [her husband is] off fighting in the Pacific, and she’s left with the children to raise, and of course this play takes place at a crucial time in the son’s life. It’s a coming-of-age play, in a way, for him. And so there [laughs] she is trying to deal with it all, and it’s quite wonderful in the sense that you feel this woman’s frustration, and at the same time she’s hanging on valiantly, you know, doing her part for everything, and trying to keep all those balls in the air, and at the same time you know this woman must be terribly lonely and wish he would just come home and help solve things. And I think that play has wonderful humor in it. Do you recall much of the kind of homework you did for the character Grace? Yes. Studying that time, the war, because that’s such a different time than when we did it, doing it in the eighties, and this is, what we’re talking about is the forties. And I’ve always loved the forties anyway. I have done Talley’s Folly which, of course, takes place then, too. And I guess I’ve been fascinated with it. I’m postwar baby boom, so I guess we always want to know what happened before us, so I’ve always been fascinated with the forties and the thirties. Pig Woman is such an interesting character and almost inexplicable by our standards because she really is of the same sort of background that Grace is but has chosen a different life. And to Grace and her set that’s almost unfathomable. So that I feel like studying that time has helped a lot as far as understanding the characters. So your preparation actually involved a fair amount of formal study. Yes. I watched, there’s a whole thing about the March to Bataan. [The husband is] in the Pacific and I read books about the war in the Pacific because I felt that Grace would be vitally interested in what was happening to him, where he is, not knowing. As I [found] out, you didn’t really know. Everything was censored so much, you never knew where they were. And I think you have to have that edge—you don’t even know where your husband is, and you’re terrified that he may be dying. There’s that scene where the mail arrives.— Yes, and that scene in the night when that phone rings, you kind of think that her first thought is he’s been killed. I think there’s always that edge.You cannot forget that the war’s going on in that play. Do you recall which parts of the characterization came easily and which you had to struggle with? Or did it all sort of just fall into place? I don’t think there was much of a struggle as far as the character. I just loved her and she was just so wonderful. I think she’s really wonderful. And certainly when she’s fighting for her son, with the Pig Woman, when it comes to the confrontation.

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When you got to The Dining Room, then, playing Actress One, with a multiplicity of parts, what kind of challenge did that pose to you? Going from the integrated, unified, realistic character, now you’re playing eight different people. Yes. But however many characters that you play, you’re doing that many plays. You have to get each of them as though they’re a total character, and you could do them for two hours. And any character that you do for two hours, you’re basically showing two hours of life to an audience, whereas you fill in the whole life. And yet you’ve got the same amount of rehearsal time. Did you have to change your preparation methods to handle this? I think that you find your own style as an actor of searching out, ferreting out the role that you have to play. And that pertains to all of them. But with The Dining Room I felt that you have to find each one, their individuality and who they are so that you are playing full people each time. I did it again two summers ago at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in New York, and both times I felt it’s the kind of play where you don’t just walk on and do it because by the time you do it the scene will be over. Before you go on each time, you get those circumstances and that character set inside of you before you come down the stairs or on the stage or whatever. And in some instances you might only have a couple of minutes. Right. So that in rehearsals you take the time and [when] you get to doing it in front of an audience, you can shorten that time. You still use the same elements but you condense things. But you can’t do it without doing them. The steps are still necessary. You do it instantly is all. So could you give me a kind of an outline sketch of what the steps of preparation are for you? No matter what the character, what the play, do you have certain stages that you want to take the process through? Where do you begin and what’s the middle point and what’s the end? Fve always wanted to write a diary of every rehearsal because I think there are certain elements that will always be the same. And then there are certain elements that change because every role is different. I start with a broader and go to a more narrow—when I read the play, I want to get the feeling of what the play, a play, if it’s good—It’s got a rise, a crest, and there’s an overall thing that it’s going for and a climax and then denouement or whatever you want to say. There’s a change from the beginning, a middle, and an end. And you’ve got to find that overall arc of the play so that you know where your character is in that arc. Then each scene usually has the same sort of thing building toward that overall arc. And you need to be aware of it because you can’t say, “Well, but I like this moment so much, I’m just going to indulge myself here and to hell with the rest of the play.” You have to have the whole play in your head, where it’s going, what you don’t know, what you do know. And so when I read the play first, I’m reading it from everybody’s point of

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view, not just my character’s. Then it comes down to my character itself and where it fits into that overall arc. Then the character’s arc, usually there’s an arc in the character where you start at one place and either gain knowledge or whatever and end up in a different place. So then you have to figure that out. Then you get down to what you’re feeling at this very moment in time when you walk on the stage, and what you know and don’t know, and what the other person says to you, what it does to you, and what the other person does, and that, of course, comes through the rehearsal, because every person, who does the role opposite you is going to change how you do what you’re doing. So in The Dining Room, then, in your own terms, you were having to sustain six, or seven, or eight different character arcs Right. within these scene arcs, within this overarching play. Have you ever had any sort of experience comparable to that in any other plays that you’ve done? In a funny way, because of its construction, Camino Real, you know the sixteen blocks. Oh, yeah. Now that’s interesting. I mean I see it immediately, but I never would have thought of that myself. You don’t think of that. And I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t done Camino Real, if I’d only read it. That’s where you feel, like I always say, the time to mature, it’s everybody’s career that really does build, no matter whether it builds fame-wise or not, but it builds in terms of experience, because everything you do, I mean when we went to Alabama, I thought, “Oh, god, oh, god.” And I did not love living in Alabama, but when I got to play Blanche [DuBois], wasn’t I lucky I’d lived in Alabama. [laughs] Sometimes you feel like everything you do is somehow building to your experiences that make you able to play a role better than you did before or better than you might have. And if only the IRS would understand that, you could deduct everything. [laughs] So don’t be too quick to shut out possible experiences. Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons why I feel like the academic choice for training is a good one because you are forced to take courses in everything else. And an actor doesn’t play always an actor. If all we played were actors well then, yes, study acting. But if you intend to play a gardener, well then you’d better find out what a flower is, you know what I mean? The Master Builder has to know about architecture. Everything filters in somehow. I’d like to go on to talk about Sally. In The Perfect Party. That’s a fun part. I just love his plays. And then we have to talk about Diana in Another Antigone. And then of course I did Love Letters with Pete. Oh, you’ve done it with Pete, too. Great. I’ve got to hear the story of that.

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The next two plays, Perfect Party and Antigone both have academic connections, Antigone very directly because it’s about a professor and a student and a dean. But in Perfect Party we find out that Tony has given up his academic job because he’s going to put on this perfect party. [Laughs] I just love that premise. You know he wrote that after, what was the play with Irene Worth, and Jeff Daniels, and Stockard? The Golden Age, which I always get mixed up with The Middle Ages. But Golden Age was Stockard Channing and Irene Worth. I was supposed to do The Middle Ages, too, and I didn’t get to, but I’d been hired to and then they decided to scrap that production so that Death of a Salesman could go into that theater and I was in Death of a Salesman. The critics came down really hard on him. The first time I met him was spring of ’84 right after The Golden Age had been stomped. Well, you remember how they just carried on. And I felt for a while like he just didn’t feel like writing again. And then out of that came The Perfect Party, you know, the critic, and the whole thing, and I thought that was such a wonderful response because it was life-giving rather than destructive. It ended up being a constructive thing. Because I think The Perfect Party is a wonderful play. I just love it. I love the characters, all of them. They’re just marvelous. And we did have such fun with that. [laughs] Abba Eban. [laughs] And you got to play Sally. Tell me about her. What kind of arcs are there in her character? As you thought about it, what was the arc of the play? Well I love it that she just hates the idea of the whole thing and comes in hating everything, and her first line is marvelous where he [Tony] says, “This is Lois who has come to write wonderful things about us.” And Sally’s first line is, “And possibly to put us down, am I right, Lois?” And the whole thing, the marvelous stuff about the dress, the stupid, boring, fucking mall, used to just bring the house down because there she is all dressed up and looking oh, so WASP and lovely and out of her mouth comes these lines. You know she’s basically poking holes in the balloon right from the beginning. And then of course ends up supporting him and the reaffirmation of the marriage at the end, which is wonderful. So that the arc goes [from] being that wife that will do [the party], god knows, although she doesn’t agree with it, all the way up to when the party changes, when she comes in and says, “Oh, my god, you won’t believe what’s happening out there,” and we all start clanging bells and running around singing “Glory Hallelujah,” to then coming in the door and saying, “Oh, I thought you were Tony” and he says, “No, I’m his brother, Tod” and she says, “Oh, yes, of course” and walks out. And then you know there’s that moment when she goes “Wait a minute. He doesn’t have a brother.” So there’s that trying, trying, trying, carrying on, being the dutiful wife, and doing it all, and then saying “Wait a moment.” But then searching

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through and saying “The reason you did this is the very reason I love you.” So that it’s quite wonderful. It’s positive, and marvelous, and funny. I’ve been so lucky. I’ve known and worked with David Storey and Neil Simon and Jules Pfeiffer and Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Lanford Wilson and Pete Gurney. I wanted to work with live authors. I think the wonderful thing about all of them—particularly Tennessee, who was my first, so that then I see the others sort of through those eyes—have this wonderful affirmation of life, and in the end are looking at the positive. The first time that I met [Tennessee] after the play, after Streetcar that night, he walked up to me at this party and said, “Of course, she doesn’t stay there.” And I said, “Of course not, she marries the doctor, right?” He laughed and said. “And then she invites Stella over for tea, and says, ‘but don’t bring that brute of a husband.’” [laughs] I mean he always had a sense of humor and a positive outlook on everything. AFS: And you see that Gurney shares those qualities as well? MOONEY: Yes, because at the end of [The Perfect Party], you think how is he going to get out of it. And he gets out of it in a wonderful, positive affirmation of life in this marriage. You know that they have a wonderful marriage. AFS: You mentioned the moment when Sally comes in and discovers the brother. I think this is a moment when a student without a lot of theatrical experience might say, “Now wait a minute, how can this be? How can she be so fooled?” Of course, if you’re acting it, if you’re in the theater, the whole thing has it’s own logic and reality, and it’s great and it works marvelously. But did the playing of this moment present any particular problems? Is there some sort of balancing act that you have to work there? MOONEY: As the first cast to do it, with the director, Joey Tillinger, we found the play required its own style, which is not farce, and not comedy, and certainly not realism. And at the same time, it’s all of them. Farce has always got to be based on reality or it isn’t funny. And the same with comedy, it’s always based on reality or it isn’t funny. You have to play that moment, and then it has a reality of it’s own, so it develops its own style. I remember the day when we were working on that scene1 where I do come back in and say what’s going on out there and the heavens are opening up. David Margulies said, “Yes, yes, I think we have to just get so caught up we’re not even aware of what we’re doing.” And Joey Tillinger grabbed something, [laughs] I think it was the lid of the ice bucket and the tongs and started going around the room singing. I don’t know if you know Joey but he’s a large man and he was just wonderfully silly. And we all knew that that’s where it had to go. It had to go to that height because we are the climax. Well, you know, what’s happening upstairs2 is the climax but we are doing that climax on the stage. And so that it all has to go that way, and it was just so wonderful. We would all just, I mean we loved it and laughed

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and I think it’s just a wonderful moment. And that is where you reach the height of that silliness. They didn’t know how they wanted the light to shine down through the doorway. And I remember that was one of those times when I got to make a suggestion because I said, “I know how they do it in film.” And Joey said, “What, what, what?” I said, “We need a smoke machine so that when we open that door the smoke rolls out and then you shine the light down through [the smoke] and then you’ 11 see the light coming down from the heavens.” So we got a smoke machine and, of course, it’s wonderful. The smoke billowed through the door, the lights come down through it, and it’s all this grand moment. And it was just such fun. It was such fun. AFS: I was tuned into the connections—and they’re so subtle from point to point in the play—with the Importance of Being Earnest. There are explicit references to Oscar Wilde, but at certain points the exchanges between Sally and Lois manage to catch those Oscar Wilde cadences without duplicating the vocabulary. The Wildean effect in the American idiom is a delightful feature of this play. During rehearsal did you often say to yourselves, “We’ve got to underline the Wilde here”? MOONEY: No, no one ever said anything. We never said, “This is like Oscar Wilde, let’s do it like that.” We never talked about Oscar Wilde. But don’t you think that probably we all know that play and without having to talk about it, it’s there. Thank god for the experiences that you bring to it, you know. Because it all comes together. And of course Joey is British and so he has that wonderful sense of comedy like Oscar Wilde, We all had the understanding of that style. AFS: In Another Antigone, the mood changes tremendously. We leave the comedy/ farce of The Perfect Party. I don’t think you call Another Antigone tragedy but it certainly contemplates what is tragic in the relationship between the work of a civilization and its attitudes toward its own members. Harper is given a pretty strong defense of classical education. He gets to deliver that marvelous speech to your character about what is the nature of tragedy here and why it is important that we continue to have education that focuses on these kinds of ultimate conceras. MOONEY: That’s why I always felt like it was such an important play. AFS: Did it surprise you when you first read it? MOONEY: It did not surprise me because [Pete] taught [humanities] for so long and he taught at MIT. To the people that studied with him, it was a refreshing course in a different outlook on things, without the responsibility of his graduates having to go off and perform in that area. He could enlighten them. I remember when I had football players in my acting classes at Minnesota. I loved seeing what it did for them, where it opened their eyes about something else in life. And so it was not a surprise to me, knowing Pete, that he would write about something like that because Pete is not at all a shallow person. I was glad that he had written it. I still think it’s an important play having to

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do with prejudice, especially when we think it’s solved and we turn around and there it is. Several of his plays treat anti-Semitism. It comes up in Middle Ages and it comes up in Scenes from American Life. In rehearsals for Another Antigone, did you discuss Harper’s attitude toward Jews here, or anti-Semitism? Yes. Did Pete contribute to the discussion? Yes, in the [process] of all of us working on our characters, trying to understand them. You might want to talk to George [Grizzard] more about the fact that George does not feel at all that [Harper] is anti-Semitic, does not feel at all that he’s prejudiced. He has his purpose in life which is very clear to him. And he’s rather stunned that he could be interpreted as being antisemitic. And see I understand that. I’m sure you understand that, too. We know many aeademics who’d be shocked to find out that somebody thinks that they’re prejudiced. And in their own way, they are not. But to somebody else, particularly [someone] looking for it, they are. And I think the beauty of that is like life. We know so many people with whom it isn’t clear cut. They aren’t always going to run around with a Nazi emblem on their sleeve. At the same time, they can be horribly prejudiced without ever realizing it. And I think that was the whole point—not the whole point certainly of the play—but one of the points that’s made is that prejudice comes in many ways. She [Judy Miller, Harper’s student] is certainly prejudiced. There’s that terrifying little moment when you, the Dean, raise this question with her, “Did you sense that there was any anti-Semitism?” And you can just see the light going on when she says initially, “Well, no, of course not. Never crossed my mind.” And then, oh, now it has crossed my mind. By god, I think this is another stigma I can use to beat him with here.3 That’s right. That’s just chilling. What was the arc for Diana in this play? She loves Henry for what he is in his own way, and they even had a brief fling which he would, of course, like to continue and she very much says, “Well, forget that.” So there’s that arc of dealing with the problems which he is certainly in and trying to keep the lid on it and not let it get out of hand, and then that sort of builds to making that mistake that you just spoke about with the girl and knowing it, I think that the dean knows it. Because it’s right after that that you have the dictating of the resignation, and saying, “Oh, god” and really wanting in a way to just evaporate, if you could. And we all, I’m sure, have had those moments where we wish we could literally sink into the floorboards. So there’s an arc up to that and then a turning point there and then from then on it’s a kind of different battle where, yes, you’re still trying to keep the lid on it but you’re also trying to keep a real tragedy from happening. Before it was a problem, now it’s a deeper thing. It’s a real

AN INTERVIEW WITH DEBRA MOONEY 65

friendship and life and death tragedy. I think she does know how deeply this is going to go. AFS: It moves from the level of employ ment and workplace relationships to the deeper human connection of how we treat each other regardless of what our professional obligations are. MOONEY: That’s exactly what I’m talking about. AFS: Diana in many ways strikes me as the most modern woman in his whole body of work up to that point. She is professional. MOONEYL: Not just the wife. She’s a working woman. AFS: If you go back and contrast her with Grace,4 we’ve traveled from the forties into the nineties. MOONEY: Yes. Absolutely. That’s right. And you find, I believe, that she has a daughter and all of that, as I recall. I think Diana has a daughter, she mentions at some point. I don’t know if that was still in, but I knew that she had a daughter. Pete, in a way he based the things on us. I have a daughter, and I raised her by myself, being a professional woman. That all comes in. AFS: I’ve been particularly interested in looking at his women characters. My first impression is that a lot of the action is focused [on the male characters.] Tony [Perfect Party] provides the precipitating context. And [in Another Antigone] it’s Harper’s situation. MOONEY: His women are certainly as important. I suppose the dilemma is Harper’s, but the girl and Diana are absolutely as strong as characters. And I think that in a funny way you end up know[ing] just as much about Diana and her feelings as you do about Harper. And her feelings are just as moving and important as his. Well, I must say I really admire [his writing about women] because every time I’ve ever sat down and thought about writing, or thought about characters and putting them together, I always have to admit to myself that I really am not sure how a man would feel at this [or that] time. I think he does it really well. [With] Grace, you can fill in all she must feel with her husband not there, and all that’s happening with the Pig Woman, and all of that. In order for you to be able to do that, he gives you enough. And the same with Diana. So many people would come up and tell me that they understood so much about her, so obviously it comes through. AFS: These characters connect with the audiences, don’t they? MOONEY: Yes, they do. And I think in a lot of ways his women connect more than the men. Diana is us. Sally, at the end, when she sits down and says, “Just what were you trying to do here?” is all of us who are watching this play. We’re all caught up in it and she is like the audience. The other two, the critic [Lois] and him [Tony], they’re the battlers, as it were, but she’s the audience and she’s involved. As I usually played those roles, I am vitally involved and at the same time I’m the audience. I’m all of us. I don’t know where that’s leading, but I feel that those roles are really important there because you have that third eye.

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AFS:

If Tennessee Williams is ten on the scale of playwrights who can create riveting, believable women characters, how close does [Gurney] get to that? MOONEY: Oh, I think [Pete’s] very close. Certainly he hasn’t written a Blanche DuBois in terms of size of role, but the women are as important, I think, in dealing with the issues that he brings up. I would give him high, high scores there. The women have dilemmas as well [as the men]. I have great admiration for him, as you can probably tell. AFS: I want to go back to The Perfect Party and have one last look at some lines that Lois is given. I think this is [Gurney] giving his critics their day in court, and it’s a passage that’s made me curious. Lois says, “I’m going to have to pass on this party” and her reasons are “there’s no sense of danger at this party. What is the threat? Where is the pain?” And it’s a long speech that she’s given,5 and it occurred to me that that has been the rap from the newspaper reviewers: “Well, [Gurney] is very good, the craftsmanship is marvelous,” when they deign to pay attention to that, “but he goes right up to the edge, he goes right up to the abyss, and then he pulls back.” Now my sense, as you’ve just talked about Grace, and Barbara and Diana, is that that’s a bad rap. Or is there something to it? MOONEY: Well, look at [Melissa] in Love Letters. She certainly goes over that edge, and there is real pain there and it’s been done by everyone under the sun to the point where it doesn’t often get talked about as a play. But certainly that character does find her own pain, and it’s an unbearable pain. I think I do see a huge difference between Richard Cory and where we’ve gone to with Love Letters and Another Antigone. I think maybe you could say that about some of his plays but certainly not about all of them. AFS: Richard Cory stays in your mind as one that is maybe more susceptible to that criticism? MOONEY: I think he was finding himself then. People have to be allowed to do that. Maybe he hadn’t found his voice yet as an author, but he was searching and the search was interesting. And each [play]gave us something. [In] The Dining Room, maybe each scene doesn’t go into a huge catharsis, but there is a catharsis overall when you watch that play, that whole arc. You end up having such a feeling about those people. It ends up being a very moving play about that space and time, and our own feelings of our life going by, a nostalgia, and that’s something that is not a leitmotif. I think that, well, there are times when you want him to push harder, maybe, but there are other times where he does it, he makes it. And I think that we have to allow any artists their say, their chance to do it. NOTES 1. The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays, 236–7: Sally:

The Party’s beginning to crest!

AN INTERVIEW WITH DEBRA MOONEY 67

Wilma: Sally:

Sally: Wilma: Wes:

That’s just what we were saying! It’s amazing. Everything is suddenly coming together. It’s as if somewhere someone had pulled a switch, and a huge gravitational force had come into play. It’s like the beginning of civilization itself, if I remember my courses at Vassar correctly. First, there was this man, I don’t even remember who he was, who sat down at the piano, and started idly fiddling with the keys. Then others began to gather around. A chord was sounded. A tune emerged. Someone began to sing. And then, as if out of nowhere, people produced other musical instruments. Harps…xylophones…Moog synthesizers…And now! —Well, let’s listen, and see how far they’ve come: (She opens the door. From offstage we hear the huge sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—full orchestra and chorus—singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A rich, romantic light and an exotic fog spill into the study as the three stagger back, amazed.) Voices:… His truth is marching on! Glory, Glory Halleluia! Glory, Glory Halleluia! Glory, Glory Halleluia! His Truth is marching on! (Sally, Wes, and Wilma pick up glasses, trays, ice buckets as cymbals, triangles, and drums. They march around the room, ending in a wild display of sympathetic enthusiasm. Finally, Sally closes the door and the sounds stop.) See? (Wet-eyed, hugging her) It’s a good party, Sally. A very good party indeed.

2. The seduction of Lois, the newspaper critic reviewing the party, by Tony in disguise as his evil twin brother, Tod. 3. The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays, pp. 145–6: Diana: Judy: Diana: Judy: Diana: Judy: Diana: Judy: Diana: Judy:

…The Provost wondered if your difficulty with Professor Harper has anything to do with…ethnic issues. Say again? A student has recently complained that Professor Harper is antiSemitic? Anti-Semitic? That’s the complaint. Anti-Semitic? It’s probably that Talmudic type who sits in the front row and argues about everything. I bet he wears his yarmulke even in the shower. Ah, but you don’t feel that way? No way. Oh, Judy, I’m so glad to hear it. I never even thought of it.

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Diana: Judy:

Good. Then I’ll tell the Provost. I mean should I worry about that? My grandmother says you have to watch out for that sort of thing at all times. Diana: Yes well, times change. Judy: Unless it’s there, and I didn’t see it. Diana: No, no… Judy: I mean, maybe I’m so assimilated into white-bread middle-class America that it passed me right by. Maybe I should reexamine this whole issue with that in mind. Thanks a lot, Dean! Diana: (calling after her) Judy! Judy!…Oh God! 4. In What I Did Last Summer. 5. The Perfect Party, pp 216–219; the key speech is on page 218.

An Interview with John Tillinger ARVID F.SPONBERG

AFS:

Do you have a distinct recollection of the first time you saw professional actors doing a play? TILLINGER: I was born in Iran and there was little theater except street theater. I used to watch that, but I used to find it difficult to follow; it’s mostly improvisational, making up the plot as they went along. My first memory of anything theatrical was (actually nobody’s ever asked me this question before) the Allied troops putting on a show. By then I had already put on my own plays in my garden for my parents and friends. I got my friends together, and put on a sketch based on cartoon characters. When I got to England, the first play I saw was 1066 and All That, a historical spoof. As I was six or seven at the time, I’m not sure that I understood all of it, but I laughed along with everyone else. But by then I’d long been in love with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. I was high on the entertainment thing. Growing up in England at the end of the’50s, I put on plays at school. By then I was a sort of theater aficionado. I just rushed back to the vacations and I would see as many plays and movies as I possibly could. So I saw Alec McCowen playing a child in Escapade and I saw John Gielgud in Way of the World in 1951 or ’52.1 was seeing some very elaborate classical plays. I think my first Shakespeare play was Michael Redgrave as Richard II and that must have been ’511 think, on a school outing. Of course I didn’t understand half of what anybody was saying, anybody who pretends that they did are lying. It was a shatteringly exciting experience, hearing all those trumpets and shouting and all that verse, which I couldn’t quite follow but it became a sort of touchstone, it became the springboard for my love of theater. Though now I think about it, I remember it was the lyrical sections which really touched me. During the early ’50s I saw endless drawing room comedies. Then John Osborne burst on the scene. I went to school with Emlyn Williams’s son, who was a great friend of Richard Burton and Osborne, and through him I became very aware of what was happening in the English theatre, that classical theatre was being tempered by this new wave of English theatre. What George Devine did at the Royal Court was extraordinary. There were really some stunning young play wrights there, some of them

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have disappeared, but Arnold Wesker, Dennis Potter, and N.F.Simpson were amongst a lot of new voices which were miles away from the Hugh Williams’s and Terence Rattigan comedies. I think Rattigan actually is a rather good playwright. AFS: Would you tell me a little bit about your training and how you became a director. TILLINGER: I went to the university in Rome; I was going to become an architect. That sort of petered out as I began to spend more and more time inside theaters and movie houses and I thought “why waste time doing this when I really obviously want to be in the theater.” So I dropped out some time in my second year, and then I went to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and started my career as an actor. All the time I was there, people kept saying “you really should think of being a director,” but I took no notice. I then went into the regional theaters in England and worked in the better ones in Nottingham, at the Bristol Old Vic and Oxford Playhouse. Then I moved into London and did a couple of shows in London before breaking into television. By then my parents had moved to this country. I’m not English, I was just educated there. My father became ill, and I wanted to spend time here with him. His illness became terminal, and I by then became involved with somebody here. It seemed difficult to be binational. I had always hoped I could go from one place to another. But one can’t—unless you’re a star. I stayed in this country and I was very lucky; I acted in a lot of plays on Broadway, off Broadway, I went back to England, after I’d been in a play called The Changing Room on Broadway, for six months. My wife and I lived in London and while I was there a friend of mine had just been appointed the head of Chichester, Keith Michell. AFS: You knew him from Old Vic? TILLINGER: No, I knew him because I appeared in a musical with him called Robin and Elizabeth. He said “I need somebody to read plays for me,” so I started to do that and then I think I helped on a translation of a play by Pirandello for him. When I came back to America, Arvin Brown, who’d been looking for a literary manager at Long Wharf, asked if I’d be interested in being the dramaturge there. He wanted somebody who’d had hands-on experience of working in a theater, not just an academic. I was frankly thrilled at the idea and also I felt it was financially imperative. I started there as a dramaturg and one thing led to another. What I did mostly was to prepare plays so that the director could take over when it was time to do so. At one point, Arvin was going to direct Solomon’s Child, and when he dropped out, Tom Dulack asked for me. So I directed my first play for Long Wharf Theatre. At the same time I’d already got into motion a production directing Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane, a play I really liked. I did that in New York and it was a huge hit. From then, things frankly just snowballed, which was thrilling because I don’t think it

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TILLINGER 71

always happens that way. Some years were slow in the beginning, but because of Long Wharf I was always doing at least one or two shows there. AFS: Keith Michell and Arvin Brown seem to be two turning points in moving from acting through dramaturgy into directing. TILLINGER: Particularly Arvin Brown. He’s the most supportive person. But he took me under his wing even though I’m probably a year or two older than he is; he seemed to trust me. Within a very short period of my first joining the staff at Long Wharf, it became a very hot theatre in America. We were doing things that few others were doing. In the meantime, a lot of theaters have emerged in New York that have taken on what we were doing in those days, both new English and American plays. The outlets were very, very small, believe it or not, in the early ’70s. There wasn’t a Manhattan Theatre Club. Playwrights Horizons were in their infancy. Lincoln Center didn’t exist in these terms. There was the Public Theatre, and that was probably it. There was no WPA, etc. So we got the pick of the crop, which we don’t do anymore. I think if a playwright has a chance of having a play produced in New York, he will leap at the chance, because there will be ten critics, instead of just one critic reviewing it and it gives the play national exposure. AFS: Could you describe two or three features of British theatre training in the ’50s that would be distinct from American theater training as you found it once you got over here. TILLINGER: Well, I suppose I’m going to come out with a bunch of clichés, but one of the obvious things is language and the rhythm and music of a playwright, Of course I wasn’t trained in the United States, so I can’t comment on what goes on in schools here. I prefer directing American actors to English actors. I find them more accessible. But I think, basically, there is a great love and respect for language and the playwright in England. We grew up with Shakespeare, so he’s not intimidating. I know they do take students to Shakespeare plays here, but it’s made to seem like punishment. Not that half my class at school in England didn’t find it a form of torture as well. Some of them thought it was the most boring three hours they’d ever spent. But the English have this tradition of language, whereas here it was all about the internal feelings. Not that we didn’t address ourselves to that too, but we did address ourselves to the language. That is one of the biggest differences I would imagine between English and American training. One can also become very pretentious about language and that can be fatal, too. We were trying to see what the language was and make sense of it and make it real. When I became an actor, Peter Hall had started to break down Shakespeare to make it more accessible to the public. People wanted to see his productions beacuse they were very, very understandable, very accessible. You knew what was going on, not a lot of actors standing about, ranting and speechifying. Peter Hall’s a few years older than me; he was successful very early on. He and John Barton

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broke down this old-fashioned way of doing Shakespeare and he made it very, very—the only word I can use is—accessible. AFS: You used that word in reference to working with American actors. Do you think the emphasis over here on addressing the feelings of the character has something to do with that? TILLINGER: I think that American actors are more vulnerable. For the English, theatre is a blood sport. They’re much crueler and they may be better for that. The stakes are so high and the tribulations of actors are so enormous in this country. You’re directing somebody one week who is barely able to pay the bus fare and six months later he’s earning $2 million on a movie, and that makes the American actor easier to talk to and less cruel. I’m not saying there aren’t some people in this country who don’t become big stars and become very difficult to deal with, but I find the attitude much healthier, but then as I say, I’m not English, so maybe it’s all that class warfare that I experienced in England which didn’t make any sense to me. Why somebody is working class just because his father was a bricklayer is incomprehensible, to me. If the man you’re talking to is earning $2 million a year being an actor, he’s not working class as far as I’m concerned. AFS: Tell how you first became aware of A.R.Gurney’s works. TILLINGER: Well, I was aware of him first when Scenes from American Life was produced at Lincoln Center. I was acting in a play at the Manhattan Theatre Club called Chez Nous, a Peter Nichols play. And one day, somebody got sick and we couldn’t do a performance. We were all at the theater, and the management said, “What do you want to do? Do you want to see the play in the other theater?” And I said, “Sure.” So we went to see Wayside Motor Inn. I was very taken with the breaking of form that he was experimenting with in that play, and then the play really spoke to me. And here I think, possibly, some of my English background did play a part. AFS: In what way? TILLINGER: Well, I think people think that WASPs have no feelings and the point is that WASPs have the same feelings as everybody else, they just express them in a different way. It’s similar to the English. They try to keep their manners, behave well, they tend to be nonconfrontational—though I don’t think it’s true anymore—but that saves people’s feelings and keeps the boat from turning upside down. Wayside Motor Inn wasn’t about the kind of Jewish confrontation or, shall we put it, Irish confrontation, that we’re much more familiar with. When Dining Room got great notices, I went to see that. I can’t remember what I was doing at the time, but I went to see it and I was unbelievably moved by it. I was weeping and all that. And laughing, the laughing everybody recognizes. I found it very, very moving. It touched a deep chord in me. So those were the two plays I had seen before we got together. AFS: And then Golden Age came along.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TILLINGER 73

TILLINGER: I think, and I may be wrong, The Golden Age had been done in London and had sort of a mixed response. I didn’t see Children, by the way, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and I wish I had, because it’s a wonderful play. The Golden Age was done in London, and I actually don’t know if it was well received or not, but I got the impression from Pete that it was sort of middling well received. I’m guessing here, but I think it probably was offered to one or two directors that Pete knew who were either unavailable or didn’t care for the play. And I read it and I thought it had a lot of potential. So we did a reading with Jessica Tandy and I realized it had enormous possibilities and I was very eager to work on the play. Jessica hadn’t quite gotten this surge of fame going that she has now. So it seemed a possibility that she might do it. Anyway, it didn’t work out and with a lateral move, we got Irene Worth. Pete worked on the play a lot. We got, I thought, a sensational cast together. And it was a very good rehearsal period, a lot of good work and a lot of good exchange. The really nice thing is both Jeff Daniels and Stockard Channing really liked Irene, and there was mutual liking and respect between them there, and we opened in Washington where it was a big hit. David Richards treated it with enormous respect. It wasn’t a runaway sell out, but it was certainly very well received, by all the critics actually. It was supposed to move to New York but Stockard was doing another show, and when the show fell through, and we transferred to New York. Two things happened. The timing was off. Glengarry Glen Ross opened three weeks before us, and Death of a Salesman was just about to open, and here was this what seemed to critics an inconsequential little piece. So we got fairly badly damaged, actually. Don’t get me started on that. AFS: Do you remember one or two of the changes that Pete made from the London to the American productions? TILLINGER: Yes, I think we tried to make the boy much stronger, to understand his motivation, his real story. I thought he was fairly callow in the London version. You’re asking something that I did ten years ago. I think he was almost a stereotypical reporter, and [Pete] tried to deepen the character a bit. I think one of the problems with the play—and I’ve said this to Pete and he said, “But that’s not the play I wanted to write”—is that the old lady became twice as fascinating as anybody else. The logical conclusion is that [the boy] falls in love with her and not the young girl. What does the character make of that? But that was again not the play that Pete wrote. AFS: What distinguishes a Gurney play from others? TILLINGER: What I always look for in any playwright, and Pete has it a lot, is a distinctive rhythm. I think a good playwright has music, meaning that his way of writing could not be mistaken for anybody else’s. It has a rhythm and music of its own. That’s a great mark of a playwright, it means he has a distinctive voice. Because now, and particularly now, the young writers have grown up with television so their writing seems to be “televisionese,” if you see what I mean,

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or “movie-ese.” John Robby Baitz being the exception. But the thing about him is that he grew up in South Africa, so he didn’t watch television. He read books. And that is the difference. Whereas Pete belonged to a different generation, where reading was primary. I do think that he has an incredible wit, which is something I respond to a lot. So, those two things had me going. AFS: I am struck by the number of plays that he writes that specify particular music in the background. In working with these plays have you discussed with him what role nonlanguage sounds should play? TILLINGER: Well it’s more or less in the script, and there never seems to be much argument. I felt he was right and I tried to do what the author asked. If he doesn’t have an opinion, then we sit down and discuss things but if you think it’s right, then why go into all that? Somebody the other day asked me if I do character analysis, and I confess, well, I’d never heard the term. I suppose that’s what kids do at college, but… AFS: Oh, we definitely have them do character analysis. TILLINGER: This can be dangerous. Either you understand a character, or not. Otherwise, you get a very rigid analysis, if you analyze the character in the way that I understand the term. How can you say, “Well, this is this kind of person— he would never do that.” Human beings are not like that. Human beings say “black,” and twenty minutes later they say “red.” The contradictions and the ambivalence of human beings are what I think makes art, and certainly what theater is all about. So, I don’t quite understand what people mean by character analysis. Maybe I’m misinterpreting it, but I don’t think there’s any point in arguing about music if you think what the author has decided is fine. AFS: As a director have you evolved a plan for getting inside a play? Necessarily aren’t there questions that you want to answer, certain things that you always do first as you begin to read and work toward a goal? TILLINGER: I’m not quite sure what you mean. I find this a sort of academic question that I don’t really respond to. I try to understand the play, and I try to understand what’s going on, and I tell the actors what I think the play is about, but I say that my joy of working in the theater is that I’m so often proved wrong, and that it’s a whole period of discovery; rehearsals are a period of discovery. For me, this is often creative for the actors, and, indeed, the playwright. He may have one idea about what the play is about and discovers three or four new ones. AFS: So, if I were given the privilege to go through the scripts that you use in rehearsal, I would not find patterns in your notes to yourself? TILLINGER: I would hope not, because I think that each playwright presents a different style and story, and I think within each playwright, each play is quite different, so you have to address yourself to what each play is trying to say about the characters and the situation. So, I don’t see a pattern emerging. There is no pattern because each playwright and each play is different. AFS: Let’s go on to Perfect Party.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN TILLINGER 75

TILLINGER: It was like a party—the whole rehearsal period. I felt the rehearsal period needed to be like a party. I tend to make the rehearsals as joyful as I can because I think that’s the best way for people to work, though I can be stringent and sometimes pretty cruel, but I didn’t need to be with this one. It was a fabulous experience. When I was sent the play, I was sent it with a lot of reservations from people that shall be nameless, saying that it was a very different thing for Pete and he’s trying out something new, and I thought it great, and happily, it turned out to be a very successful evening. AFS: The connection with Oscar Wilde in the play has always intrigued me, at least in the reading. In the dialogue between Sally and Lois he seemed to catch some of the cadences of the dialogue between Gwendolyn and Cecily without repeating the vocabulary. TILLINGER: I think you can go beyond that. You go back to Congreve and Restoration comedy. That’s where Wilde got it from and the tradition is there in English and American drama from the early seventeenth century onward. So, that’s where it all comes from. I didn’t see it particularly as Wilde because Wilde was taking up the baton from them. AFS: In your conversations with Pete through the rehearsal process, was this matter of his trying to find another aspect of his own voice a specific topic of discussion? TILLINGER: No. You know, I believe in the play and I don’t cross question an author. I understand the play and say I’d like to direct it and then I may have some specific problems with moments or something. And that really gets ironed out, a lot, around the table in the first five or six days of rehearsal. The one big problem we had was [characterizing the husband’s twin brother]. One day I said, “Pretend that you’re Marcello Mastroianni or Giancarlo Giannini,”—which didn’t make any sense—why would his brother have an Italian accent? But the minute [John Cunninghom] did it with an Italian accent [the characterization] was so effective that whenever we went back to speaking American, it didn’t work, so we left it that way. In New York, at least. AFS: So in the first four or five rehearsal sessions in this play, everyone was able to come to basic agreement about what the play is and what we’re trying to accomplish? TILLINGER: Right, I find that that is true of most of my rehearsals. I mean sometimes it doesn’t work when they stand up and that was the case with [the twin brother]. The minute [it was done] in the Italian accent [it] was fine. And, you know, there’s a sort of improvisational thing one does in rehearsal to break some patterns and it is one that stuck. It sort of added to the madcap flavor of the piece. We did some absurd things, you know, which made me laugh a lot. I don’t know if all the audiences laughed but there were some really silly things we did in rehearsal some which we threw out. AFS: Could you give me a couple of examples?

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TILLINGER: That’s the strongest that I can give. You’re talking about something that happened in 1986, so it’s a long time ago. AFS: Sweet Sue. TILLINGER: While I was rehearsing The Perfect Party, suddenly [Pete] said, “I’ve got this play that I want to do at Williamstown,” and I read and was deeply touched by it, and I thought again that it was breaking some form there and we did it at Williamstown with Mary Tyler Moore. And it was then picked up by a Broadway producer. I mean, it only takes one, and it’s very rare that you get ten people wanting it unless it’s Angels in America, which has already been reviewed by the New York Times. AFS: But to date [Sweet Sue] is still his only play that has had a traditional Broadway production. Moving it from Williamstown to New York entailed what kinds of adjustments? TILLINGER: Well, first of all, it would not have moved without Mary. She is a big star. I liked working with her a lot. I like her a lot. She asks a lot of questions and they’re all very much to the point. One of the problems that became apparent in Boston, and even before that, was the young man. He just seemed somehow quite callow and there were a lot of rewrites taking place in Boston, and I felt that the reason she loved him was not that she was obviously physically attracted to him, but because here she was at fifty and this young man was talking to her. However, the talking didn’t somehow work, and maybe I cast it wrong, I don’t know, but it sort of didn’t work, and I thought Lynn and Mary were very well matched, but again, maybe there were two different styles going on. I can’t pretend that it was a resounding hit. It ran a long time —over five months, but I think it’s mainly due to Mary and Lynn being the stars in it. It never made its money back. I remember a French agent coming and saying, “Well, what’s the matter with these boys? Why don’t they just get on with it and make love to her, and why is that a problem?” And somehow, people didn’t quite understand what the problem was. Maybe I didn’t fulfill the potential there, but it was a hard rehearsal period. We did go through these changes and some of them worked and some of them didn’t. It wasn’t quite there yet by the time we opened in New York. AFS: And the essential problem was the character of Jake and the stasis of his relationship with Sue, given the context of Broadway and the requirements for a story in a Broadway play. TILLINGER: Well, I don’t know what Broadway is. I don’t know that anything is Broadway. I don’t know what Broadway wants anymore. I would have thought Sweet Sue was a charming, light comedy which was quite moving. I was very moved. When Lynn and Mary were really going, it really was quite powerful. Within that context I don’t know what constitutes a Broadway play. I don’t think there is such a thing anymore. AFS: Another Antigone.

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TILLINGER: Yes. Again, this play went through a lot of problems. Sweet Sue had a lot of reservations when it was done at Williamstown, but Another Antigone, when we did it in San Diego, was a big hit. It was a huge hit. Here at this time, I really am at fault. When we moved to New York, I think the casting of the leading girl was wrong. We kept the same cast. Debra [Mooney] was in it, as you know. But I just think the girl—I cast a Cuban girl, actually—who was very beautiful, and had enormous grace and dignity, but his girl wasn’t about dignity. The critical community in New York was foul. It was just beyond belief foul. Before we did Another Antigone in New York, I had directed Scenes from American Life at Long Wharf and that went over like crazy. Scenes is about a lost world and I was playing it to a New England community. I feel that Another Antigone is one of the few plays that I’d like to have another crack at. I didn’t do quite right. People tell me “You did what it is, and it’s the play that isn’t quite right.” I’m not a good judge. AFS: Not long after that, we come to Love Letters, which is up and running right from day one and it looks like it’s going to go on forever. TILLINGER: And you know, Pete wrote it, I think, probably not to do it in the theater. He said to me that he wrote it really to get used to his computer. AFS: This seems to me to be very characteristic that the first time out on the new technology he creates an epistolary play. There’s something beautiful about that. TILLINGER: There certainly is. He sent it to The New Yorker, who not only did not publish it but refused to even review it, which is a little alarming. But next he did a reading of it at the public library. It went over very well. He sent it to me and I leapt at it. I found it unbelievably moving and very well written. He’s a wonderful writer. There’s no question about that. We were worried, frankly, that the actors would be bored doing it more than X amount of times. And I think that’s probably true. They like to move around and all that. So we were worried, from that point of view, and also we wanted to be able to get actors who were able to commit to a week or two but couldn’t commit to six months. In France, you know, it was done by Anouk [Aimee] for six months or more. AFS: Did you find the actors reluctant to leave the play? TILLINGER: No. They were glad it was two weeks. And it was sold out immediately at Long Wharf, I mean we went to 108 percent immediately. I don’t know how we got the extra 8 percent but we did. Once again the critical community didn’t always quite understand what it was. You know the Times—I can’t remember who from the Times—reviewed it—didn’t get it, but fortunately, by then, there was a ground swell and the public did. And as you just said, it’s sort of history now. It’s been a hit everywhere, everywhere but London. AFS: Why was London so poor? TILLINGER: Well, one thought is indiscreet, which is that we had the wrong two actors opening the play. But the other notion is that the English really don’t tolerate

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Americans doing this kind of play. They feel they do it so much better. We roll out the carpet for English actors here—handing them Tonys practically at the airport—in an almost sycophantic way. We do tend to get the cream of the crop but we roll out this carpet. They look down on most Americans, old movie stars notwithstanding. I think Stockard Channing and John Malkovich have recently broken this trend.

PART II Essays

FLOYD: …And maybe you’re saying as well that we ourselves have had a whiff of that greatness even in this country, in the period from Eugene O’Neill through Arthur Miller, when indeed our country was at the height of its power PEGGY: I…could be saying that. Yes. FLOYD: And you’re also saying that now that our theatre has declined, you’re concerned that our greatness as a nation is declining as well. And therefore, this wall, and your yearning to reach beyond it, is an attempt to revitalize theatre in America and to keep our great country from sliding irrevocably into darkness and decay. PEGGY: That could be it! FLOYD: God, Peggy. You don’t know how exciting this is! This afternoon I was sitting alone in my office, hoping that one of my students in American Drama might stop by at least to chat. I knew this was unlikely, however, because this semester I am down to three students in that course: an ambitious young man who wants to write film scripts, a breathless young woman who once saw Les Miserables, and an exchange student from Bangladesh who signed up by mistake. Normally I would have used my spare time to prepare for next semester’s course on World Drama, but I learned today that it’s just been supplanted by a second section of a new course in “Media Studies” entitled “The Brady Bunch and Beyond” PEGGY: You poor man. The Fourth Wall, 1992

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Indeterminacy as Tragic Fate: Issues of Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation in Gurney MARK WILLIAM ROCHA

Consider this excerpt from Scenes from American Life (1970)1 in which a father and son, out for a sail, conclude an argument over the son’s decision to draft-dodge the Vietnam War: FATHER: You have no idea what duty means. You have no conception of what the word duty means. We don’t just quit. We don’t desert the ship. Or scuttle it. Which is what you’re doing. When your mother got into that nonsense with Mr. Fiske, I stuck by her. I stuck by the rules. And so should you. Now stand up at that trial and take your punishment like a man. Do it. No arguments. Just do it. SON: Fuck you. [The FATHER slaps him across the face. The SON hits his father. They struggle knocking over a chair. The boat is in trouble. The FATHER frantically pantomines grabbing lines.] FATHER: Grab the tiller!… I said GRAB THE TILLER! … Head her off! I said OFF!… Oh, my God, you can’t even sail!2 With this tragedy-in-little, A.R.Gurney supplies his own allegory for many of his bestknown plays. The scene depicts the archetypal battle with chaos in which the attempt to fix and impose order ends in destruction. In Gurney, this battle is essentially linguistic, for here the Father insists upon a determinate meaning for such crucial signifiers in the Gurney lexicon as “duty” and “man.” The Son’s hostile and artless reply, “Fuck you “is a bomb that deconstructs the text of the Father and exposes that text’s signifiers as indeterminate, if not entirely emptied of signification. Like King Lear, the Father has no choice but to rage at a disordered linguistic universe that no longer signifies his will—he would not be the “Father” otherwise—and this leads to inevitable death for both Father and Son. I therefore propose that for Gurney ’s doomed characters Fate is the force we call linguistic indeterminacy. Gurney’s characters are quite literally fighting against language

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itself in an attempt to make words mean, and this of course is always a lost cause, as Beckett, lonesco, et al. have amply dramatized. Establishing this concept of tragic fate in Gurney is a prerequisite to addressing the issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation as central rather than peripheral issues in the plays. Without this concept of tragic fate, one is reduced to explaining away these issues with the commonplace assertion that WASP culture is racist, sexist, etc. But one need hardly read Gurney to discover this about WASP culture or any other American culture, for that matter. Gurney’s achievement instead lies in how he deliberately and consistently dramatizes linguistic conflicts from which we discover the way such signifiers as “Jew,” “black,” “rich,” “woman,” and “homosexual,” have come to signify as they do. We see that such signifiers are part of a larger, rigidly fixed semiotic system, the development and dissemination of which is both the glory and the disgrace of WASP culture. A “Yardman” Can Never Become a “Builder”: Of “WASPs” and “Others” in Children With Gurney, one must be quite self-conscious even about the use of the signifier “WASP” since his plays call attention to how the signified of even this term is indeterminate. Indeed, the signifier “WASP” is itself the sign of a threat to the fixed Anglo-American semiotic system since it is uttered to identify that which could formerly be taken entirely for granted. “WASP” is a signifier that exists outside the established sign system, as this exchange from Children (1974) demonstrates: BARBARA: …Remember how [Pokey] cried at daddy’s funeral? MOTHER: We all cried. BARBARA: But not so much. God, tears were streaming down his face. The rest of us were good old undemonstrative Wasps. MOTHER: I hate that expression, Wasp. Everyone uses it these days, and I loathe it. BARBARA: It’s what we are, Mother. MOTHER: We are not….3 This type of scene of conflict over what is signified by a given word qualifies as a major motif in Gurney who consistently employs it to foreground attention upon the closed sign system of, in this case, the Mother. The Mother cannot admit “Wasp” into her lexicon because it signifies how that which was previously the all of culture is now only a part. In other words, “Wasp” is a sign of “otherness,” a signification the daughter Barbara glibly accepts but which her Mother cannot because “otherness” is a sign she has always reserved for others. Thus she must dismiss the very word itself and her dismissal signifies a fierce commitment to preserve her sign system of determinate meanings and in so doing preserve the very notion of an ordered universe. The Mother ultimately sacrifices herself to her code as she entombs herself within the house that serves as both the monument and mausoleum of that code, much as Lavinia does in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Given this, one may more readily perceive the Mother’s objection to Barbara seeing a Jew as being at root a semiotic issue:

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MOTHER: I am simply appalled. To leave Fred for that sly, ambitious, social-climbing Artie Grieber. I’m appalled. BARBARA: I love him, Mother. MOTHER: You can’t love him. BARBARA: I’ve loved him since I’ve known him. MOTHER: What? When he was cutting our grass? BARBARA: Even then! MOTHER: That’s impossible. BARBARA: [Defiantly] He was the first boy I ever slept with, Mother. MOTHER: I won’t hear this. (Act II, p. 109) To the Mother, Artie Grieber can only signify as a “yardman,” while her daughter Barbara signifies Artie not as the yardman he once was, but as the “builder” he now is. The linguistic point is that the Mother exists entirely within a fixed sign system in which resignifying a sign is not only obviously impossible for her, but even the very notion of the mutability of a sign must be rejected out of hand as a threat to the entire code. A signal feature of the Gurney mokif of conflict over the word is the code keeper’s refusal and formal forbidding of the word itself, and so the Mother seals out the threat to her code with, “I won’t hear this.” Make no mistake, the Mother is anti-Semitic. The injurious effects of such racism can never be laughed at, nor does Gurney mean for us to do so. But Gurney seems far less interested in indicting racism than in dramatizing its root causes in the American communities he presents. A Jew is unacceptable as a son-in-law because he literally would be out of place, that is, outside a system of determinate meaning. Accepting the Jew would plunge the Mother into an unimaginable semiotic chaos. Like all signifiers, “Jew” must have its fixed place, and the Mother cannot resignify any one term without destroying the entire sign system. Indeed, the Mother would rather die than suffer the consequences of a disordered universe from which, she realizes at the last, there is no escape. A semiotic analysis of anti-Semitism yields the practical understanding that what is really at stake in the conflict between WASP culture and “others” is a theory of language. The original Puritan culture of New England, of which Gurney’s characters are direct descendants, of course began with THE WORD from the Bible and a devout belief in the immanence of the text. Furthermore, “The essence of Puritanism,” as Alan Simpson has put it, “is an experience of conversion which separates the Puritan from the mass of mankind and endows him with the privileges and duties of the elect.”4 Given such divinely-endowed status, it follows that the Puritans would attempt to do the impossible “in bringing to the New World a society which was largely the product of sixteenth-century thought and defending it there against change in a changing world.”5 This is nothing less than tragic hubris. The problem for many of Gurney’s Waspiest WASPs, such as the son Randy in Children, is that they are profoundly detached from the original spiritual animus of the Puritan mythos, yet they still are bound to its sign system of determinate meanings in which order is the transcendental signified. Gurney explicitly conveys how the family in Children is still bound to the letter but not the spirit of their ancestors’ code through the device of the “Family Bible,” the name given to “daddy’s notebook” chronicling the family’s history right back to

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colonial days. There were a wealth of ministers in this family’s genealogy, as well as one of their sermons, which Randy reads in a telling sequence: RANDY: [Reading, laughing] “Man is conceived in sin and born in travail…. Seek not for salvation in the vast splendors of our bounteous land…. The delights of this world have been set as a bait and a snare” [Slyly, to BARBARA] “Forswear the pleasures of this world” BARBARA: Isn’t that marvelous? Isn’t that marvelous, Mother? [MOTHER nods, a little grimly. BARBARA continues reading.] Oh, and here come all the businessmen. Look at all these inventories. All this money. Look. Daddy estimated all their incomes…. (Act I, p. 98) Barbara’s deeply ironic attempt to signify the sacred text with her Mother as “marvelous” is made solely for the sake of form, to maintain the illusion of connection to a family mythology that obviously no longer explains their lives, and yet is the only text they have. When the family first began to detach itself from the original sacred text as they shifted occupations from religion to business, the substance of the original text was emptied of significance, but the businessmen preserved the form of the original text which signified fixed values. The hand of Providence must always be manifest in perfect order and so began the inventorying and estimating and keeping score that determines the lives of the family to the present day. The lives of each member of the family are wholly inscribed within the text of the deceased father which is so tightly closed that it could admit of no indeterminate signifiers, as the Mother so painfully recalls: [The notebook] is just a long boring list. I used to beg your father. I used to beg him when he was working on that thing, I’d say put in the nice things we all did. Put in some of the things I organized. Where is the description of the blueberry picking, or the trip to Cuttyhunk, or the singing by the piano, or the time we all got together and made this terrace, stone by stone? Where are all the real things? Where is the life? I’d beg him to include those things. But he never would. All he cared about were the things you could own, and count, and pin down. (Act I, p. 100) The text of the father is therefore the text of death. To be sure, the Mother once tried to subvert or at least amend the text of the father with signifiers that would be qualitative rather than quantitative. But the father refused to open the closed sign system to which he too surrendered his life in suicide. Notwithstanding her former resistance, the Mother finally makes the decision to follow her husband and inscribe herself within the text of death, that system of fixed values and determinate meanings. This is tragic but it is a conscious decision which declares a determinate identity. In resigning herself to her fated

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death, the Mother remains fixed as “Mother” in the father’s text rather than as an “other,” a “WASP.” It is a brutally high price to pay for identity, but this is a brutal culture, and not only to those it fixes as “others,” like Jews and blacks. Brutality is perhaps most evident in the way this culture treats its own, particularly in the way it enforces gender roles and prescribed significations of “woman” and “man.” Disabling Mono-Lingualism: Gender and Sexual Orientation in The Dining Room Despite the great deal of attention given Gurney in the popular press, there is no serious treatment of sexism as one of his major subjects. One can make a strong case that sexism is the most fully dramatized and therefore the most important issue in The Dining Room (1982). Perhaps critics fail to note the sexism in this play because it is so painfully obvious and simply to be taken for granted within the WASP culture critics are convinced Gurney intends to satirize. But if we mean by satire, holding up the mirror to human error for the purpose of correction, entertainment, or the justice of comeuppance, then The Dining Room cannot qualify. Quite to the contrary, if one employs a semiotic approach and consequently reads the plays as tragedies of indeterminacy, then it seems one inevitably discovers how The Dining Room is really about the refusal and inability to speak another language. Gurney’s mothers and fathers are obviously unwilling to change, but more to the point of sexism, they are unable to change because they are deeply inscribed within a closed sign system, in which “change” itself is signified only as a threat from outside the system. They are disabled by their mono-lingualism. That sexism is injurious is a theme that hardly requires dramatization from Gurney or anyone else. What Gurney does provide in The Dining Room is an extensive dramatization of the way the code of sexism is taught and maintained, and the reason why sexism is a necessary practice in Anglo-American culture. The question in Gurney is not at all, is sexism bad? Of course, sexism is bad. The applicable question is, if so many say sexism is bad, why do we still practice sexism? In semiotic terms, the answer must be that sexism implies a language most Americans have been taught, and it’s very difficult to stop speaking a language one must still use every day. Sexism is a practice rooted in a language of fixed values, and like any other, this language must be taught. Gurney dramatizes this schooling most carefully and impressively in the opening scenes of The Dining Room in which a Father teaches his young son how to signify the four women in the Boy’s life. (Gurney’s penchant for allegorical character cues in this and other plays indicates a conscious effort to universalize the action. In this case, the children of the “Father” are “Boy” and “Girl,” though we learn their names are Charlie and Liz.) The Dining Room has been invariably characterized as “a series of little vignettes,” but the opening scenes with the Father seem calculated to build a prerequisite understanding of how his determinate sign system is inculcated in the young. The Father assigns rigidly fixed signifiers to the four women in the Boy’s life and then leads his son in the practice of sexism that such rigid significations demand. At the beginning of this sequence, the Father’s young children enter the dining room for breakfast. The children no sooner enter than their Father quickly reminds them that they

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can communicate to him only by meeting the exacting standards of proper English. Contact with the Father is possible only if one speaks his language: GIRL: Daddy, Could Charlie and me— FATHER: Charlie and I…. GIRL: …Charlie and I come out and sit with you while you have breakfast? FATHER: You certainly may, Lizzikins. I’d be delighted to have the pleasure of your company, provided— GIRL: Yippee! FATHER: I said PROVIDED you sit quietly, without leaning back in your chairs, and don’t fight or argue. GIRL: [Calling into kitchen.] He says we can! FATHER: I said you may, sweetheart. [The GIRL comes out adoringly, followed by a little BOY.]6 Once again, Gurney focuses on the play of individual words, in this case to dramatize how the Father acts as a police officer to enforce adherence to the law of the language of his family. The Father clearly understood what his daughter meant to signify when she uttered, “Charlie and me,” and “He says we can “yet he expressly excluded these as having no signifying value. In other words, the Father not only is teaching his daughter the approved vocabulary of their language, he is most of all teaching her a way of signifying, the foundation of which is the keeping of rule and order. Forcing his daughter to substitute “I” for “me” and “may” for “can” does not change at all the content of the daughter’s message but rather its form. Adherence to form and allegiance to a determinate linguistic universe is, in fact, the very idea of the “communication” that occurs throughout the sequence between the Father and his children. Moreover, the Father is less interested in “the pleasure of your company”—itself a phrasing lifted from this culture’s decidedly formal language—than he is in using the opportunity of contact with his children as an object lesson. The children win access to their Father and the dining room and all it implies as a metaphor for inclusion in the “tribe” only if they follow his strict linguistic prescriptions. The Father signifies to his children as a power, and he teaches his children precisely what they must do to be near the seat of power and thus feel powerful themselves as worthy of inclusion. Make no mistake, either, that it is because of her Father’s instruction, not in spite of it, that the daughter views her Father “adoringly.” This adoration is genuine, and we will shortly see how it is the female adoration of the word of the Father that is a major obstacle to the revision of gender roles. As both children enter the dining room, Gurney’s stage direction is careful to note, “The children watch their FATHER.” The dining room then becomes a classroom in which both the Girl and the Boy learn how they must signify “woman.” The first woman they observe is Annie, the family’s black domestic, who, of course, is signified in definite terms as “servant.” The Father teaches his children by example that Annie exists only to respond to his commands. The second woman to be signified is the Girl herself. In the similar condescending fashion of Torvald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the Father addresses her with pet nicknames such as “Lizzie Boo,” “Lizzikins ” “sweetheart,” “sweetie pie,” and “darling” but, of course, does not address his son in the same manner. This serves to signify “woman” as decorative property,

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a notion that is reinforced when the Father dismisses the daughter’s expression of shyness and prescribes her future function in society: “Half of life is learning to meet people” (Act I, p. 202). The third woman to be signified is the offstage character of Miss Kelly, the Boy’s teacher at the private school he attends. When the Boy twice tries to invoke Miss Kelly as an alternative authority in his own life, the Father directly puts down these attempts. The first instance occurs during a discussion of the ongoing Depression. The Boy reports Miss Kelly has taught them “the government has to step in and do something.” The Father, a resolute Republican, issues a terse command: “You tell Miss Kelly she’s wrong” (Act I, p. 203). Following this, the Boy asks his Father, who drives his son to school each morning, to leave earlier so he won’t be late. “Miss Kelly says I should learn to be punctual,” the Boy offers in support of his request, but the Father’s reply is a devastating fixing of Miss Kelly’s significance: Now you listen to me, Charlie. Miss Kelly may be an excellent teacher. Her factoring may be flawless, her geography beyond question. But Miss Kelly does not teach us politics. Nor does she teach us how to run our lives. She is not going to tell you, or me, to leave in the middle of a pleasant breakfast, and get caught in the bulk of the morning traffic, just so that you can arrive in time for a silly hymn. Long after you’ve forgotten that hymn, long after you’ve forgotten Miss Kelly, you will remember these pleasant breakfasts around this dining room table. (Act I, p. 204) This speech is an imperative that determines not only how the Boy will signify “Miss Kelly” but how he will construct his personal history. This history will dismiss as insignificant one’s relationships to the institutions of religion (symbolized by the hymn) and education. Instead, the Boy will inscribe himself within the Father language, taught to him during “these pleasant breakfasts.” The fourth and final woman to be signified by the Father to his son is the Boy’s Mother. When the Mother enters the dining room to join them for breakfast, the Father uses the occasion for yet another lesson about women: FATHER: I know people who leap to their feet when a beautiful woman enters the room. [CHARLlE jumps up.] MOTHER: Oh, that’s all right, dear. FATHER: I also know people who rush to push in their mother’s chair. [CHARLIE does so.] MOTHER: Thank you, dear. FATHER: And finally, I know people who are quick to give their mother the second section of the morning paper. CHARLIE: Oh! Here, Mum. MOTHER: Thank you, dear. FATHER: Now, Charlie: Take a moment, if you would, just to look at your lovely mother, bathed in the morning sunlight, and reflected in the dining room table. MOTHER: Oh, Russell.

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[CHARLIE looks at his MOTHER.] FATHER: Look at her, Charlie, and then ask yourself carefully: Which is worth our ultimate attention? Your mother? Or Miss Kelly? MOTHER: Who is Miss Kelly? FATHER: Never mind, dear. Which, Charlie? CHARLIE: My mother. FATHER: Good, Charlie. Fine. (Act I, pp. 204–05) The Father’s schooling is complete. Here he has deliberately opposed “Mother” and “Miss Kelly” as competing candidates for the signified of “woman.” The Father, of course, forces the boy to efface Miss Kelly, literally to erase her as worthy of attention, and in so doing the Father erases for the Boy the possibility that a woman can have a voice, exercise authority, or be anything other than what his Mother surely is, a mute object of decoration, a helpless beneficiary of men. With Gurney, as usual, the details are subtle but telling: the Mother is ignored twice by her husband when she expresses anything other than deferential gratitude; she is automatically to be given the second section of the newspaper, which assumes she has no interest in the “hard news” of the first section. By the end of this breakfast the Father has coerced his son not only to accept but to practice the possible signifieds of “woman”: servant (Annie), pet (daughter), babysitter (teacher), and decorative object (Mother). The Boy, therefore, has become programmed as a sexist by learning his Father’s language. One therefore discovers through these important early scenes set in the past how this AngloAmerican culture is sexist, which deepens our understanding of the many subsequent scenes of gender conflict which are set in the present. Sexism persists because the characters literally have no words in their language with which to reconceptualize gender constructs. In the scene that quickly follows, for example, a married couple argue over the proper use of the dining room table. The husband, Howard, violently objects to his wife Ellie’s use of the table to type her term paper, itself an important symbol as a threatening, destabilizing text. Howard’s sexist reaction to his wife is clear and despicable, but the point is that Howard’s behavior is determined by the language he learned as a boy, which has disabled him from constructing a world outside the semiotic universe of the Father. He is quite unable even to imagine his wife’s use of the table. The idea of a woman empowering herself through the creation of her own text in the very room where the Mother always deferred in silence to the word of the Father is unthinkable because Howard has no terms in which to think it. Ellie’s act signifies only as a desecration to Howard. Women, of course, cannot escape inscription within the Father language and the proof of this is that the most debilitating sexism in The Dining Room is practiced by mother upon daughter. The scene that immediately follows Ellie vs. Howard presents a mother, Grace, who makes a concerted though ultimately unsuccessful attempt to manipulate her fourteenyear-old daughter, Carolyn, into attending the Junior Assembly. Judith Fetterly would surely cite Grace as a perfect product of what she terms immasculation, the process by which “women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny.”7 If this seems too harsh, consider how in this scene Grace not only tries to take away Carolyn’s power to make her own decision, she tries to separate Carolyn from her maiden Aunt

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Martha, with whom the young girl identifies as a symbol of independent womanhood. Grace reveals how much of an agent of male misogyny she is when she tells Carolyn a story of how Aunt Martha’s youthful rebellion was ruthlessly put down: GRACE: [Picking up CAROLYN’s breakfastdishes.] Well you’re obviously not old enough to make an intelligent decision [between attending the Junior Assembly dance and seeing a play with Aunt Martha.] CAROLYN: I knew you wouldn’t let me decide. GRACE: [Wheeling on her.] All right, then! Decide! CAROLYN: I’d like to— GRACE: But let me tell you a very short story before you do. About your dear Aunt Martha. Who also made a little decision when she was about your age. She decided—if you breathe a word of this, I’ll strangle you—she decided she was in love with her riding master. And so she threw everything up, and ran off with him. To Taos, New Mexico. Where your father had to track her down and drag her back. But it was too late, Carolyn! She had been… overstimulated. And from then on, she refused to join the workaday world. Now there it is. In a nutshell (Act I, p. 210) Carolyn reacts to this text of rebellion answered by violent subjugation by running out to talk to Aunt Martha. Again, Gurney carefully establishes the relationships between texts to make a point about the absolutism of the determinate language of the Father, which is enforced with the literal threat of imprisonment. The scene opens with Grace working on a grocery list, one kind of text that women are permitted to create by men. Grace continues throughout the scene to try to complete her list but fails to do so because the indeterminate text of rebellion she holds within her bubbles up to subvert it. When she offers it to her daughter, Grace intends for it to be in the service of the word of the father as a withering statement of control that there is no way out for women. But the effect of this previously effaced text on Carolyn is catalytic, in large measure because it is a revelatory sign of her mother’s immasculation. Carolyn’s decision to “talk to Aunt Martha” represents her wish to escape the word of the father which is also here spoken through the mother.8 If an independent-minded heterosexual like Aunt Martha is outside the semiotic universe of this Anglo-American culture, then without a doubt any sign of homosexuality would be excluded as well. Heterosexuality is, of course, taken by Gurney’s mothers and fathers as a cultural given, and there are no terms to signify homosexuality except as deviancy, something outside the system of stable sexual identity. Homosexuality cannot be said to not exist because there are no terms within the closed language that can signify it. This becomes quite clear in The Dining Room in consecutive scenes involving two more of Gurney’s father characters, one of whom is unable to signify his daughter as a lesbian, and the second who is unable to signify his brother as gay. In the first of these scenes in Act II, the adult daughter, Meg, her marriage having failed, asks her father, Jim, to take her back home. Their exchange is yet another clear example in Gurney of the profound alienation that exists between two people who live in entirely different linguistic universes. Jim is quite unable to register the significance of Meg’s words except as a threat to order that must be excluded:

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MEG: JIM: MEG: JIM: MEG: JIM: MEG: JIM: MEG: JIM: MEG:

JIM:

There’s someone else, Dad Someone else? Someone else entirely. A third person. Yes. What was that movie your mother and I liked so much? The Third Man?… It’s not a man, Dad. Not a man. It’s a woman. A woman. I’ve been involved with a woman, Dad, but it’s not working, and I don’t know who I am, and I’ve got to touch base, Daddy. I want to be here. [She kneels at his feet. Pause. JIM gets slowly to his feet. He points to his glass.] I think I’ll get a repair. Would you like a repair? I’ll take your glass. I’ll get us both repairs. (Act II, pp. 246–7)

Gurney’s word play here is exquisite, especially in Jim’s use of the word “repair,” which becomes a metaphor for the highly stylized, closed language of this culture. The reader of course notes the delicious irony of Jim’s use of the word “repair,” which signifies not only a freshened drink but a willful decision to dive back into his determinate linguistic universe which affords escape from the catastrophic implication of Meg’s lesbian relationship: a disordered universe. Repeatedly in Gurney, one encounters father characters (or mothers exercising the father’s proxy) who are willing to do anything, even die, before yielding to indeterminancy. This is rehearsed to obvious comic effect in the next scene in which the father, Standish, is ready to fight a duel with a fellow club member who insulted his gay brother, yet the subtext as always in Gurney is tragic, for Standish would indeed rather die than to admit a destabilizing sign into his language. Standish explains the incident to his children and literally cannot find words to signify homosexuality: STANDISH: …Mr. Byers…made an unfortunate remark…having to do with your Uncle Henry’s…private life. [Pause. The children don’t get it.] EMILY: I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific, dear. STANDISH: [Taking a deep breath.] Mr. Byers, who had obviously been drinking since early afternoon, approached Uncle Henry in the steam bath, and alluded in very specific terms to his personal relationships. CLAIRE: What personal relationships? STANDISH: His—associations. In the outside world DAVID: I don’t get it.

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EMILY:

Darling, Mr. Byers must have made some unnecessary remarks about your Uncle Henry’s bachelor attachments. DAVID: You mean Uncle Henry is a fruit? STANDISH: [Wheeling on him.] I WON’T HAVE THAT WORDIN THIS HOUSE! (Act II, pp. 249–50) Standish’s last line here, screamed to the world, states with finality and precision the tragedy of his dying Anglo-American culture. For Gurney’s fathers, resignifying gender and sexual orientation would require the surrender of identity itself, a surrender all tragic figures must refuse. If such refusals are often oppressive and injurious to those around them, there is also something noble in these fathers who will not submit to the fate of indeterminacy. The Dining Room ends with a dying father, Harvey, instructing his adult son, Dick, in the plans he has made for his funeral. Thought out in advance to the last meticulous detail, Harvey’s funeral will be a last ritual monument to a life given over to the idea of order. Even death itself will not frighten Harvey into swerving from loyalty to a code which has both empowered and crippled him. His imperative to his son serves, in effect, as Gurney’s own imperative to his audience if they are to grasp the contours of the culture he dramatizes: “So concentrate, please, on my funeral” (Act II, p. 253). The Motif of the Missing Text: The Issue of Class in The Cocktail Hour The Cocktail Hour (1988) is Gurney’s meta-play, a play whose very subject is the writing of a play. With some justification, critics have taken the play as autobiography, since it presents the homecoming of a playwright, John, whose recently completed play depicts a WASP family like Gurney’s own. The play’s archetypal theme concerns the problematic relationship of the artist to his subject, the subject in this case being the playwright’s septuagenarian father, Bradley. The father-son relationship is all too familiar ground for American drama, which one might well argue has trodden little other. The Cocktail Hour is, therefore, an ordinary though facile reworking of the prodigal son parable. But it becomes remarkable if acute attention is given the use of language which reveals John’s ambivalence, even deep anxiety, over his class affiliation. The playwright John’s ambivalence is rooted in what one might term his bilingualism: as an artist he has become highly self-conscious about his use of language and has become acculturated to the language of indeterminacy; yet he is still a product of his father’s language of determinacy, a language which retains attraction and power. While discussions of the issue of class in American drama usually proceed no farther than Odets, The Cocktail Hour is one of many Gurney plays that provide an excellent opportunity, perhaps much more so than with race, gender, or sexual orientation, to understand how class is almost entirely a function of language. One signifies one’s class, as Shaw showed over and over, by what language one speaks, or just as significantly, chooses to speak if one is “bilingual.” There is always a “missing text” in a Gurney play, which invariably belongs to a woman and which has been rendered invisible by what I have termed the text of the father. The

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Mother in Children could not get her husband to include her stories in the family history; Grace in The Dining Room has withheld from her daughter Carolyn the story of Aunt Martha, and here in The Cocktail Hour we learn that the mother, Ann, has written a novel about a “well-born” woman’s passionate affair with a lowly groomsman. Ann has written a novel about a woman’s transgressing the boundaries of class differences to achieve an emotional fulfillment which is automatically denied women of the upper class. It is, in other words, a fantasy, and it is precisely because Ann recognized it as a hopeless fantasy that she abandoned it and burned the manuscript. Ann was unable to realize her fantasy even in fiction since she contrived a proper ending that had her character marry the master rather than the groomsman. When John asks Ann why she burned it, she replies: “Because I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get it right. It was wrong.”9 She elaborates this a moment later: “Well, I could never get the feelings right. Especially with that groom. That passion. That tempestuous passion. Those…ames. I could never get that right in my book” (Act II, p. 82).10 What Ann is saying in effect is that she didn’t have the language she needed to signify this woman’s experience which occurs outside the boundaries of the language of Ann’s class. This point is made clear by a careful review of the words she uses to describe her book, already cited above. The vocabulary available to her to create this experience in fiction is quite limited, causing her to repeat words and speak in uncharacteristically terse sentences. And the ellipses of course indicate the groping for words she does not have to express feelings which could only be awkwardly and conventionally metaphorized as flames. To put it another way, Ann is unable to speak the vernacular, a fact that is obvious throughout the play as she protests every profanity which her son John utters. The burning of her novel is a sign of her disabling mono-lingualism. Her text has been offered as a sacrifice to the language of her husband Bradley who issues such linguistic edicts as, “vulgar people always fall back on vulgar language” (Act II, p. 73). Ann is so deeply inscribed within the “father text” that determines her class that she is literally unable to write her own ending to her own novel. Her burning of her 622-page manuscript was the sign of surrender to linguistic disability. Ann’s missing text is of monumental importance to John because it helps to resolve a lifelong anxiety over whether he is the true son of his father. John’s suspicion about his legitimacy grew from the lack of attention paid him as a child, which led John to become the family proletarian and linguistic rebel. John is the one who imports raw language into the family and rants about his family’s treatment of their servants and how “this world is based on exploiting the labor of the poor” (Act II, p. 59). John is the one who encourages his brother Jigger’s downward mobility to move to California and build boats. John has created himself outside his class, one “who always played this foundling, this outsider, this adopted child” (Act I, p. 45), and consequently his own father sees him as a traitor and tries to buy his silence. His father seeks to make of his son’s new play manuscript yet another missing text. But John’s life has indeed been an “act,” and what he wants most of all is to be his father’s son. Indeed, the entire premise of the play is that John has come home to ask his father’s permission to stage his new play. John wants back in. He wants his native language back. So the crucially important point of Gurney’s play with respect to the issue of class, especially given the experience of Ann and John, is that one cannot escape one’s class because it is

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determined by one’s language. In naturalistic terms, John has been determined by his linguistic environment and therefore has no choice but to return home for readmission into his own class. John has made a choice to speak the word of his father, but this choice must be seen as highly determined. Again, one may explain away Gurney’s play by nominating it as a witty satire of this culture’s classism. But this would leave us with the commonplace Marxist critique of capitalism, which of course is placed in John’s mouth only to be deliberately undercut. The deeper class theme in the play dramatizes how class creates a prison-house of language from which escape is futile. This is a tragic theme. The Cocktail Hour is, however, a comedy that relies upon that oldest of stock plots from New Comedy, the discovery of a foundling to be the true heir of an aristocrat. Why Gurney consistently packages compelling tragedy within comedy may itself be a class issue worth pursuing. Note that The Cocktail Hour is a play about putting on a play, and there is no clearer sign of class than being a Broadway theatergoer. Gurney’s play is really about putting on a play suitable to a certain class that speaks only the language of comedy, so that rather than being a traitor to his class, Gurney consistently demonstrates his membership in it, something that Gurney has himself freely admitted. Comedy is of the son. It is social and says, “I want in,” whereas tragedy is of the father. It is solitary and insists, “I’ve got to be me, no matter what.” If Gurney departs the former for the latter, we may yet have of him the American version of King Lear he has been about writing his entire career. NOTES 1. Date in parentheses indicates year of first performance. 2. A.R.Gurney, Jr., “Scenes from American Life,” Four Plays (New York: Avon, 1985): Act II, pp. 47–48. Subsequent references to this play appear within the text. 3. A.R.Gurney, “Children,” Four Plays (New York: Avon, 1985): Act I, p. 80. Subsequent references to this play will appear in the text. 4. Puritanism in Old and New England (University of Chicago Press, 1955): p. 2. 5. Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy (New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1947): p. 342. 6. Four Plays (New York: Avon, 1985): Act I, p. 201. Subsequent references in text. 7. Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Indiana University Press, 1978): p. xx. 8. This scene and many others like it in Gurney also yield much to the psychoanalytic approach of Nancy Chodorow in Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (Yale University Press, 1989) and elsewhere. Chodorow explores the mother-daughter bond and explains why women “bring up sons whose sexual identity depends upon devaluing femininity…and daughters who must accept this devalued position and resign themselves to producing more men who will perpetuate the system that devalues them” (qtd. in Austin, pp. 63–4). See also Gayle Austin, Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism (University of Michigan Press, 1990) for more on Chodorow. 9. A.R.Gurney, The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays (New York: Plume, 1989): Act II, p. 79. Subsequent references in text.

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10. Note that the plot of Ann’s novel is precisely that of Aunt Martha’s story in The Dining Room, written six years earlier. For another connection, Bradley’s remonstrance to John about making “cracks” (Act I, p. 16), rehearses the identical exchange between the Father and the Boy in The Dining Room discussed above.

Where Does the WASP Keep Its Sting? The Dynamics of Anger in the Plays of A.R.Gurney ERVENE GULLEY

I know what I want. I want to walk into a room with a pretty girl on my arm, and know that she’s mine for the evening. I want to get married some day, and have great sex three times a night, and even during the day. I want to have kids, and dogs, and play sports on weekends, and be a respected leader in my community. I want to move on up and contribute something positive to my country and the world. The Old Boy This portrait, drawn with youthful directness and enthusiasm by the title character in A.R.Gurney’s 1991 play The Old Boy, sketches succinctly a territory Gurney has explored, with the incisive observation and nuanced understanding of an insider, in more than thirty plays. Clearly evident in this prep-school-boy image of a future self are the fundamental values of the WASP establishment—personal and social achievement shaped by carefully ordered codes of behavior, informed by power, and illuminated by the glow of self-satisfied superiority. Equally clearly delineated in the boy’s sketch are three other significant and ultimately problematical qualities of the WASP ideal: it is comprehensive, generic, and resolutely affirmative. Every part of his existence—from birth to death, from the bedroom to the boardroom, and from Monday to Sunday—is subsumed into the pattern. Further, the image of one successful White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is interchangeable with that of any other (wife, kids, dog, sports—and perhaps even sex? are generic). And the expectations are entirely positive (private pleasure, public respect). “I have values. So do you,” says Bunny Stuntz, in one of Gurney’s earliest plays. “We believe in things. We have families, friends, rules we can count on. We can afford to turn our backs on the—dark, seamy side of things” (The Rape of Bunny Stuntz 26). The WASP ethos, in short, is one that not only makes no provision for the uncontrollable elements of individuality but is actually threatened by them. Yet, as Gurney’s plays insist, the individual WASP is exactly that—individual—and thus potentially at odds with a system that demands, in return for its considerable benefits, the sacrifice of personal impulses outside its approved patterns. The resulting tensions are a breeding ground for anger. But anger—unpredictable, unpatterned, and unpleasant—is intrinsically at odds with and potentially destructive of the WASP ideal of positive, orderly behavior. Gurney, in a recent New York Times article on civility in contemporary American society, described and criticized his own indoctrination in the importance of avoiding conflict: “‘I was brought up to feel that argument…was wrong…. You agreed and in private said something else. I think that’s wrong, because those coals can smolder underneath; an insight may not be arrived at”

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(Grimes, V,7). In plays that again and again open those smoldering coals to the air, Gurney explores the struggle between the expression and the repression of anger. Out of his exploration come both a complex rhetoric for revealing the values and mechanisms defining WASP culture and a significant dynamic for shaping dramatic action. Anger is, of course, always in some way about power—about gaining it or preserving it. And the rhetoric of anger for Gurney’s WASPs—the verbal and behavioral modes by which anger is expressed—is fully informed by issues of power. At the extremes of the rhetorical continuum are silence and outburst, silence countenancing the system and outburst asserting the individual. More commonly, however, characters find mechanisms for anger that lie between silence and outburst, enabling them to moderate between their need for individual expression and their desire for social acceptance. Both the choices they make and the effects of these choices on others are always in part a function of their power and a reflection of their social position. Ultimately, then, the rhetorical mechanisms these characters use in dealing with anger, viewed as a whole, provide a means for understanding the workings of WASP culture. Least disruptive, and therefore most favored, is silence. For those without power, silence is the ultimate protective retreat from the risks of anger. Gurney’s first published play, Turn of the Century (1957), explores relationships in the family of an imperiously difficult dowager. Early in the play, the eldest daughter-in-law counsels her next younger counterpart to stifle her irritation at the old woman: “You’re behaving as if you just married into the Titus family. I gave up thirty years ago” (9). Later in the play, the youngest daughterin-law describes explicitly the rewards of acquiescence: “We’ve married over our heads, girls, into a family where there’s style, and love, and loyalty, and you can’t get a hold of much of that these days. Oh we’re lucky, all right” (15). For those in power, silence is a mode of choice in expressing disapproval of those who transgress. In Children (1977) an adult daughter who has missed lunch with her family to keep a rendezvous with her lover asks another family member, “Was [[Mother]—peeved at me, for ducking out?” (37). Told that her mother “never mentioned it again,” the daughter accurately concludes, “Then she was peeved” (37). Similarly, in The Dining Room (1981) a young boy is itemizing for his conservative businessman father the views of his socially progressive teacher. To each assertion, the father replies merely, “I see.” Through this mechanical repetition of a phatic phrase, the father conveys his disapproval of the boy’s statements without acknowledging their importance and without disturbing the calm of the family table. In biographical parallel, Gurney recounts his own father’s response after the Buffalo premiere of Scenes from American Life (1970) set out for sometimes unflattering public scrutiny the way of WASP life in that city. Incensed that Gurney’s play had embarrassed family and friends, his father, in Gurney’s words, “didn’t speak to me for a while because of it” (Epstein). In all these situations, silence conveys anger by treating offensive views and actions as beneath response. And the consistent subtext clearly affirms two important principles of the culture: the right of those in power to define values and the desirability of restraint and avoidance of conflict as modes of behavior. As effective as it is in asserting power and maintaining decorum, however, silence meets little to none of the need for individual emotional release that shapes anger. Not surprisingly, then, the most frequent and varied modes in the WASP rhetoric of anger are those that

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allow it some release while controlling its destructive extremes. The behaviors that demonstrate this emotional compromise, including substitution, projection, and displacement, reflect in their broad and sometimes subtle variations the impulse to individual expression they are intended to accommodate. All have as common pattern, however, a self-protective shift in where the anger is focused or how it is articulated. In the dynamic of Gurney’s drama, these indirect or evasive rhetorical modes chosen by the characters are contextualized by circumstances that enable the audience to correct for the indirection or evasion, generating a subtext that clarifies both the nature of the anger itself and the nature of the mechanisms used to accommodate it in the society. “In the language of lockjaw,”observes critic David Richards, “subtext is all” (H5). Commonly, the objects or metaphors characters employ in diverting or filtering their anger are among the tangible rewards of life in the WASP culture—markers, therefore, of the very source of their conflict and of the anger it engenders. In Scenes from American Life, for example, Helen and John argue about tennis while sitting with their young nephew watching his parents play a match. That they are not really talking about tennis, however, is implicit from the outset, and subtext nearly becomes text as Helen explains to her nephew why his parents are winning: “There. Mummy won that point. And I’ll tell you why. When she went to the net, Daddy stayed with her. They stayed parallel all the way. If your Uncle John would stay parallel with me…” (13). Public arguments between spouses are bad form, but public discussions of tennis are appropriate. And because neither anger nor propriety can be ignored, Helen dresses her naked resentment of John in the tennis whites of commentary on the game. When John rises to protest a bad call; Helen continues her metaphorical service: Your uncle John is wrong, Timmy. The referee is always right. Now notice Mummy. She is not complaining. She is going right on with the game, even though she may be very unhappy inside. That’s what it means to be a good sport. That’s what life is all about (13). The attempt here is to civilize anger by restraining it in a socially acceptable metaphor. And though the disguise is quite clearly transparent, the gloss of propriety keeps faith with WASP values. Paralleling the restraining metaphor are a variety of other rhetorical modes for expressing anger, all intended by the characters to cloak anger safely, all serving for the audience as a means of revealing anger more fully. When the absent father in What I Did Last Summer (1983) recommends measures to deal with his troublesome son, his anger at the rebellious boy clearly, at least to us, echoes the unresolved anger from his own youth: “…Sounds to me as if the boy should go right off to boarding school. Sounds as if he’s lost his bearings. I was sent to Saint Luke’s when I was fifteen, and it shaped me right up. Send him away” (40). When the eldest son in Children complains at length about a misplaced can of oil, which he needs for the roller to smooth the tennis court, which he needs as a forum to show his superiority, he is actually expressing his anger at the breakdown of his familial and social worlds, though he is not able to stand far enough back from himself for such a vision to clear. A much more complex mode of safe anger is that shown by Pokey, the younger son in Children. Returning to the family’s summer home in apparent response to his mother’s

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intention to remarry (though he makes no acknowledgment of this), he unsettles the family by distributing his dead father’s belongings to the other siblings and by insisting on the sale of the family’s summer home. His refusal to join in family activities (underscored by his complete absence from the stage, except for a late and brief apparition in shadow behind a screen) and his refusal to speak about the planned marriage are in the familiar mode of anger through silence. His emphasis on his dead father’s possessions is in the equally familiar pattern of focusing anger on particular objects. But Pokey’s actions go beyond mere expression of his own feelings. In distributing the father’s possessions to the other children and in demanding their consent to the sale of the house, Pokey manipulates them to express his anger. His absence from the stage, and his failure to confide in the other characters, however, withholds from the audience for most of the play the full understanding of his motives. Consequently, our attention remains focused on the mechanisms by which anger is expressed. We see a character using the system to amplify his power, turning the very values that define WASP culture—family loyalty, obedience to rules, suppression of conflict —against the people who live by them, showing contempt simultaneously for both the individuals and the social structure that supports them. The root of Pokey’s anger turns out to be his childhood assumption that his mother was having an affair and that knowledge of this drove his father to suicide. That he was mistaken, and eventually learns so, ultimately matters little. The effects of his anger working through the family have left everyone shattered: his mother has sacrificed her future happiness by calling off her marriage, his sister has lost the man she was planning to marry, and Pokey himself has been physically assaulted by his brother. He now is sadly, but firmly banished from the family by his mother and is in danger of losing his wife. That truth lies revealed in the rubble is, in the ideal, a good thing, but the value of the revelation is at least temporarily overweighed by the cost at which it has been purchased. And the moving finger of Gurney’s dramatic design charges that cost in large part to a system that over-pressurizes anger by denying it release. One of the ironies reflected in the dynamics of events in Children is the way in which the repression of anger ultimately triggers the very outbursts it seeks to control. To be sure, not all direct expressions of anger are forbidden in WASP culture. For those in authority, such as parents and community leaders, verbal assault seems a legitimate means of enforcing conformity to proper behavior. A dancing master publicly humiliates a young boy who tries to leave class, shouting at him, ordering him to bow, then forcing him to dance with the master as his partner. A grandfather “cures” his grandson of stammering by shouting at him (Scenes from American Life). A father, hearing his adult son use the word “balls,” delivers a diatribe on the attempted destruction of civilization by “foul-minded and resentful people,” then stalks from the room (The Cocktail Hour). Another father, incensed that his son has brought “three naked Negroes and a Jewess” to the club swimming pool, calls for that son to be blackballed “permanently and forever” (The Middle Ages). Outbursts such as these have the status of righteous indignation conserving the system and its power relationships. For those not in power, however, outbursts of anger are not privileged; rather, they signal conflict with the system itself. Minor outbursts are not uncommon among Gurney ’s characters, and collectively they suggest the pervasive tensions under the surface calm of WASP life. The young boy who tries to sneak out of dancing class, the teenager who

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says “shit” in his mother’s hearing, the girl who sneers at the protocols for her coming-out party, and the woman who imagines aloud the pleasure of sneaking up on “old Mrs. Stockwell” and pushing her into the pool—all are expressing individual resentment of the system’s behavioral codes. But these outbursts are momentary and particularized, risking only brief or limited loss of favor within the sy stem. Yet these small outbursts and the responses to them do point up the possibility of more serious explosions if pressures become great enough. The clearest marker of family disintegration in Children is the mother’s self-liberating outburst near the end of the play. Strained by a lifetime of moderating family tensions into a smooth facade of unity and propriety, and pushed to breaking by the openly rebellious and contentious behavior of her adult children, she explodes: I. AM. THROUGH. Through with this house, through with the children, through with the WHOLE. DAMN. THING. I am free and clear, as of right now… It’s yours, and anyone else’s who wants to pay the taxes, and plant the flowers, and fix the roof, and order the meals, and make the gravy, and keep things UP! I’ve had it! Count me permanently OUT!… If someone gets sick, I don’t want to hear! If someone loses a tooth, or wins a prize, or needs a dress, or wants a toy, I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to care! I won’t have anyone’s telephone number, and no one will have mine. I’m unlisted, as of now. If you find me out, I won’t be there. I’m gone, I’m finished, I’m through (48– 49). The immediate trigger for this outburst, only part of which is quoted here, is irritation at her elder son, but the anger is directed at the whole of the system that has defined her life. The assertion of individual freedom, the rejection of generic behavioral codes, and the free expression of anger are conjoint. In the event, however, this liberation through anger is incomplete—undone by the arrival of the elder son, bloody from an attack on his younger brother. Aware of the need to moderate conflict and restrain anger among her children, the mother seems to abandon her claims to individual fulfillment, resuming the structure and responsibilities of her previous role. But anger has brought change. She sees both herself and her children more accurately. Her choice of roles is exactly that—her choice, and when she tells her younger son he is no longer welcome at home, her concern is expressed in terms of his own welfare, not preservation of the system: “I don’t think our family is good for you any more. I think all these years you’ve been at least trying to grow up, and now the best thing I can do is send you on your way” (52). In other plays, the dynamic of confrontation with anger is shaped from different sources through different lines to different outcomes. While in prep school, the Old Boy with whose description of the good life we began this essay, angrily pressures a friend to deny his homosexuality and live a proper WASP life. Years later, when the friend’s broken marriage and suicide bring home the costs of that pressure, the Old Boy uses the occasion of a speech at the prep school to arraign himself and the culture that created him for the inhumanity of its values—for the denial of love and tolerance. The outburst here is more public and more

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costly than that of the mother in Children, but it is ultimately more comprehensive and liberating. Most comprehensive, public, and, one hopes, liberating of all is the open resolution of anger through art. In What I Did Last Summer, a teenage boy rebels against constricting WASP ways by spending most of his summer working with an ex-debutante, social-dropout artist known as the Pig Woman. Forced to choose at summer’s end between the individual freedom represented by the Pig Woman and the socially secure world of his family, he reluctantly says farewell to her and climbs into the family car. Turning to the audience, and speaking out of his future, he says: “So I tried photography in boarding school. And took up writing in college. And finally, last summer, I wrote this play” (62). Works Cited Epstein, Hap. “In the WASP’s nest with A.R. Gurney.” Washington Times, August 29,1989. Grimes, William. “Have a #%!&$! Day.” New York Times, October 17, 1993: V1,7. Gurney, A.R. Children. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1977. ——.The Cocktail Hour. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989. ——.The Dining Room. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982. ——.The Middle Ages. New York: Dramatists Play Service 1978. ——.The Old Boy. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1992. ——.Scenes from American Life. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1970. ——.Turn of the Century. in The Best Short Plays of 1957–1958. Ed. Margaret Mayorga. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. ——.What I Did Last Summer. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1983. Richards, David. “In the Language of Lockjaw, Subtext Is All.” New York Times, May 19, 1991, H5, 28.

The Dining Room: A Tocquevillian Take on the Decline of WASP Culture BRUCE McCONACHIE

“Nonprofits Love Dining Room” hummed Variety in April of 1984. The arbiter of show biz economics touted a “whopping forty-three productions” of Gurney’s social comedy since its opening in February 1982; it estimated the playwrighf ’s income from these performances at between two and three hundred thousand dollars. “It’s hard to find a resident theatre that hasn’t presented The Dining Room” Variety continued. These included the McCarter Theatre, Syracuse Stage, the Cleveland Playhouse, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, the Arizona Theatre Company, the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, the Goodman, the Kennedy Center, the Public Theatre in Pittsburgh, the Philadelphia Drama Guild, the Alley Theatre, and the Old Globe in San Diego. The Dining Room proved even more popular in the hinterlands than it had in New York City, where it ran off-Broadway for eighteen months at the Playwrights Horizons Theatre (Hummler, 223). The critics’ response to Gurney’s play suggests that audiences in New York and throughout the country enjoyed what they believed was a warmhearted evocation of the decline of WASP culture, deftly characterizing its strengths as well as its foibles and failings. Echoing other reviewers, one Boston critic termed the effect of the play like “a tour through a museum…, guided by a knowledgable, witty, mildly amused and very perceptive curator” (Lehman, 25). “Dining Room is pure but incisive Americana,” wrote a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, “an anthropological study of the style and rituals of that maligned, misunderstood ethnic majority, the welloff” (Nachman, 34). A local critic in Westport, Connecticut dubbed Gurney ’s depiction of WASP ethnicity “stingingly on-target,” but added that the play “emerges as affectionate ribbing nonetheless” (Killen, 18). In a similar vein, Dan Isaac in Other Stages noted the comedy’s “political and anthropological” focus on “the American upper-class as a delinquent, dying culture,” but concluded that “The Dining Room will probably enter the permanent repertory and join Our Town and Ah, Wilderness! as a model of vintage Americana” (2).1 Gurney disagreed that he intended his play as a Chekhovian swan song for American aristocracy. In an interview two months after the New York opening of The Dining Room, he claimed that the critics had largely missed the point: Essentially, it’s a Marxist-feminist conflict. Things really start happening when the women start saying “no.” Up until that time they are servants, or they preside over the servants and the family. But when they change, everything else changes too. The

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men remain pretty much the same over the years, but the women show the effects of economic and social change. (Leahey, 3) Gurney’s comments suggest that conflicts of class and gender structure the architecture of his Dining Room—even that WASP women emerge as a possible vanguard for progressive change during the course of the action. But does this occur in the play? And if it does, is Gurney’s Marxistfeminist critique prominent enough in the rhetoric of the action to call forth spectator identification and affirmation? To approach the likely rhetorical positionings of audiences for The Dining Room, we need to take a closer look at the structuring of history in Gurney ’s comedy and the roles played by gender and class in his conception of historical change. From this perspective, Gurney’s description of the play as a “Marxist-feminist conflict” carries little validity. Jibes at American aristocrats do occur, but they are folded into an explanation of the demise of WASP culture close to that of E. Digby Baltzell, a prominent sociologist of the American upper class. Gurney/Baltzell’s Tocquevillian framework of history effectively diffused the beginnings of a radical critique in The Dining Room and hence the potential for a progressive response from Gurney’s audiences. The similarities between Gurney’s and Baltzell’s views concerning upperclass aristocrats and historical change are not accidental. Both came from elite WASP backgrounds and lived to regret their culture’s loss of influence and prestige. Only sixteen years younger than the sociologist, Gurney grew up in what he has termed the “privileged affluence” of an Establishment family in Buffalo, New York. Like Baltzell, the playwright attended St. Paul’s prep school in New England and graduated from an Ivy League college. Both pursued primarily academic careers. And both share a sense of loss, even betrayal, about the decline of WASP culture. In 1982, Gurney admitted that he is obsessed with the contrast between the world and the values I was immersed in when I was young and the nature of the contemporary world. The kind of protected, genteel, in many ways warm, civilized, and fundamentally innocent world in which I was nurtured didn’t seem in any way to prepare me for the late twentieth century. I tend to write about people who are operating under these old assumptions, but are confronting an entirely different system of values. (Bennetts, 5) These sentiments already modify, if they do not openly contradict, Gurney’s assertion that progressive politics undergird The Dining Room. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964) established Baltzell as the leading interpreter of the American WASP. According to the sociologist, his landmark study was “inspired by [Alexis de] Tocqueville’s classic analysis of the Old Regime and the French Revolution, which showed how violent revolution came to France because the nobility degenerated into a caste when it refused to assimilate new men of power and affluence—the bourgeoisie” (1991, 30). In a quotation that echoes throughout Baltzell’s scholarship, the nineteenth-century Frenchman wrote that “an aristocracy in all its vigor not only carries on the affairs of a country, but directs public opinion, gives a tone to literature, and the stamp of authority to ideas” (Baltzell, 1991, 30). From Baltzell’s point

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of view, the white, AngloSaxon, Protestant elite—for which he coined the acronym “WASP”—had, like the French aristocracy, turned its back on the burdens of authority and become a privileged caste rather than a ruling class. Their decline, together with increasing social disorder, was the inevitable result. Baitzell’s Tocquevillian response to the waning power of the WASP Establishment countered Marxian analyses of class and caste in America offered by C.Wright Mills and others in the mid- 1950s and early ’60s. In The Power Elite, Mills described an upper class relatively open to newcomers and new ideas and exerting nearly unchallenged control over American society. The difference between Baltzell and Mills—a distinction central to Gurney’s take on the decline of WASP power—hinged on their different valuations of upper-class hegemony. As sociologist Howard Schneiderman explains, whereas Marxists see hegemony as a social evil, Baltzell, following Tocqueville, sees it as necessary to the well-being of society. Hegemonic establishments give coherence to the social spheres of greatest contest. They don’t eliminate conflict, but prevent it from ripping society apart (xxii). For Baltzell, the lure of a classless society with equal social and economic opportunity favored by Mills was a chimera that would lead to disorder and bloodshed. Baltzell urged that opportunity be made more equal, but assumed that class hierarchy was a necessary prerequisite for social order and gradual change. From this conservative orientation to social stratification, Baltzell traced the rise and decline of the American Protestant Establishment and scolded his class for abandoning its traditional values and commitments. In Baltzell’s history of WASPdom, most elite families emerged around the time of the Civil War, their power based on the economic success of the family firm. The second generation of WASP leaders consolidated the gains of the first through private schools, intraclass marriage, exclusive clubs, business sinecures, and political influence. By the third generation, however, historical changes were undermining the hegemony of WASP culture and economic power. Family firms, a significant source of paternal authority in elite households, folded or merged with larger corporations. Talented members of minority groups, especially Jews, gained positions of business leadership and forced open previously closed doors to Ivy League schools and exclusive clubs. Many WASPs who came of age in the 1930s (Baltzell’s own generation) expected to inherit the world of their fathers but could no longer support the servants, the family estates, and the social position of their tradition. By the 1960s, noted Baltzell, the decay of WASP culture was apparent on a number of fronts: Once-proud families measured their status by money and success, not lineage; American aristocrats were abandoning their traditional inner-direction and becoming “other-directed,” worrying about their social images; personal morality was in decline as WASPs no longer policed their own social relationships, and the Protestant Establishmnent, already atomized economically and socially, also lost its political coherence and clout. For Baltzell, the decline of WASP authority led to social chaos. In 1988, he wrote that in Philadelphia, In 1938 a WASP business class dominated the city, while members of ethnic and racial minorities were more or less second-class and powerless citizens. Today,

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nobody—no social group or class—dominates the city. As all values are now equal, no values have any real authority. Thus social conflict and disorder reign (1991,35). Clearly, Baltzell would trade the more egalitarian world for the more ordered world of 1938.2 Does Gurney encourage his spectators to opt for a similar tradeoff in The Dining Room? Despite a playful irony that generally keeps political engagement at a distance, the play’s construction of the historical descent of WASP culture does reinforce nostalgia for the past hegemony of the Protestant Establishment. Although Gurney’s many short scenes do not occur in chronological order, he charts the demise of the WASPs through clearly marked, successive generations, a pattern of generational change that follows the rough outline of Baltzell’s history. And like the sociologist, Gurney locates the main cause of their decline in distant historical forces and the internal dynamics of WASP culture and society, not in conflicts over gender roles or with other social groups. Gurney’s first generation, two aging patriarchs in separate scenes, show the Protestant Establishment at its best. In the first episode, a grandson must come before a likeable curmudgeon to ask him for money for schooling and travel. Grandfather teases the adolescent about not making it on his own as he had to do: “Don’t you want to be selfmade? Or do you want other people to make you? Hmmmm?” (323). In the second, an old man instructs his eldest son on the plans for his funeral, specifying the details of the organ music in the church and the wording of his obituary. The latter centers on his family, his “business career” and his “civic commitments,” including chairman of “the symphony drive” (347). Both episodes applaud the traditional WASP virtues of independence, restraint, civicmindedness, optimism, and ironic good humor. But as the second scene emphasizes, these men of character and authority from the first generation are dying out. In a line that might have been written by Baltzell, the grandfather from the first scene asks his grandson to consider who might be sitting in the patriarch’s dining room chair when he and his siblings return from Europe: “I’ll tell you who’ll be sitting right in that chair. Some Irish fella, some Jewish gentleman is going to be sitting right at this table” (324). Despite their premonitions, first-generation patriarchs financed the softer lives of their third-generation grandchildren, underwriting—Gurney would have us believe—the gradual demise of their dominance. Gurney presents several of his second-generation WASPs as fussbudgets, philanderers, and snobs. Obsessed with the privileges of their caste, they are more concerned with good manners, the appearance of morality, and their elite status than with paternal authority or civic leadership. The first upbraids his son at breakfast for making “wisecracks” and for agreeing with his teacher, who believes the government ought to help poor people during the Depression. Father uses the rituals of the breakfast table, however, to bring junior into line. In one second-generation episode, the long arm of the family firm and the small world of elite society keep a man and a woman from having an extramarital affair with each other. This richly ironic scene has both adults urging repression on their children during a birthday party as they struggle to keep their hands off each other. Another episode centers on a clash of wills between a second-generation mother and her daughter. Attempting to shoehorn the girl into dancing school and coming-out parties, the conventional path to WASP

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marriage, the mother instead sparks her daughter’s rebellion. Gurney primarily encourages his audience to laugh at these second-generation types for their selfishness and rigidity. Adopting the Tocquevillian values of Baltzell, Gurney gently criticizes these WASPs for enhancing their status at the expense of their moral leadership. One second-generation character, however, triumphs over her fourth-generation nephew. Tony is snapping pictures of Aunt Harriet’s Irish table linen, silverware, bone china, and Steuben glass for a classroom anthropology project on the “eating habits” of a “vanishing culture,” “the WASPs” (338). When the grand dame of the Establishment hears his intentions, she kicks him out of her dining room and delivers the punch line of the scene —arguably the punch line of the play: Vanishing culture, my eye! I forbid you to mention my name in the classroom! Or show one glimpse of my personal property! And you can tell that professor of yours, I’ve a good mind to drive up to Amherst, with this pistol-handled butter knife on the seat beside me, and cut off his anthropological balls! (338). Aunt Harriet’s rousing rhetoric probably animated many in the audience to cheer her on through appreciative laughter. The doienne may be a cultural dinosaur, Gurney seems to be saying, but better to preserve a caste than kill off a culture. WASP hegemony, though antedeluvian, can still be feisty and fun! Gurney’s third generation, however, has lost its will and its way. Perhaps because this is the playwright’s own generation, scenes centered on these characters dominate the play. Of the roughly nineteen episodes in The Dining Room, fourteen involve characters from the third generation. Like those of Baltzell’s set who grew up in the 1930s (and of Gurney’s a bit later), the WASPs from this era have lost the privilege and power that came with large estates, family firms, and exclusive schools and clubs. Would-be patriarchs from this generation flounder in hysteria, rebellion, shame, and alcoholism. In one farcical scene, Gurney explores the demise of the WASP ethic of masculine honor when a head of his household overreacts to the news that his brother has been accused of homosexuality at “his club.” Another features an architect psychologically tormented by his father’s treatment of him at the dinner table. When asked by a client about possible uses for dining rooms in today’s world, the architect snaps, “It’s time to get rid of this room” (316). In pointed contrast to the earlier episode between the almost-adulterers at the birthday party, two third-generation characters have just entered the dining room from the bedroom when they are discovered by the woman’s son arriving home from college. “Uncle Gordon,” his authority in shreds, flees in embarrassment from the knowing stare of the son. Perhaps the most poignant scene in the play centers on a third-generation alcoholic father and his despairing daughter. In the course of their conversation, Dad learns that Meggie has gotten a divorce, wants to move back home with the kids, is seeing a married man, and has been involved in a lesbian relationship. Dad’s only response to these mounting revelations is to increase his intake of alcohol and deliver advice about character and making an effort; he’s too sodden and comfortable to offer genuine help. Meggie longs for the happy security of her childhood, but both father and daughter realize it is gone forever. The scene comes the closest in the play to evoking the immense distance between the idyllic world of Gurney’s

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WASP past—“protected, genteel, in many ways warm, civilized and fundamentally innocent”—and the moral chaos of the present. Without WASP hegemony to hold it together, American society has fallen apart, and the WASPs themselves are among the walking wounded. Gurney laces his nostalgia with ironic humor, in proper WASP fashion, but it remains nostalgia nonetheless. Most of Gurney’s fourth-generation characters ignore or reject the mandates of WASP culture. For them, the traditional functions of the dining room are superfluous. Two teenage girls use the room to knock down some stolen drinks before their boyfriends come over with “pot.” A former stockbroker turned carpenter, having consciously rejected the lure of WASP power, now repairs the symbol of that culture, the dining room table, and falls in love with a WASP divorcee. A young married woman sets up her typewriter on the table to finish her M.A. thesis. In these scenes, the glue holding together the traditional Protestant Establishment—like the glue no longer binding the table in the carpenter-divorcee scene —has come unstuck. Baltzell noted that the “central values” of a previously WASP neighborhood in Philadelphia after 1960 were becoming “increasingly egalitarian, competitive, and extremely atomizing” (1991, 42). The same could be said of the values of most of Gurney’s fourth-generation characters. Nearly indistinguishable from other upper-middle-class Americans, they live their lives with little or no regard to their cultural past. One critic summed up the generational history of Gurney’s WASPs with this statement: In the end, [their world] seems to be careening into sad chaos, its young people fleeing to alcohol and drugs, its elder citizens obsessed with the past and keeping up appearances that the rest of the world finds merely quaint. (O’Connor, C4) “Sad chaos” does indeed permeate the lives of his third-generation characters, the main focus of the comedy, but the playwright seems more optimistic about the next generation if only because most of them no longer labor under the expectations of the past. In this sense, Gurney is somewhat less pessimistic about the moral order of American society in the early 1980s than Baltzell. Overall, however, the Tocquevillian decline of the American aristocracy from authoritative class, to privileged caste, to superfluous cluster is as apparent in The Dining Room as it is in Baltzell’s sociology. Within such a framework, conflict centering on class and gender can have only peripheral importance. An early scene in Act One, for instance, has an Irish maid telling the little boy she tends that she is giving up domestic service. And the first act ends with Establishment ladies abandoning the traditional rituals of Thanksgiving dinner and exiting into the kitchen to help the maid with the dishes. These are minor acts of rebellion, however; no maid openly questions the legitimacy of the class system and no WASP wife demands a chair in the boardroom of the family firm. Such incidents exemplify the frustrations of WASP hegemony but do not challenge its power to define and enforce class and gender relations. Indeed, the final gesture of the play invites the audience to completely identify with a conflictless vision of past WASP domination. A middle-aged Establishment woman, probably third-generation, speaks at length of a “recurrent dream” in which she gives the “perfect party.” She would use “Grand-mother’s silver, before it was stolen,” invite “all of our favorite people,” including “the man who fixes our Toyota,” and hire “a first-rate cook

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in the kitchen, and two maids to serve, and everyone would get along famously!” (351). Gurney seems to have intended that his spectators take this utopian vision of classless harmony semi-ironically. The same woman had just tried to play Lady Bountiful with the maid, receiving a stiff response for her hug and extra pay. But an ironic response to her speech is undercut by the beauty of the table setting in candlelight and the ensuing action, in which wine is poured, other cast members are “talking animatedly, having a wonderful time,” and a male host proposes a toast to “all of us” (351). Because of the maid’s earlier exit, “all of us” on stage are only upper-class WASPs. Gurney has the lights fade to black on this final tableau. It may be that Gurney wants his audience to question the traditional class and gender roles that make such a celebration possible—even to gag at the presumption that such historic inequalities can be elided by an elite white male’s attempt at inclusivity —but the rhetoric of the final image reduces these concerns to quibbles. The candlelit tableau evokes bittersweet nostalgia, not Brechtian distancing. The shimmering vision at the end of the play caps an evening in which the spectators have been encouraged to view the dining room itself as the primary symbol of the comforting solidity of a vanished WASP past. Gurney’s script calls for “a lovely, burnished, shining dining room table” with six chairs on a “hardwood floor” with a”good, warm oriental rug” and flanked by a “swinging door” on one side and an “archway” on the other, the setting masked so as to appear floating in a “limbo” (297). With six actors playing over fifty characters in the comedy, the table itself became “the omnipresent dramatic anchor” for one reviewer (O’Connor, C4). Another remarked that the room for a Boston production reminded him of houses “built in those pre-income tax years when there still really was an upper middle class” (Lehman, 25). The critic for a McCarter Theatre revival of the play in 1984 was the most explicit about the setting’s effect. For Frank Occhiogrosso, the image of the dining room was “a source of stability and permanence…in a world of flux.” Characters change and their relationships alter, he noted, but this movement occurs “within an ambience that does not move, that stays the same. This is a fact which, for the characters, is sometimes appreciated, sometimes lamented, sometimes unnoticed. It is always observable by the audience.” The “order and stability” of the dining room, he concluded, offers “an antidote to our current, rootless lives” (17). To judge from these reviewers, The Dining Room in production played the comicpathetic lives of present WASPs off against an idealized image of order and harmony from the WASP past. In effect, the setting massively reinforced Gurney’s narrative about the Tocquevillian decay in the moral authority of his generations. The similarities between Gurney’s and Baltzell’s understanding of WASP decline explain much of the rhetorical coherence of the play, but they do not altogether account for its popularity. Why, after all, would 1982 American audiences, most of whose heritage was not exclusively white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant, identify with the Host’s toast to “all of us”? Although limitations of space prevent a full explanation, I’d like to conclude with a brief overview of changes in American ethnicity that made such identification possible. Interestingly, the results of these alterations for the ethnicity of American theatre audiences accord with their appreciation of the Tocquevillian rhetoric of the play. After 1960, American ethnicity began to undergo some surprising transformations. Instead of ethnic identity being anchored in working-class social structures, such as churches and clubs, “symbolic ethnicity” gradually took its place among European ethnic groups.

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According to sociologist Richard D.Alba, symbolic ethnicity involves “the desire to retain a sense of being ethnic, but without any deep commitment to ethnic ties or behaviors” (306). Unlike earlier forms of ethnicity, identification with the symbolic type tends to rise with the educational level of participants and often finds expression in their leisure activities, such as cooking and dancing. Alba also found that many Americans with ancestors from Ireland, Poland, England, Italy, and other European countries were no longer identifying themselves by their country of origin but saw themselves in more general terms as “European Americans.” Pan-European ethnicity emerged in the 1960s as a response to AfricanAmerican activism and increased with the influx of Asian and Hispanic immigrants in the’70s and’80s. Consequently, many white Americans of European ancestry both identify themselves symbolically as “ethnics” and also believe they have much in common with other ethnic groups from Europe. White Americans of European ancestry constitute the overwhelming majority of spectators at professional theatres in the United States Given the changes in ethnic identification since the 1960s, these theatregoers would have welcomed the representation of a WASP dinner party on stage, even though many of their ancestors only a generation before would probably have felt excluded from the ritual. Alba’s research suggests that the ethnic homogenization of the white American upper class has produced a new theatre audience, one more open to exploring such symbols of ethnicity as WASP dining rooms. In particular, Alba notes that ethnic symbols tend to circulate as “cultural capital,” used by European Americans in “the complex signaling by which individuals establish relations with one another” (308). “To fulfill this function,” Alba continues, ethnic identities need not occupy more than a small portion of the identity“masks” individuals present to others, and need not be deeply felt. Moreover,it is apparent from our survey that ethnic identities can be used to establisha degree of intimacy with individuals of other ethnic backgrounds; a sharedethnicity is not required (308).

From this perspective, most playgoers could see in WASP culture a synecdoche for the European experience of their own family. And after the show, The Dining Room could continue to provide an inducement for everyone in the theatre party to discuss their own ethnic backgrounds. Nonetheless, Gurney’s play might very well have marginalized some minorities in the audience. “All of us” in 1982 included upper-class “European American” whites, but pointedly excluded African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. NOTES Editor’s note: This essay, composed originally for this volume, has appeared in a slightly different version in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. I am grateful to Dr. Vera Mowry Roberts, editor of JADT, for allowing me to bring it home. 1. See also the reviews by Frank, Kelly, O’Connor, and Viagas, who express similar sentiments.

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2. Other sociologists and historians have also commented extensively on WASP culture and its decline. See, for example, Fussell and Schrag. Robertiello and Hoguet critique the psychosocial dynamics of WASP culture and its largely negative effects on American society.

Works Cited Alba, Richard. Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990. Baltzell, E.Digby. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. New York: Random House, 1964. ——.The Protestatit Establishment Revisited. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991. Bennetts, Leslie. “His Obsession Is a Culture in Decline.” New York Times, May 30, 1982, 4–5. Frank. Leah D. [Review of The Dining Room]. New York Times, November 13, 1983, [n.p.]. Fussell, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York: Summit Books, 1983. Gurney, A.R. The Dining Room. Plays from the Contemporary American Theater. Ed. Brooks McNamara. New York: NAL, 1988, 293–351. Hummler, Richard. “Nonprofits Love Dining Room : 43 Editions for Gurney Play.” Variety, April 18, 1984, 223. Isaac, Dan. [Review of The Dining Room] Other Stages, June 3, 1982, 2. Kelly, Kevin. [Review of The Dining Room] Boston Globe, Dec. 4, 1982, [n.p.]. Killen, Tom. “WASPs Get Stung at Westport Playhouse.” Westport News, August 24, 1983, 18. Leahey, Mimi. “A. R. Gurney: Serious at Last.” Other Stages, April 8, 1982, 3. Lehman, Jon. [Review of The Dining Room] The Patriot Ledger, Dec. 4, 1982, 25. Nachman, Gerald. [Review of The Dining Room] San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 1982, 34. O’Connor, John J. [Review of the WNET production of The Dining Room aired in October 1984] New York Times, Oct. 19, 1984, C4. Occhiogrosso, Frank. [Review of The Dining Room] Stages, May 1984, 17. Robertiello, Richard C., and Diana Hoguet. The WASP Mystique. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1987. Schneiderman, Howard G. “Introduction.” The Protestant Establishment Revisited. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991, ix-xxxii. Schrag, Peter. The Decline of the WASP. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971. Viagas, Robert. [Review of The Dining Room] Fairpress, August 24, 1983, C-5.

110

What I Did Last Summer: Realizing One’s Potential LAURA MILLER

With his play What I Did Last Summer, A.R.Gurney relates a universal tale and theme while focusing on one family during the summer of 1945 in a resort spot on the Canadian side of Lake Erie. As he describes a young boy coming of age, there is much that is autobiographical in the piece. While confining himself to a specific example, Gurney is able to make sweeping comments about general truths. He alluded to this literary phenomenon in interviews with both Edwin Wilson and myself: “Start with a type and you get nothing. Start with an individual and you get a type. By being specific you can be universal” (personal interview Feb 11, 1992). The play centers on fourteen-year-old Charlie and his relationships with his mother Grace; his nineteen-year-old sister, Elsie; his fourteen-year-old friend, Bonny; his sixteenyear-old Canadian friend, Ted; and the local outcast, the “Pig Woman,” Anna, who employs him and attempts to help him find his potential by giving him art lessons. Although the play is set in the summer of 1945, Charlie often speaks from the perspective of memory, which places the entire work within the frame of a flashback. Other characters also break the fourth wall and address the audience, commenting on the action and the structure of the play itself at various moments throughout the piece. During the course of the play, Charlie fights with his family, is molded by Anna, and discovers some truths about life and about himself. Subplots include his mother’s affair, sister’s phobia about driving and her breaking free from this self-inflicted restriction, Bonny’s growth and shifting loyalties as she sees beyond surface appearances, and Ted’s plight as a “Canuck” in a world where “American” is considered superior and his friend Charlie is from the upper class. Anna is the only character never to directly address the audience, and she is the only one who never claims the play is, or should be, about her own situation. Gurney thus emphasizes her separateness as a nonconformist Native American while also pointing up her special role in the play as the true protagonist who pushes the action forward. Thus in many ways, though she never claims the honor, the play is about Anna as much as it is about Charlie, who would seem to be the protagonist from the “I” of the play ’s title and the focus on him as the main narrator. Anna glories in her differentness as she observes the corrupting values, hypocrisy, and foolish mores of the American summer residents. She can be gruff and prickly, but these are defensive behaviors she has adapted after living for many years labeled as the village

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eccentric. She is the one who raises the issue of realizing one’s potential; this issue is the throughline of development for all of the characters. In Bellah et al.’s Habits of the Heart—a book dealing with WASP values—a “human potential therapist” identified only as “Preston” is quoted as saying: The image of a healthy person is a plant, and that you never stop growing. Most of us don’t need tomato stakes. We’re basically good, and so with enough sunshine and water, we’ll grow beautifully. You can grow in any direction and that adds to the variety of the world. That goes counter to the whole puritanical side of America, that there’s one way of life and we’re gonna fit you into it. (123, 126) Anna, as mentor to the young Charlie, challenges him to question all assumptions. She uses as a springboard Charlie’s middle-class acceptance of grass lawns as the norm. He tries to talk her into giving him work, suggesting the first thing that comes to mind: “I can cut your grass” (154)1. It becomes apparent that he hasn’t been observant, as Anna retorts “What grass? Do you see any grass around here?…The very idea galls me Think about grass. Have you ever thought about it?” Of course he hasn’t, so she urges him to “Think. Question your assumptions. Think of what grass requires” (154). Anna then proceeds to give Charlie both a history of grass—with its ties to the snobbish English aristocracy—and a botany lesson on the water, topsoil, and pampering that lawn maintenance demands. Anna instructs Charlie concerning the mixed blessing and stigma of being “different” (156) and the inherent qualities that encompass value and worth as they are both related to and divorced from money (157–8,166, 176, 183–5, 193). She urges him to seek patterns and shapes and to envision a better world (159). She points out to him that all great teachers and promoters of improvement are dangerous, as she foreshadows her own destruction, grouping herself with the great instructors Socrates and Christ (172). With Anna’s encouragement, Charlie challenges the WASP status quo of his upbringing and considers making his own choices. And as Anna reminds us all in the conclusion to Act I, “at your age, all choices are important. They tell you who you are” (180). It is additionally significant that Anna’s poet of choice is William Butler Yeats (180), a visionary who advocated the use and exploration of poetic images. He was interested in his Irish pagan roots and was an Irish nationalist politician. Anna’s pride in her Native American ancestry and her own rebellion against society tie in with iconoclasm as well as with Yeats’s hatred of the middle class and those who wanted conventional success. Anna finds inspiration in Yeats because he, too, was concerned with moral effects and was less interested in the practicalities of life. This raises the question of what choices are made in the play and who, in fact, actually makes them. Charlie still depends on his parents and thus does not have the power to make significant choices at this time. By contrast, when Grace was faced with choosing “the other road” in her youth, she was older than Charlie and in a better position to rebel successfully though she failed to do so. There is a vast difference between an eighteen-year-old woman and a fourteen-year-old boy. Act II opens with a counterpoint between Anna’s world and that of Charlie’s family and their WASP high society, as two scenes play simultaneously. Audiences and readers are

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challenged to consider whether boys like Charlie should be tamed by being shipped off to boarding school—the WASP solution, as it were—or allowed to cultivate themselves, or even grow wild, under the tutelage of the likes of Anna (182–4). Charlie is not “wild,” merely outspoken and questing for a meaning to life. The question of whether or not parents and structured WASP institutions can recognize and encourage real talent in their children is raised (191). Charlie accedes to his mother’s demands and Anna’s encouragement that he dress up for a high-society party, but when Grace pushes her luck by rearranging his sloppy tie, he rebels, metaphorically declaring “you’re strangling me!” (187). Charlie presses further and repeatedly uses foul language, whereupon Grace slaps him. Charlie strips off all the requisite party attire and runs naked down to the lake to “get clean, really clean, CLEAN” (187). He then goes to Anna’s without having sampled the party, as she had encouraged him to do in order to better see the negative side of WASPdom. This leads to the “obligatory scene” between Anna and Grace in which they air their views regarding the two disparate lifestyles being examined in the play. And because Charlie does not know what transpires in the scene—he is offstage and his choices are being made for him—he loses focus as the protagonist. The main issue that the play addresses is that of the romantic versus the practical approach to living or, put another way, conformity as opposed to following one’s own muse. Charlie is the focal point because he is asked to choose between the two ways of life. While Grace is visiting Anna, trying to convince her to relinquish her hold on Charlie, Anna reminds Grace that she too had once had the spark that now gleams in Charlie: “You could have done anything. And you settled for a Still Life” (192). Here we can see Gurney’s multiple play on words, as “still life” is used to represent Grace’s artwork in a literal sense, to suggest both the domesticity implied in the typical still life paintings of fruit, vegetables, et cetera, and finally the uninteresting and “still” life that Grace has as a typical housewife and mother, as opposed to the adventuresome life she could have had as an artist. Anna is confident that Grace could have achieved renown as she had been “the best” of students (192). Grace and Anna’s discussion of their conflicting values brings some significant issues into the open. These include: 1) the value of art as self-realization versus just “playing in the mud,” as Grace dubs Anna’s work; 2) success as recognition by a “show,” i.e., an art exhibition, versus success as teaching others to realize their potential; 3) marriage and family security versus following “the road not taken,” which leads to the question of whether Charlie will take the road less traveled or be a conformist like his mother; 4) unabashed adultery as seen in the relationship between Anna and Doc Holloway versus the furtive adultery of Grace, and Grace’s suggestion that because her “sin” may be unknown to her family she is less wicked than Anna; 5) Grace’s use of money to bribe Anna, which is the upper-class response as Gurney makes clear by the revelation that Grace’s father employed the same method; 6) the life of the senses and sensual pleasure, as represented by eating ripe tomatoes and swimming in the nude versus “proper” restrained behavior; 7) the patriarchal versus the matriarchal as seen by Grace’s acquiescing to her husband’s authority versus Anna cherishing the tomato seeds from her maternal ancestors (189–197). And in the end, when Anna’s threat to lead Charlie astray from his family’s mores has finally been stifled, Grace admits that she hates to see Anna go; and Grace almost brings herself to

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recognize the value of people who make one think, even if they rock the boat by so doing (205). This WASP world has a code of behaviors to keep it safe and predictable. There is a moral code (145) and a work ethic (144, 148–9). Manners, however, take precedence over the moral code, as Charlie discovers when he is reprimanded for being rude to his mother’s paramour (147–8). This is a world in which money talks (166, 192) and where one “can always tell a gentleman by his linen and his leather” (184). It is a world of predictable lives with predictable moments (189); one knows what to expect and any deviation from that norm is considered inexcusably bad manners and rudeness. This is also the culture that invented the “drinking age” by banning the consumption of alcoholic beverages for those it considered to be too young. The Italians, the French, the Jews, and others do not have such rules; on the contrary, their youth are taught how to drink in moderation from an early age. Charlie is not allowed to drink beer at age fourteen (150), but when he has pleased his mother by preparing for the high-society party, at which she intends to “have a perfectly spectacular time…drink too much, and eat too much, and kiss every man in sight” (188), she decides to “break down” by letting Charlie have one glass of beer (185). Thus alcohol is both restricted and used as a reward, yet it is blatantly abused by the WASP adults. One of the appealing things about Anna, as far as Charlie is concerned, is that she treats him as an adult, asking him to watch out for her own problem with alcohol, while she serves him wine with lunch (159). Anna enjoys being “different” and tells Charlie that “I refuse to accommodate myself to the leisure class” (156). She appreciates and encourages the expression of strong feelings (158); this again is something that polite WASPs consider anathema. She no doubt sees in Charlie’s exclamation, “Darn it! Darn it all! Damn it! Goddammit to hell!” a steady increase in verbal freedom of expression as his expletives become more and more animated. In fact, this is the turning point in Anna’s attitude towards Charlie. After this outburst, she reconsiders her opinion of him as a troublesome “white man” from the “stockade” and begins to view him as one of her own kind (157–8). Anna appeals to Charlie’s youthful sense of rebellion by promising to “rail against [his] homeland” and by insisting that he call her by her first name (159). She goes on to describe his family as a “stuffy bunch, all the way down the line. Loved money, hated horses, never knew what to do about women.” Charlie cheerfully agrees with this derogatory description, while at the same time setting himself on a course to break away from these family traditions (159). Anna’s viewpoint is much more earthy than that of the WASP family who has no idea as how to deal with women. She revels in the “muck of life” (170); she insists on Charlie using the “vulgar pronunciation” of “tomato”: “they’re a vulgar fruit. Use the vulgar pronunciation” (172). And she repeatedly brings up the subject of sex, alluding to her married lover, telling jokes and describing their relationship: “my lover…used to wake me with a kiss” (158); “I will tell you the story of my cucumbers. There is an amusing anecdote connecting them to the sexual member of my lover” (174). She regularly identifies her lover as “old Doctor Holloway,” displaying no regard for WASP discretion (158, 174). Her ancestors, too, have engaged in such affairs; Charlie reminds her of the history of her prized

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tomato seeds: “They came from your great-grandmother who was an Indian princess…and she got them from her lover, who was a French trapper” (173). Anna’s descriptions include sexual imagery: I plan to give you some of my seeds. Some day…you will have the pleasure of picking a ripe tomato from one of my plants. First you will simply weigh it in the palm of your hand. Then you will admire its shape and color. Suddenly you will close your eyes and mash it into your mouth. You’ll let the juice spill out, and the meat roll around on your tongue, and then you’ll swallow—meat, juice, seeds and all. And then you’ll open your eyes, open them wide, and give out a great, loud war-whoop to life. (173)

In keeping with her philosophy of creating, procreating, and improving the world, Anna allows Charlie to fix her broken chair, which he apparently succeeds in doing (170). This is an interesting contrast to Grace’s attitude. When Charlie volunteers to fix his own broken Hitchcock chair, Grace replies: “you can’t, Charlie There are special men who do that, and they’re all away in the war” (151). Anna encourages growth, while the WASP culture, represented here by Grace, stifles it. Anna recognizes the dignity of manual labor, while Grace does not want her upper-class son working as a craftsman. Yet Grace herself had once been Anna’s prize pupil and Anna chides her: “you were a woman of pride and promise, and you chose a shadow of a life when you left me!” (194). Grace’s attempt to bribe Anna with a check echoes her own father’s method; and the ultimate ousting of Anna from the area repeats the result Grace’s father obtained when he stopped Anna from teaching Grace, after her lessons caused Grace to question her own family’s way of doing things (192–4). While Grace attempts to bribe Anna and to make a “deal” with her, there is no indication that Anna accepts Grace’s check. In fact, Anna seduces Charlie into staying with her by the promise of working on her car, something he has wanted to do all summer. This is a difficult choice for Anna, as she has no respect for cars. She also pushes Charlie to decide in her favor over Grace and ultimately she loses when Charlie has an accident. Grace wins by default as chance intervenes in the form of failed brakes on the car. The evidence of Grace’s affair, in spite of her regret for engaging in such behavior, shows that Grace is not as “happily married” as she claims to be (193). Grace also admits to missing Anna and wishing that she could have had her as a confidante over the years (194). Grace seems to epitomize Anna’s belief that, regarding potential, “most people never find the right way to work it out. And then there’s trouble” (171). Anna further condemns the leisure class with such comments as “amusement parks are places where people fritter away their potential” (177), and “behind every great fortune is a great crime” (183). She tells of girls being seduced by their riding masters (185)—an occurrence alluded to in Guraey’s The Dining Room as well (21)2. And she reveals that the WASP drinking habit stems from necessity: “You’ll have to drink, of course. It makes them [WASP social occasions] easier to tolerate” (185). She is speaking from experience here,

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as she herself attended such functions in her own youth, where she “got hooked on the old firewater” (183, 185). Anna even seems to imply that one must be damaged in order to fall into the WASP way of doing things: “I remember the Watson boy. He was the one who ran away from Hotchkiss. He was happy at Deerfield, though. Once he was hit on the head by a hockey puck, he fell right into line” (184). Furthermore, Anna points up the falsity of an imposed calendar on life’s events. When Grace asks for Charlie to be returned to her so he can continue with his schooling in order to not “fall behind,” Anna counters with “Behind what? Hmmm? Behind what?” (195). Earlier, Grace had run to Anna when her own family had tried to impose its “proper time to be married” dictum on the young Grace, as Anna reminds her: “you ran straight to me a week before your wedding!…You wanted to change your life!” (193). Anna implies that an emotional education is as important as an intellectual one; this overemphasis on intellectualism is a WASP legacy in our current educational system. Or as Bellah et al. write in The Good Society, addressing the same problems that Gurney focuses on: A successful life in American society depends on the ability to negotiate competently a series of requirements, primarily to show technical competence and secondarily to demonstrate the ability to deal effectively with other people [emphases mine]. The educational system dovetails with the occupational system in maintaining these emphases. (42) At the heart of the play is the issue of realizing one’s potential. This is dealt with on several levels, which may best be explored through the following questions: Have the individual characters in the play reached their potential? Are they on a path that will enable them to reach it? As representatives of various cultural and social groups, have they or will they be likely to reach their potential? And finally, one might ultimately reflect on what barriers and opportunities deny or encourage the reaching of potential for all of us in American society. It has already been established that Grace did not reach her potential as an artist, nor is she the perfect wife. As a mother, although not perfect, she certainly loves her children and instills in them a respect for the traditions that she herself values, as may be evidenced by Charlie’s return to her world at the end of the play. As a representative of women, Grace does not fulfill her potential, nor does her society encourage her to do so. Throughout the play there are references to the importance of men who are capable of achieving results that women and children cannot (140, 144, 151, 154, 179, 199, 207). Her daughter, Elsie, is amazed that Grace read War and Peace, but Grace reveals that before her marriage she read a great deal; she was, in fact, a totally different person who had a world view and “potential.” Elsie’s attitude sums up what Grace has become. Elsie threatens to write to her father about the trouble they are having with Charlie, because she feels that Grace has proved incapable of dealing with the situation. She says of her father “he’s a man. He could help” (179). It should be noted, however, that this comment prompts Grace to action, although the action she takes is simply to write the letter herself,

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asking for her husband’s help and advice (179,182). She does not even question the directive from her husband. She simply makes the calls to the patriarchal establishment to get her son into boarding school. Ultimately, however, Grace does confront Anna in the “obligatory scene.” Grace remarks to Elsie, early in the play, that “we all have a little growing to do, now don’t we” (142). We see Elsie grow from a somewhat spoiled young college girl who refuses to drive because she gets nervous (142) to a young woman who can take control in an emergency and guide her mother through a crisis (200). When this happens, Elsie exclaims “Good God! Maybe this play is about me after all” (201). In a sense she is correct, as we see a character achieving at least a measure of potential, and we realize that latent within the seemingly least competent can lie a vital spark. From a minor character, this is no small contribution to the overall message of the play. Gurney uses an additional minor character, Ted, to make another point about potential. Ted is a working-class Canadian who has suffered from class discrimination in this affluent resort area. He points out, however, that: “after the war, Toronto is going up and Buffalo is going down…Canada’s going to be a great nation, and we’re getting in on the ground floor” (202). Ted’s plans to attend technical school also foreshadow success for him in the about-to-burgeon age of electronics (202). He and his father have accurately assessed the potential of Toronto and will presumably reap their rewards for so doing. Gurney has thus allowed the outsider to have foresight, and he has cautioned those in positions of power not to take their status for granted. However, there is another possible interpretation of the character of Ted, and the choice of which interpretation is correct is ultimately left to individual production teams. Ted brings comic books to Charlie after the accident, which Ted has to give away because of his family’s imminent move. Charlie accepts them graeiously, but Ted is bemused by Charlie’s indifference to them: “He’s really sick. He doesn’t feel like reading comics” (203). One may conclude that Ted is intellectually left behind, whereas Charlie has begun to grow, thanks to both Anna and the sobering effects of the accident. With Bonny we also see the development of potential. At the start of the play, she is more interested in Ted and his status as an older, working “man” with a driver’s license than she is in Charlie (144, 146). Ted, however, has a somewhat obnoxious personality, and, in spite of being Charlie’s friend, he picks on and belittles his job to Anna as well as making fun of Anna herself (145, 176–8). Bonny is a witness to all of this, and she ultimately chooses Charlie over Ted (179, 203). Thus we see a young girl developing a set of standards by which she will choose future friends and romantic liaisons. Bonny, too, is a minor character, but again Gurney provides in her an example of developing potential. In direct contrast to the young Bonny, Anna, the oldest character, shows someone who has reached, it would seem, the culmination of her potential. Anna recognizes early on that this will be her last summer at her cottage, and she views Charlie as her last hope (172). Grace points out that Anna herself has not been recognized as an artist: What have you ever made? When have you ever been shown? When have you ever received even the smallest signal from the outside world?…this is amateur night around here and you know it. (193)

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However, Grace does admit, even in the middle of this tirade, that Anna is “a captivating teacher” who excites the young (193). Therein lies the fulfillment of Anna’s potential, as Anna herself realizes. Charlie asks her if she has found a way of working out her own potential and she replies “of course”; he then asks “then how come I never see you making anything?” Her reply is, while basking in the sun as Charlie works with clay, “I’m making something right now” (171). This is beyond Charlie’s comprehension, but, of course, Anna is referring to her mentoring of him at that very moment. In spite of Anna’s influence on him, Charlie leaves her territory to return to his mother; and Anna is, unfortunately, prevented by the WASP establishment from concluding her teaching. The persons in power, including Grace, treat Anna very shabbily. Grace tries to buy her off, and Anna counters by offering her car to the underage Charlie. Those in power then retaliate by “ruining” Anna’s life (207). Points to consider include 1) the police may have covered up the accident by reporting falsely that the brakes failed, thus putting the blame on the outcast Anna and diverting it from Charlie and the upper class; 2) the provincial government goes after Anna’s back taxes, charging her with not putting in the requisite plumbing, not registering her car, and otherwise not following ordinances and regulations. It may be that the government is reacting to pressure put on it by powerful WASPs, particularly Bonny’s father. In this way Gurney neatly shows how the WASPs control government and squelch those who are audacious enough to rise against the powers that be. Grace herself is patronizing, another way of putting Anna beneath her. She refers to Anna as “the poor thing” (205), a term and sentiment that Anna would abhor. Grace understands the system and its workings here, whereas Charlie does not, at least not yet. Sadly, Anna does not seem to recognize that she has indeed kindled a spark in Charlie, as at the end of the play Charlie returns to his mother and Anna is ousted from the community. Anna is left with the feeling of having been abandoned, and her predictions that Charlie will not have time for her in a new world of fast cars, jet airplanes, and television have a ring of truth to them (207). She goes so far as to say, regarding her potential, that “I seem to have lost mine” (208). Charlie, however, significantly asks for some of her tomato seeds and convinces her to plant some of her own after she moves. He seeks the life of the senses, of pleasure in art, as it is symbolized in the passage about enjoying the eating of a ripe tomato, and he seeks his own mode of creative expression. As Anna points out to him in a comment of double meaning, “the world seems to be calling to you” (207). If one follows the autobiographical ties between Charlie and Gurney, this play itself, as well as Gurney’s total career as a playwright, can be seen as a tribute to the fact that Anna, as an inspirational teacher, did indeed reach her potential. As for Charlie, who wants to be a “man,” and to whom Anna comments that his potential may lie with conforming to WASP society after all (186), the struggle will continue. Gurney attended the proper WASP schools and attained a proper career, only fully devoting himself to his true muse of playwriting much later in his life. At the play’s conclusion, Charlie brings this into focus with his last aside: “So I tried photography in boarding school. And took up writing in college. And finally, last summer, I wrote this play” (209). This gives a double meaning to the play title itself as it now refers not only to Charlie’s summer at age fourteen but also to the older Charlie—or Gurney—writing this very play.

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NOTES 1. All quotations from the play are taken from Love Letters and Two Other Plays: The Golden Age and What I Did Last Summer. New York: Plume, 1990. 2. Reference from A.R.Gurney’s The Dining Room, New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1982.

Works Cited Bellah, Robert N, Richard Masden, William M.Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M.Tipton. The Good Society. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1991. ——.Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985.

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Absent Fathers, Transient Sons: Miller, Inge, and Gurney ARVID F.SPONBERG

Several “accidentals” connect Arthur Miller, William Inge, and A.R.Gurney. All three are sons of businessmen. They form a representative group of commenters on the American scene. Inge wrote of small-town life in middle America during his own lifetime. Three of Miller’s plays—and those among his most famous—treat the managerial and working classes of New York. Gurney writes of upper-class urban and suburban life. Significant stages of their development as playwrights came while they were in a university, either as student or faculty. Miller and Inge are exact contemporaries. Gurney, we may say, is about a half-generation younger, but the beginning of his career overlaps the years of Inge’s flourishing and the years in which Miller came into his force. The strongly individual characteristics of their plays dominate one’s experience—as one would expect with three mature artists—but a close look reveals interesting similarities, one might almost say “family” resemblances. I would consider two: their complementary senses of history and their interest in fathers and sons. Both topics bear on the problems of dramatic construction for each playwright. Most general is their sense of history—specifically, a clearly developed view that the past matters in the lives of characters. In Miller’s plays, history descends. One of Miller’s most widely repeated statements underlines this sense: “The structure of a play,” he wrote during his apprenticeship, “is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”1 Certainly in Death of a Salesman, the play I shall treat here, we see that Willie’s dreams strongly shape Biff ’s s life. Willie’s dreams, in their turn, derive from the larger “American Dream”—one could say from Willie’s “Contract with America.” From Willie’s Uncle Ben, to Willie himself, to Biff and Hap, the dream descends, a bequest promising bountiful returns but, in the end, for the Lomans, paying out at less than par. Inge’s sense of history does not present itself in such clear lines of descent. Rather it resolves itself as a motive and a cue for action well known as a condition of small-town life —intense concern about individual reputations. Reputation is the label we give to personal history. In Inge’s plays, personal history pervades every relationship. In small-town midwestern America, one person plays more parts in the social drama than does one person in a large city. The stamp of a person’s past functions in a manner similar to—if we may imagine such a terrifying creature—a cosmic casting director apportioning roles according to “types.” In Picnic, for example, Hal’s reputation becomes the point of concentration for all the other characters. Alan Seymour and Flo Owens survey its precise contours in a negotiation for the right to determine, ostensibly, whether Hal can date Millie Owens, but,

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in reality, to decide the destiny of Hal and Madge. The original production of Picnic betrayed Inge’s understanding of personal history. It permitted Madge to ignore the power of reputation and to leave with Hal. As Ralph Voss has written, “[Inge] could not believe that any sort of lasting, true, or realistic relationship could possibly result,”2 Inge knew this was false to character and to history and in Summer Brave he corrected the error. I don’t know if Inge knew Miller’s essay, “The Shadows of the Gods,” but certainly he would have recognized a fraternal view in that part of the essay in which Miller says, When I was still in high school and ignorant, a book came into my hands, God knows how, The Brothers Karamazov. It must have been too rainy that day to play ball. I began reading it, thinking it was a detective story. I have always blessed Dostoevsky for writing in a way that any fool could understand. The book, of course, has no connection with the depression. Yet it became closer, more intimate to me, despite the Russian names, than the papers I read every day. I never thought to ask why, then. I think now it was because of the father and son conflict, but something more. It is always probing beyond its particular scenes and characters for the hidden laws, for the place where the gods ruminate and decide, for the rock upon which one may stand without illusion, a free man. Yet the characters appear liberated from any systematic causation…for I did not believe—and could not after 1929—in the reality I saw with my eyes. There was an invisible world of cause and effect, mysterious, full of surprises, implacable in its course. The book said to me: ‘There is a hidden order in the world. There is only one reason to live. It is to discover its nature. The good are those who do this. The evil say that there is nothing beyond the face of the world, the surface of reality. Man will only find peace when he learns to live humanly, in conformity to those laws which decree his human nature.”3 Inge, too, recognizes an invisible world of cause and effect, mysterious, surprising, and implacable, and the laws of this world express themselves in the personal histories, the reputations, of his characters. In considering the affinities of these artists, one is strongly tempted to treat Miller as the thesis, Inge as the antithesis, and Gurney as the synthesis. But a move so reductive and predictable would be false to the art of each playwright. Gurney’s sense of history quite literally plays itself out. By that I mean that in the forms of his plays and in the forms of his language—rather than in his plots or characterizations—we see the signs of his struggle with the historical process. In Gurney’s plays, history divides; like a river it cuts new channels, in one place reducing the mainstream to an evaporating ox-bow and in another converting chunks of mainland into islands. It is significant that Gurney regards his play titled Scenes from American Life as the one that launched his professional career and confirmed him in the eyes of many as an important playwright. In 41 scenes and 127 characters, Gurney charts significant changes in American life during the years following World War II. I suspect that Gurney does know Miller’s autobiography, Timebends, and I suspect that Gurney nodded in recognition when he read a passage in which Miller describes the sort of fragmentation of the theater audience that Gurney acknowledges in the dramatic form of Scenes from American Life and in several other plays.

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Already in the sixties I was surprised by the common tendency to think of the late forties and early fifties as some sort of renaissance in the New York theater. If that was so, I was unaware of it. I thought the theater a temple being rotted out with commercialized junk, where mostly by accident an occasional good piece of work appeared, usually under some disguise of popular cultural coloration such as a movie star in a leading role. That said, it now needs correction; it was also a time when the audience was basically the same for musicals and light entertainment as for the ambitious stuff and had not yet been atomized, as it would be by the mid-fifties, into young and old, hip and square, or even political left and right. So the playwright ’s challenge was to please not a small sensitized supporting clique but an audience representing, more or less, all of America…serious writers could reasonably assume that they were addressing the whole American mix, and so their plays, whether successfully or not, stretched toward a wholeness of experience that would not require specialists or a coteries to be understood.4 Gurney also recognizes with great clarity the altered circumstances under which he and his fellow playwrights work. His most articulate statement of his views can be found in his introduction to The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays: …anyone who chooses to write a play…would be obsessesed with the very characterisitcs of the medium he has chosen… A tight, restricted form where everything unessential must be rigorously eliminated, and where every line, presumably, must forward the action toward a climax and conclusion; a collaborative form which is to a large extent dependent on the director, the actors, and the designers, all of whom must respond to the text with some kind of common trust and sensibility; and finally a precarious form which is beset today by stringent economic considerations, so that the size of its cast, its scenic requirements, the number of costumes it needs are all important factors in the decision of whether it will ever be produced at all. And, of course, an unproduced play is stillborn. Therefore, if a writer is going to commit himself to all these restrictions, it makes sense to embrace and celebrate them, rather than disguise them or pretend they aren’t there. If he is unhappy with them, he will probably be much more at home in the fluid and liberated worlds of the movies or television… Choosing to write a play today is like choosing to buy a viola di gamba. Obsolete though it may be, once you’ve brought it home, you might as well try to get it to make its own particular kind of music. It makes no sense to force it to behave like a Moog synthesizer.5 As we shall see, these considerations and the atomization of the audience determines both the content and the form of Gurney’s play The Middle Ages. Before considering the other family resemblance among these playwrights that has more particular expression in their stagecraft, I want to add one more thought: It may seem an observation of barely tolerable obviousness to note that Miller, Inge, and Gurney write out of a sense of history. One would think that any playwright—any writer—would have a sense of history, as one might similarly assume a sense of irony or a sense of humor. But

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nearly three decades of attention to the development of American playwriting has, so far, only confirmed my early impressions that most American plays betray little, if any, cognizance of or even interest in historical processes. It’s seems to me as if most American playwrights have adopted not the view of Arthur Miller but of Henry Ford that “‘History is bunk”—or, as a student of mine misquoted Ford with apt, but, alas, unintentional, irony, “History is bulk” A sense of history is not an obvious attainment, in my view, and, therefore, it is a matter for rejoicing that Miller, Inge, and Gurney write out of a sense of history and that they trouble themselves to put us, their audience, in possession of usable history, history that deepens our understanding of how and why we have become the people that we are. History, of course, implies generation and the agents of generation are parents. Little wonder, then, that in the plays of Miller, Inge, and Gurney, the relationships of parents and children form points of concentration. These points, in turn, form my second subject. I would like, at once, to distinguish the three writers from each other while emphasizing, again, a family resemblance. The title of this essay, Absent Fathers, Transient Sons, seems best to caption an important element in the dramaturgy of our three writers that energizes some of their plays. I am no psychological critic so I limit myself to pointing out that while Inge’s father was indeed absent for long periods of time, both Miller’s father and Gurney’s father were significantly present in their sons’ lives. As an historian of American playwriting, I am interested in a much more limited and practical problem: in any given period of our history, what aspects of human relationships did play wrights regard as having the most compelling dramatic interest? After all, any writer starts with a question that is simple to state but so hard to answer: how best to catch and hold an audience’s attention? Fail in that and all else fails. The nature of theater, though, complicates the playwright’s task. As the great director and Dean Emeritus of the Yale School of Drama, Lloyd Richards, is fond of telling young playwrights: “Remember, you ask an audience to make an appointment to see your play. You’d better have something worthwhile to tell them.“6 What do Miller, Inge, and Gurney regard as a worthwhile subject for our attention? The answer, in part, is Absent Fathers, Transient Sons. In treating first Death of a Salesman, I acknowledge taking a line of inquiry expressly warned against by Miller. In his essay, “The Family in Modern Drama,” Miller writes, One ought to be suspicious of any attempt to boil down all the great themes to a single sentence, but this one—“How may a man make of the outside world a home?”—does bear watching as a clue to the inner life of the great plays. Its aptness is most evident in the modern repertoire; in fact, where it is not the very principle of the play at hand we do not take the play quite seriously. If, for instance, the struggle in Death of a Salesman were simply between father and son for recognition and forgiveness, it would diminish in importance. But when it extends itself out of the family circle and into society, it broaches those questions of social status, social honor and recognition, which expand its vision and lift it out of the merely particular toward the fate of the generality of men.7

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Now in Death of a Salesman you may say, correctly, that Willie is anything but absent. The play begins with Willie returning to the roost, so to speak. So father is indubitably there and remains with us throughout. But Biff is a bird of another feather. Hap says to him, “you’re not settled…you’re still kind of up in the air.” Biff confirms this. He’s had “twenty or thirty different jobs”; he “doesn’t know what the future is” and doesn’t “know what he’s supposed to want.” Later, when Linda complains that she had no address to which she could send him a letter telling him about his father’s difficulties, he lies plausibly by saying that he was “on the move… I can’t take hold, Mom. I can’t take hold of some kind of a life.” Linda replies, “Biff, a man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.” In other senses than the physical, though, Willie has been absent and is losing his grip on reality. Hap alarms Biff by describing Willie’s absent-minded driving habits. He doesn’t watch the road but, in the current idiom, “spaces off.” Miller dramatizes these transient mental states. In them we encounter the Shadow God of Willie’s life, the mythic Uncle Ben whose wilderness exploits engender all the wrong dreams. It’s useful to remember that at one time Miller’s working title for this play was “Inside His Head.” Perhaps the cause of the greatest pain in Willie’s life is Biff ’s abandonment of him—“for spite,” in Willie’s view. The Biff that Willie carries with him in his head is vastly superior to the Biff revealed in conversations with his brother and mother. The contrast between the real Biff and the Biff inside Willie’s head drives the play. In Miller’s play, the father contains the son, engenders him, and fears the loss of him. In Inge’s plays, sons exist wholly apart from their fathers. Fatherlessness, we may say, pervades the Inge-ean universe. I admit that we may more properly describe this fatherlessness as the negative effect of Inge’s concentration on mothers and sons. I accept that—but either way you state it, the consequences for Inge’s plays remain the same: Sons occasionally find but more often lose their ways with and through women. Rarely do they find the trail into a permanent relationship. One who does is Bo Decker in Bus Stop. Unusually for Inge, and for compelling dramaturgical reasons, Bo gropes his way into Cherie’s heart in the presence of a surrogate father, the somewhat older cowhand, Virgil Blessing, and under the ever-watchful eye of Sheriff Masters. Unlike Dante’s guide into the Inferno, this Virgil proves an unreliable mentor in the quest for Cherie’s love. We’re led to understand that Bo’s parents died while he was still young and that rearing Bo fell into Virgil’s hands along with the management of the ranch—rather as a regent might assume guardianship of the throne until the prince and heir was competent to reign. Yet it is a ranch over which Bo reigns—perhaps very like the ranch that Biff wanted to borrow ten thousand from Harry Oliver to buy—and he pursues Cherie with the same stubborn muscularity that he ropes and brands calves. But in matters of the heart, Virgil admits, “I’m no authority.” And so it is the ideas inside Bo’s head that drive Bus Stop. Only through persistent, repeated, and painful rejection by Cherie does Bo learn the inadequacy of those ideas. The three other male figures in the play are absent, as is Cherie’s boyfriend. Other examples with less happy endings could be cited. In Gurney’s plays, sons and fathers exist in conjunction with and usually in opposition to each other. The conflict between Barney Rusher and his father, Charles, in Gurney’s play, The Middle Ages, does not arise from the conditions inside Charles’s head. On this point, Gurney is realistic and objective. It would be a little nearer the truth to say that

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conditions inside Barney’s head drive the play forward, but to say so would still leave us wide of the mark. The Middle Ages received its first production at the Mark Taper Forum Lab in 1977 and was revived in New York in 1983 at St. Peter’s Church. In the time of William Congreve, a favorite of Gurney, the play’s central character, a young man named Barney Rusher, would be known as a rake, and The Middle Ages is a rake’s progress. In keeping with the spirit of his title, Gurney moderates our feelings toward Bamey by giving him the adventuresome soul of a Robin Hood, and the mischievous truth-telling spirit of King Lear’s fool. Barney almost gets a Ph.D. from Berkeley in medieval studies. But by the end of the play Barney tells us that he has made a fortune as a producer of pornographic movies. The play is set in the trophy room of a men’s club in a large city. The opening and closing scenes occur on the day of the funeral of Barney’s father, Charles, who is, therefore, absent. The remaining eight scenes flash back and follow Bamey’s life from age sixteen to forty-six. In each of these scenes, Barney pursues the fair Eleanor Gilbert who wounds him deeply by marrying Barney’s well-behaved, dull, but reliable younger brother, Billy. Gurney entangles Barney’s lifelong courtship of Eleanor with his equally long conflict with his father, who complicates Barney’s life by marrying Eleanor’s mother, Myra. Gurney, as we all know, writes comedies and even this bare outline of the story suggests the opportunities for laughter of which his fertile and agile imagination can take advantage. Acknowledging that, however, doesn’t detract from the serious tone of the comedy. I know it is customary with some to group Gurney with Noel Coward or Philip Barry and other practitioners of “high comedy.” I prefer to leave that designation attached to the names of those earlier writers and speak, rather, of the serious comedy of A.R.Gurney. It’s plain that the flowers of laughter in Gurney’s plays arise from a dark soil of loss, abandonment, and isolation to which, in this play, the father, Charles, gives full expression: On one of his returns to the club, Barney, at this time a sailor in the U.S. Navy, has brought three friends, who are also Negroes—to use Charles’s term—and they have been discovered swimming in the club’s pool by an elderly member, Mr. Sidway. Charles has called the police on the assumption that the Negroes have broken into the club. When he learns that they are Barney’s shipmates, he says: “Barney, I want you to go down to the pool, and ask your friends to put on their clothes, and come up to the main room, and raise a glass to my new grandson.” In the only moment of prompt obedience to his father in the play, Barney exits. Charles turns to the audience and speaks; I will greet them, I will shake their hands, I will see that they are made comfortable, because they are guests, and the cardinal rule of this club is hospitality. And if I hear one rude remark from anyone in the room about these—guests, then whoever makes it will feel my full fury. And then, when the party’s over, when these guests have decided to depart, I am going to do something which I should have done ten years ago. I am hereby blackballing my elder son! He is no longer welcome here, now or in the future. I will speak to Alice in the coatroom, and Fred in the bar, and John in the locker room, and if they see hide or hair of him ever again, they should call me, or the police, or the National Guard! I want him OUT! Permanently and forever!

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We have always prided ourselves on our openness here. I like to think that we are a democratic institution. In recent years we have admitted many fine Jewish members, and there’s talk that Walter Fay is partly Chinese. Fine. Good. But we are not ready for the invasion of naked barbarians… He’s my son…and I love him. But when he returns, he may not—repeat not—come to this club. If he wants to swim or play a game, let him seek out some public facility. If he wants to have a drink with old friends, let them meet in some gloomy saloon. If he wants to cash a check, let him stand in line at the bank. Oh, we’ll still break bread together he and I. We’ll still do that. But not here. Oh, no. We will go out. To a restaurant. We will be shown to a dirty table in a dark corner by a cheap woman who chews gurm. After an endless wait, she will bring us two watery cocktails, crackers wrapped in cellophane, call us “honey,” and serve us lukewarm coffee with the main course. That’s what democracy is these days. That’s what Barney wants apparently. And I’m sorry.8 There is humor here, without doubt. Charles’s depiction of his club as a “democratic institution” only sharpens our perception of the degree to which the history of the period covered in the play steadily eroded, cut off, and isolated many—though not all—of the Charles Rushers in our society. At the same time, up to this point in the play, we may have shared Charles’s disapproval of Barney’s insolence, practical joking, and indecency. But by giving this speech to Charles, announcing this decision to cut off and isolate his own son, Gurney maps the features of the old regime. Gurney’s serious comedy lets us see, in a humorous vein, the serious consequences of historical change. Barney is as little able to accept his father’s dreams as Biff Loman is to accept Willie’s, or as Bo Decker is to accept Cherie’s or Sheriff Masters’. Inge presents Bo as emotionally transient, trying to apply what he thinks are the appropriate ideas and learning, at last, how to connect with Cherie. But Bo is settled in time and place and has followed his absent father’s occupations and habits. Biff and Barney are physically transient sons, wandering back and forth across the country, unable to settle themselves in the occupations and habits of their fathers, not wanting to believe in the ideas that led to their fathers’ absences from their lives. In these plays, Miller, Inge, and Gurney appear to have converged on a common subject —absent fathers and transient sons. Woven into their treatment of this subject are complementary attitudes about history as a dynamic force in American life that determines, pervades, and divides families and communities. This convergence seems to suggest that this subject has especially rich theatrical significance for American audiences and that a closer attention to history could, with equally imaginative treatment, produce more plays as meritorious as Death of a Salesman, Bus Stop, and The Middle Ages. NOTES In a slightly shorter form, this essay was presented at the fourteenth William Inge Festival, at which Arthur Miller was honored. The Festival is held annually in April at Independence

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College, Independence, Kansas. I am grateful to Jackson R. Bryer and the organizers of the Festival for the opportunity to participate. 1. “The Shadows of the Gods,” The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, New York: Penguin, 1978, p. 179. 2. A Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989, p. 131. 3. “The Shadows…,” pp. 179–80. 4. Timebends, New York: Harper and Row, 1987, pp. 179–180. Emphasis added. 5. A.R.Gurney, The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays, New York: Plume, ix-x. 6. Lecture, Northwestern University, October 1992. 7. “The Family in Modern Drama,” The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, New York: Penguin, 1978, pp. 73–4. Emphasis added. 8. The Middle Ages, New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1978, pp. 44–5.

Entering the Fourth Dimension: A.R.Gurney’s Sweet Sue BRENDA GORDON

Sweet Sue (1986) opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City on January 8, 1987. 1 On the surface, the play tells a simple story: a woman and a younger man become attracted to each other but do not follow through, obeying instead the dictates of a society that frowns deeply on such liaisons. This simplicity is complicated by the use of two actors for each character. The two Susans and the two Jakes are most often on the stage at the same time and acknowledge each others’ presence through the dialogue. The play was not well received. The problems that developed between Sweet Sue and its critics seem to arise from the lack of traditional doubling. Susan and Susan Too are not alter egos fighting for supremacy, nor are Jake and Jake Too. This type of doubling is what we, as audience, are conditioned to expect, and most reviewers of this play seemed distracted by what they perceived as a flaw in the use of this device. Gurney, however, insists that he was not trying to create alter egos. His instructions in the script copy of this play make that clear: “It would be a mistake to break the parts down into different psychological aspects or alter egos of the characters. Rather we should see two different but complete approaches to each role” (6). This notion triggered my thinking that this play foregrounds the act of writing a play. Gurney has certainly examined this art in other plays, most notably in the earlier The Perfect Party (1985) and the later The Cocktail Hour (1989). But here we have a play whose very essence suggests metadrama, a self-conscious pointing to itself as play, in all senses of that term. Francis Fergusson says that the process of becoming acquainted with a play is like that of becoming acquainted with a person. It is an empirical and inductive process; it starts with the observable facts; but it instinctively aims at a grasp of the very life of the machine which is both deeper and, oddly enough, more immediate than the surface appearances offer. (11) The metadramatic qualities of Sweet Sue immediately propel me from the surface. Gurney’s technique here has the effect for me of heightening the sense of fantasy. Norman Holland, psychoanalytic and cognitive theorist, suggests that when we interact with a text, be it play or any other art form, we naturally try to adopt that text as our own. We seek meaning in order to provide ourselves “a mastery of the fantasy content” (185); we “modif[y]” the text in order “to reduce the anxiety” that fantasy can arouse in us (182). Looking, then, at this

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play as a play about writing a play leads me to a multidimensional fantasy that encompasses several visions of art and suggests Sweet Sue is Gurney’s most complex play to date. I interpret Sweet Sue as emphasizing four discrete dimensions that lead into each other. The first dimension foregrounds a play wright’s art, then spills over into the theatre and the second dimension that highlights the nature of performance art. The performance itself involves the audience in the third dimension as we watch and strive to create or rather recreate our own fantasy by developing a direct correlation between this art and our world. And finally the audience interacts with Susan’s personal fantasy about the nature of her self and her art that fleshes out the fourth dimension. In the first dimension I watch a playwright writing a play, in much the same way that I read about short story writing techniques in John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” In this story Barth constantly interrupts the narrative flow with self-conscious asides that both discuss the conventions of story writing, while the story itself thwarts these same conventions, and betrays the angst of the writer as he struggles toward some unified vision. In Gurney’s play, while we have no playwright “character” interrupting the dramatic flow, the confusion of multiple actors and ambiguous action creates a similar effect. The playwright develops a skeleton plot: a young man, Jake, is invited to spend the summer with his college roommate, Ted, so that they can earn extra money painting houses. Ted, however, fails to tell his mother, Susan, a fortyish divorcee. She has her own plans for the summer—to retrieve the artistic sensibility that has been buried under the sentimentality of years of producing Hallmark cards in order to make a living for her children. But in true parental fashion, Sue compromises her own desires, even seeing a chance that Jake can aid her in her quest, and ensconces him in her studio. Jake has his own goal for the summer: to learn how to have a meaningful relationship with a woman, not simply one based on raging hormones. Of course, the two become attracted to each other. As the play opens, we see two women and two men working at times together and at times separately toward the revelation of this plot and through their confusion see the struggle of the playwright to resolve this relationship and then focus the action toward that known outcome. As the curtain rises, Susan is sketching Jake, who is naked and sits with his back to the audience. Susan Too stands aside, watching Jake Too packing to leave. Susan opens, “This is the way it should have ended, Jake” (7). We are immediately alerted to the fantasy nature of the scene. Susan goes on about how this would have resolved their relationship by setting it on a professional level. Susan Too retorts, “You’re dreaming again” (7) and adds that the best way to resolve their relationship is with “a short, sweet, civilized goodbye” (7). This option is explored and also fails as Susan Too then stops Jake’s departure by offering him a beer. The ambiguity of action set up in this first scene continues throughout the play, reminding me of Oscar Brockett’s definition of improvisational playwriting in which “a writer supplies an outline, situation, or idea; the actors then explore, through improvisation or other techniques, multiple possibilities” (256). Clearly, the play becomes a fantasy about and an extended metaphor for the writing and rewriting process that occurs not only in the quiet den of a playwright but also in the theatre during rehearsals as the playwright, director, and cast work together to resolve the work into a unified vision. In this second dimension, the play enters the theatre and ceases to be static words on a page but becomes a living piece of performance art. The play now becomes the fantasy of

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the director and actors who are seeking to make the play their own. On Sweet Sue’s opening night, however, we do not see the finished product; we see the play in rehearsal, the play before it has even been cast. The metadramatic focus is again clear. There are not two distinct sides of Sue and Jake being revealed; there are two different actors vying for each role. The opening of Act II particularly highlights this notion. The act opens in exactly the same way as in Act I; however, the actors are reversed. Susan Too is now seen sketching Jake Too, and it is Susan who accuses her of dreaming. Both actresses and actors have had the opportunity of developing their own approaches to these characters. In this way, Susan and Jake are complicated by the different perspectives offered by different actors. The role each actor portrays is further complicated by the lack of an ending and the fantasy nature created by the ambiguous action in most of the scenes. These roles become an interesting challenge as we envision the director trying to develop a production concept while the actors try to create characters who cannot seem to resolve their positions and therefore cannot formulate a clear mode of action, all problems oddly lifelike in retrospect. Thus we arrive at the third dimension. As the audience we are asked to accept the writer writing and the actors rehearsing, and the play itself as representing some type of unified vision. Herbert Blau notes, “The audience is what happens [his emphasis] when, performing the signs and passwords of a play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response” (25). As audience member, my response draws me back to the opening of the play when Susan says, “This is the way it should have ended, Jake” (7). I remember the ambiguity of action, leading sometimes to one conclusion and sometimes to another. I consider the time compression, created by overlapping scenes and the use of the second actor to pick up action as if time had passed. When Susan Too tells Jake Too to go and take a shower while she tries to contact Ted, Jake Too exits, tossing the towel to Jake, who enters drying his hair. Such compressed action occurs consistently, suggesting the timeless quality of dreams or thoughts. Does the play occur over a week or a few minutes? It is impossible to say. Therefore, one way I recreate this play into a vision that has meaning for me is to see the play as total fantasy from beginning to end. The play is itself Susan’s work of art, a fiction she creates in order to explore her life. Perhaps the only piece of reality wedged into her fiction is that she went to her son’s college and took Ted and Jake out to dinner. Jake was clearly fascinated with her, and she brought this fascination home and turned it into the cataly st that helps her explore all the possibilities of such a passion. Susan, Susan Too, Jake, and Jake Too are mental amalgams of characters and, thus, are as absent from the stage as Ted, Nancy, and Harvey Satterfield. The course that these characters take in Susan’s imagination leads ultimately to the loss of both her son and her job, proving just how fragile Susan feels her existence is. Moving beyond the fantasies, self-conscious in nature, of the playwright, the director, the actors, and the audience, we confront the fantasy that Susan creates in the fourth dimension. Susan becomes one character, an unseen character who is creating a fantasy on the stage, filled with multiple possibilities, in an attempt to re-create herself. The questions of whether or not Jake has posed nude or they have had an affair seem to be clearly answered and, in fact, become secondary issues. Primary is Susan’s struggle to redefine her own art by clearly facing her own passion and exploring the extent to which art and passion commingle.

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To say that Susan is repressed is a significant understatement, and her fantasy about Jake underscores her own growing awareness of her repression. By her own admission, she had been “too dependent” and therefore “married much too young” (22). Deserted by her husband, who had run away to “[join] a commune in Vermont” (14), Susan was faced with the task of raising three children, putting them through college, and instilling them with values in an attempt to protect them from what she sees as a threatening world: “I like to think I’ve kept [this house] an oasis of decency in a world gone absolutely hay wire on the subject of sex” (18). Ironically, though, what she has succeeded in doing is to lock herself up in this “oasis of decency,” repressing her own passion in an effort to do the right thing by her children. Susan fantasizes Ted as having a torrid love affair with Nancy but becoming Susan’s watchdog when he senses that Jake is falling for her. In her fantasy Ted is allowed the freedom to explore his passion outside the “oasis,” but Susan remains locked inside, alone, and wondering, “Why does Ted brood over my life, like some God? Are we doomed to be forever at the mercies of our own children?” (52) The answer would seem to be yes. Even Jake is denied the freedom to explore his passion for Susan by the little monster that Susan raised in her “oasis of decency.” She has drummed it into Ted: “Take charge…be responsible…. Be like me. Be like Sweet Sue” (54). But what is being irresponsible in Susan’s world? Obviously, it would have been irresponsible of her to continue pursuing some amorphous artistic goals when she could support her children by prostituting her art. Obviously, it would have been irresponsible to explore her own sexuality with an equally inclined man. Better to date men with whom she can hide her passion behind a veneer of culture: “You can read the same books, enjoy the same music” (39). You can have a “very congenial relationship” (39). Yet even Susan admits that Harvey Satterfield, “a Professor of Moral Philosophy,” sometimes needs to be prodded in order to get him to “make his move” (38). After conceding this, however, Susan quickly reverts to her previous responsible stance: “It’s a generational thing, actually. Your generation is tyrannized by sex” (38). Do Susan and Jake have an affair? Does he pose nude for her? This is her fantasy, but the fantasy is itself a manifestation of her sexual repression; therefore, the questions seem absurd. Here is a woman who can only conceive of dancing by herself to the Talking Heads, a group she is beginning to like, only “some night. Late. After a glass of wine. With the door locked” (29). It is inconceivable that she would take such a giant step with Jake, even in her dreams. No, Susan’s fantasy describles her baby steps toward a new freedom for herself and her art. Susan is taking a long, hard look at herself and her art. She does not like what she is finding. SUSAN: An artist looks at the world directly, and tells us the truth. SUSAN TOO: I don’t do that. I look away. SUSAN: I lie. JAKETOO: Oh come on. SUSAN: I do. Look, come here: fat little Santa Clauses. Coy little Easter bunnies. Hearts and flowers. That’s me. Hearts and flowers for cocktail napkins and thank you notes. (15)

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The art she produces has become a metaphor for her current state. Her life has “no shadows, no darkness” (15), no passion. She has learned to take pills in order to keep everything “bright and light and easy” (15), to avoid the “dangerous” (30), the sexual. When she feels threatened by her attraction to Jake, she sees herself running off to the predictable Harvey Satterfield, popping pills as she goes. But to achieve her goal, to become the artist she wants to be, Susan must face her own life directly, not run away. She does. She moves slowly toward a greater awareness of her own culpability, her own responsibility not just for Ted and her husband but for both the Sweet Sue on the cards and the Sweet Sue in her house. At first, however, she stands away from herself, in a dream, seeking knowledge through distance. This distance is exemplified when she speaks of herself in the third person: SUSAN TOO: Oh yes. I’m very proud of Sweet Sue. She’s worked very hard. I don’t t know where I’d be without her. SUSAN: But this summer I intend to give her a break. (15) Susan imagines that she can simply give Sweet Sue a vacation, dispose of her as easily as a three-day house guest and find the art and passion she lost so long ago. She soon realizes, however, that Sweet Sue is too much a part of her self to be dismissed. Susan has to find the passion that Sweet Sue has so carefully avoided and learn to allow it into her life. Susan’s breakthrough comes when she imagines Jake finding a girl with whom to develop his soughtafter meaningful relationship and realizes that it is not the cake she has in the oven that is burning: “No it’s not. I’m burning. It’s me” (50). A shadow has entered her life. Now Susan’s creative effort is turned toward dealing with that shadow. She wants Jake to model for her and pretends not to care if Ted would mind. She even imagines Ted’s eventual loss with a matter-of-fact “fine. That’s life. Goodbye, Ted. He’s free, I’m free, that’s that” (52). She is beginning to see herself and her life clearly, even remembering how her father used to calm down her “hellion” (53) nature as a child by singing “Sweet Sue” to her. She soon admits, however, that Ted is the tyrant she made him and wonders if she drove her husband away by trying to force him to desert his own passions and surely wonders to what extent she has tyrannized herself. Soon Susan imagines relaxing the rules; Ted can have Nancy over for the night and she will try to compromise with Hallmark by sending them a patently unHallmarkian proposal for a series of cards. She tries to be open with Jake and Ted about her feelings; she does not envision herself as so sweet anymore. But this does not suit her either. After creating an indignant scene with Jake, who is upset because she is not giving him his messages from Elaine, she breaks down and apologizes. Faced with her jealousy, Susan determines that her only safe haven from the emotional upheaval she is experiencing is to marry the congenial Mr. Satterfield, an ironic analogy to Hallmark as a safe haven for her art. This suggestion ultimately produces a showdown with Jake in which they both admit their feelings for each other, even though Jake has channeled his into his new relationship with Elaine. Susan’s attempts to incorporate some type of radical change into her fiction backfire. This is no fairy tale. She envisions herself getting “some new pills” from her doctor, losing her arrangement with Hallmark, and even losing Ted who she imagines runs off to find his father, disgusted by his mother’s and Jake’s admitted attraction to each other. She fantasizes being punished for straying from the strictures drummed in over a lifetime: “Be patient be

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polite, be good and decent and true, and it will all fall into place” (34). She has imagined straying and determines that her world would fall apart. Change does not happen overnight, does not bring only good, and is rarely permanent in its entirety. Change, even in her imagination, seems to have hurt Susan more than helped, but the pain itself is change and the climax arrives as she imagines letting herself become righteously angry. Feeling exploited by both Jake and Ted, Susan realizes that she understands the nature of love better than she ever thought “because this [passion for Jake] is like nothing I’ve ever felt before, ever.” Through her creation, Susan has changed; she has discovered the passion so carefully hidden years ago. She has realized that she is still an attractive, sensual woman. But she is also Sweet Sue and will accept some of her curbs on that passion. She will not, however, marry to escape life; she puts “the pills on the drawing table” and takes “up a pencil” (76). Her art has become the receptacle into which she can pour her passion, exploit her own sexuality should she so choose. She lets Jake go but envisions the affair and transfers her passion into his portrait, declaring it “not bad” and finally “good. Excellent” (76). ‘The best thing I’ve done” (76). Her fantasy complete, I envision Susan as left in place with Ted headed home for summer, a continuing arrangement with Hallmark, and herself at a safe distance from the action. But the fiction she has created plays across the stage and will infuse her life and art with a new vitality, a new freedom of expression. Sweet Sue incorporates fantasy in several ways, but the character of Sue, taken as a whole, is no fantasy figure. She is round, true to life. Gurney’s creation of Susan is yet another example of his increasingly strong ability to write wonderfully round and believable women. The Mother in Children (1972) is another good example. She is very like Susan in terms of her sense of maternal integrity, and like Susan the Mother becomes brutally honest about her own foibles after she announces that she will remarry and watches her grown children fall apart. Also like Susan, the Mother gives up her passionate inclination in the end in order to keep her family together. Unlike Sweet Sue, however, Children strikes us as more realistic. There is no suggestion that the play is Mother’s fantasy. She is clearly a victim, albeit primarily of her own mistakes. I believe that Susan and Mother act on what they know will be the outcome of their actions, right or wrong. They accept that they are, because they set themselves up to be, the only glue that holds together already fragile families. With the integrity that comes of age in this not so perfect world, these women both choose family. Their decisions are surely based on cultural sexism but are, nevertheless, wise. Their decisions are not based on fiction but on looking at life directly. Often when I am reading literature or watching plays or movies, I am struck by the unreasonable lack of motivation that informs female decision making. Ironically, as a woman I have become inured to a certain amount of this, often reading with the off handed notion that “that is how they treat women.” But with Gurney I am more often delighted by how he undercuts social stereotyping and cultural bias while clearly showing their effects. In Sweet Sue he fails to bow to the traditional view of older women. The older woman usually has to lose; she is so unfortunate because she is older. But here we do not have a pathetic older woman doomed to make a fool of herself over a younger man or a stereotypical seductress, leading Jake into a sexual trap. Instead, through Sue’s creation of Jake, we come

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to understand why he is attracted to her and what she is learning about herself. She is not just a good cook; she is “a great looking woman” (19). She is the type of woman with whom a man wants to establish a meaningful relationship. She is “so intelligent. So complicated. So on top of things” (65). She is “not old…Just sort of ripe” (67) and she knows how to treat a man like a man. But for Susan to have initiated a sexual encounter with Jake would have set up a level of expectation that in this case could have made the play more tragic, turned her into the object of pity, or even scorn, to culturally biased audiences. Gurney allows her to avoid this trap. She is a complex character, refreshing and real, who has learned from life and instead of falling wantonly into a destructive affair, Susan is allowed to make real decisions, decisions clearly based on her understanding of the world in which she lives. She is not Tosca or Anna Karenina, doomed to die for allowing their passion an uninhibited reign. Nor is she a George Sand or a Mary Wollstonecraft, whose uninhibited lifestyles led to the cultural devaluation of their art. Susan faces her own and her culture’s biases and makes informed decisions. In an article aptly named “Pushing the Walls of Dramatic Form,” Gurney tells us that when he wrote Sweet Sue he was feeling a certain “impatience with conventional dramatic form” (6). Concerning the use of two actors for each character, he simply says, “I just wanted to paint the same picture with additional colors” (6).2 He felt that the result “add[s] a complexity to the texture of the play” (6). Sweet Sue is complex indeed. Martin Esslin has suggested that “clearly the theatre of the future must exploit its advantage vis-à-vis the mass media by making the fullest use of the presence of a live audience” (212). Clearly, Sweet Sue does just that. Not only does it lend itself easily to my discussion of fantasy, but it poses further interesting challenges as a piece of performance art, and the literary and cultural allusions are valuable issues in their own right.3 Sweet Sue will surely reward both literary and theatrical scholars who wish to move beyond the fourth dimension. NOTES 1. This production starred Mary Tyler Moore as Susan and Lynn Redgrave as Susan Too. John K. Linton and Barry Tubb played Jake and Jake Too, respectively. The director was John Tillinger. 2. In this article Gurney also suggests other sources for this device: ‘There’s nothing terribly new about this device: O’Neill tried it and so did Peter Nichols” (6). In a letter to me dated 23 May 1994 he adds, “Look at Albee’s Three Tall Women which works with the same sort of form, though in a way that makes it easier for the audience to get a handle on the device.” 3. For example, knowing that Gurney is a literature teacher and being one myself, I cannot help comparing Susan Weatherill to Granny Weatherall in Katherine Anne Porter’s oftanthologized “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” in Flowering Judas and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt, 1935, pp. 121–136.

Works Cited Barth, John. “Lost in the Funhouse.” Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968, pp. 72–97.

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Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Brockett, Oscar G. The Essential Theatre. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. Esslin, Martin. Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre. 1961. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Fergusson, Francis. The Idea of a Theater: A Study in Ten Plays: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective. 1949. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Gurney, A.R. Children: A Play in Two Acts. New York City: Dramatists Play Service, 1972. ——. The Cocktail Hour. The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays. New York: Plume, 1989. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1989, pp. 1–91. ——. The Perfect Party. The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays. New York: Plume, 1989, pp. 175–251. ——.“Pushing the Walls of Dramatic Form.” New York Times 27 Jul 1986, section II: 1+. Reprinted herein, pp. 124–127. ——.Sweet Sue: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1986. Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

The Allusive A.R.Gurney BRENDA MURPHY

A.R.Gurney has made it abundantly clear in the presentation of six of his plays from the eighties that he wants them to be seen as self-consciously metatheatrical, or, as he prefers to put it, self-reflexive. His introduction to the volume containing Love Letters, The Golden Age, and What I Did Last Summer begins: “These are three plays about writing.”1 To be even more precise, he explains further on that “all three plays have to do with men who use writing as a mode of self-liberation, and their relationships with women who seem to be able to embrace a freer, more spirited life on their own” (xi). Asked about the yet-to-be-produced Cocktail Hour in a 1988 interview, he commented: The conflict is about a man in his early middle years who comes home to his city to ask his parents’ permission to stage a play he has written. He is sensitive enough to want to ask his parents. But they won’t even read it. The idea of being made public is not to their liking. The name of the writer’s play is “The Cocktail Hour” It’s very self-reflexive.2 In the Introduction to the 1990 volume containing The Cocktail Hour, Another Antigone, and The Perfect Party, he carefully laid out the lines along which he wanted the self-reflexivity of the plays to be read: Another Antigone is about, and should constantly remind us that it is about, both its similarity to and difference from its Greek counterpart. The Perfect Party, written as a kind of satyr play to follow it, tries to underscore the connections between a social gathering and the very theatrical event the audience is actually attending. Finally, The Cocktail Hour, which ostensibly would seem to be the most realistic of the three, is, in another sense, the most theatrically self-conscious, since it is most of all about itself, and continually calls attention to its own stagecraft.3

There are a number of subtexts in Gurney’s conscious leading of the reader to read these plays in this way. One, of course, is the implied repudiation of the label “realist” for these plays, a term which in the eighties carried a heavy weight of implication itself. Many critics assumed the mimetic mode to be identical with a putatively smug, self-satisfied, bourgeois, misogynist, elitist, imperialist frame of mind that characterized many of the plays written

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by Europeans and Americans during the late nineteenth century, when realism was the most common dramatic idiom of the literary playwright. Gurney, who has probably never had a review or an article written about him that did not include the epithet “WASP,” naturally chose to put as much distance as possible between his work and realism. Indeed he sounds more like Gurney the MIT professor than Gurney the playwright in his careful description of the plays’ subversion of dramatic realism: These characters struggling to break the bonds of the world they were born into and these plays pressing against the limitations of their own form, give my work, I hope, a theatricality which undercuts the conventions of realistic drama and the complacencies of the upper-middle-class milieu which I tend to write about. (xi) In the spirit of the eighties, Gurney also speaks of the “built-in ‘playfulness’” (xi) of his selfreflexive forms. Another subtext emerges, however, from his concern that this playfulness, “along with the fact that I write about WASPs, seems to open me up to the charge of being shallow and superficial” (xi). Considering his postmodern emphasis of play, of formal subversion, of self-reflexivity, this concern seems misplaced, and its juxtaposition with these literary aims suggests a conflicted author and a more complex aesthetics than he owns up to. What remains unspoken in Guraey’s introduction to The Cocktail Hour is its obvious reference to T.S.Eliot, a reference that is made explicitly in the play more than once. Perhaps it remains unspoken because Gurney’s allusion, or hommage, to Eliot points the spectator or reader away from the playful, self-reflexive, constantly shifting world of the postmodern and back toward the realistic aesthetics and the high-modernist quest for the sacred and the moral of Eliot’s Cocktail Party. Gurney has made it clear that his vision is comic, in the formal sense, that he seeks closure for his plays in a “reconciliation…between the individual and the world”4 Noting that in the European tradition, in the plays of Molière, Congreve, and Coward, for example, “the world is always put back together by the end,” while in “American comedies, there’s anarchism at the end—Huck Finn says goodbye and shoves off for the territories, Holden Caulfield ends up in the madhouse,” Gurney concludes that his seeking a reconciliation between the individual and the larger society goes “against the grain of the American embracing of private freedom.”5 These are hardly the aesthetics of a postmodernist. They are in fact closer to those of a neoclassicist. Gurney’s conflicting aesthetic aims are perhaps most evident in Another Antigone (1987). The playful self-reflexiveness in this modern Antigone play about a young woman who is writing a modern Antigone play cannot be missed. But it is also, as the Antigone character Judy’s play is, meant to speak meaningfully to what the Creon character Henry calls “a world which seems too often concerned only with the meaning of meaning” (159). Henry is a quite eloquent spokesman for the classicist point of view that “there are things beyond the world of management which are profoundly unmanageable,” although he comes to realize that, like Creon, “in his commitment to abstract and dehumanizing laws, he has neglected the very heart of his life” (170) by ignoring the human needs of the people around him. Judy, on the other hand, develops from a simple and rather juvenile defiance of authority for its own sake to an awakening sense of the failures of the American social

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system, but she can express this only through the rather useless gesture of refusing an award for her play with the words: Maybe my play hasn’t influenced anyone else, but it sure has influenced me. I don’t feel good about my life anymore. I don’t feel good about my country. I can’t accept all this stuff that’s going on these days. I can’t accept it. No, I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept it. (171) At the end of the play, one of the characters says, “I have a feeling we may have lost them both forever” (172). This play may be self-reflexive, but it is not postmodern. Its form is that of classical tragedy, and its action is impelled by a clear conflict between two characters which compels debate of fundamental moral questions. In fact,A. R.Gurney is a deeply moral playwright. Like the writers he pays homage to—Sophocles, Henry James, T.S.Eliot—he believes in a social contract and in human responsibility and in right conduct, and he is concerned with the basic ethical question of how one should act in this world. Like the naive empiricist realists, he seems even to believe in the reality of this world. The disjunction between these two versions of Gurney’s aesthetics need not suggest a hopeless contradiction. I would suggest that it points instead to an aesthetic dialectic, in which the playwright makes use of some of the literary methods of the postmodern milieu in which he lives to dramatize a fundamentally realistic vision. The Golden Age (1980), perhaps because it is the earliest of the “self-reflexive” plays about writing, provides the most clearcut example of Gurney’s allusive aesthetics. As the paradigmatic case for this study, it will be examined most thoroughly. Gurney notes that the play was “suggested by a story of Henry James” (60), the most straightforward hommage made in any of his allusive plays. The “story” is The Aspern Papers (1888), a novella based on an anecdote that James had heard about Byron’s lover Clair Clairmont and a Boston critic. In The Aspern Papers, as in any of James’s fiction, the narrative viewpoint is crucial. Although the narrator is never given a name, he is clearly the center of the story as well as what James would call the “center of consciousness”—the subject through whom all perceptions are filtered for the reader. The narrator, who is the editor of the poet Jeffrey Aspern’s papers, comes to Venice in pursuit of a cache of love letters that he believes is in the possession of Juliana Bordereau, who had been romantically involved with Aspern in the 1820s. After joking with a friend that he will do anything, including make love to Juliana’s middle-aged niece Tina, to get the letters, he becomes acquainted with the Bordereaus by assuming a false identity and persuading them to rent him some rooms in their large palazzo, where he tries to insinuate himself into their confidence so they will show him the letters. In the course of this, he becomes increasingly disillusioned with Aspern’s “divine Juliana” because of her apparent greed for money as she tries to get him to pay huge sums for rent and for a miniature portrait of Aspern with which she tempts him. A climactic scene occurs when the narrator, unable to restrain himself while Juliana lies on her apparent death bed, sneaks into her apartment and tries to open the secretary where he believes the letters are stored. Casting a guilty glance over his shoulder, he sees Juliana watching him with her “extraordinary eyes”:

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They glared at me; they were like the sudden drench, for a caught burglar, of a flood of gaslight; they made me horribly ashamed. I never shall forget…the tone in which as I turned, looking at her, she hissed out passionately, furiously: “Ah you publishing scoundrel!”6 The narrator’s conflict comes when, following Juliana’s death, for which he considers himself at least partially responsible because of this incident, the helpless Tina gives him to understand that if he will marry her, she will give him the Aspern papers. After taking his leave with “the greatest embarrassment ever painted on a human countenance” (383), the narrator lives through a tortured day in which he contemplates “the price” he is being asked to pay for the papers and wonders guiltily if his calculatedly ingratiating behavior toward Tina had indicated that he cared for her romantically. Having concluded that he couldn’t “for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous pathetic provincial old woman” and that his “predicament was the just punishment of that most fatal of human follies, our not having known when to stop” (399), he goes to bed, but says that while he slept, “the oddest revulsion had taken place in my spirit” (402). He says he woke in a panic, wondering, “was I still in time to save my goods” (402) and feeling that “the condition Miss Tina had attached to that act no longer appeared an obstacle worth thinking of’ (402). Going to Miss Tina to accept her bargain, he sees her as transfigured, younger, even angelic, and says to himself, “Why not—after all, why not?” (403). Tina, however, surprises the narrator by showing an uncharacteristic “force of soul” (403) in meeting him only to say goodbye. She tells him that after he had left her, she destroyed the papers, a characteristically Jamesian gesture of renunciation. When he hears this, the narrator finds that “Miss Tina was there still, but the transfiguration was over and she had changed back to a plain dingy elderly person” (403). Tina has chosen to renounce the bargain that would buy her an unwilling husband and to live a dignified if lonely life. The narrator, on the other hand, ends the story with the thought that when he looks at the portrait of Aspen, “I can scarcely bear my loss—I mean of the precious papers” (404). Throughout the story, James depicts the literary critic as a hypocritical liar and thief who will do almost anything to, as Juliana puts it, “rake up the past” (361) and, as Tina puts it, “pry into [the author’s] life” (341). James’s narrative technique allows the narrator to incriminate himself, inviting the reader to indict him, and by extension the whole critical profession. His response when he meets Juliana is the most revealing of the critic’s attitude: The divine Juliana as a grinning skull—the vision hung there until it passed. Then it came to me that she was tremendously old—so old that death might take her at any moment, before I should have time to compass my end. The next thought was a correction to that; it lighted up the situation. She would die next week, she would die tomorrow—then I could pounce on her possessions and ransack her drawers. (309) James’s critic also tries to justify his actions, however, casting himself in the role of “appointed minister” to Jeffrey Aspern’s temple and claiming that he and his co-editor “had done more for his memory than any one else, and had done it simply by opening lights into

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his life” (295). To the reader the Narrator says that Aspern “had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth, which alone at such a distance of time we could be interested in establishing” (295), a defense of the biographical enterprise to which Juliana later responds, “The truth is God’s, it isn’t man’s; we had better leave it alone. Who can judge of it? Who can say?” (361). Throughout the novella, the narrator makes the jesuitical argument that the end justifies the means—in this case, bringing Jeffrey Aspern’s intimate relationship with Juliana to light, which he sees as in the “service of art” (324), justifies lying and hypocrisy, the manipulation and exploitation of human weakness, and finally the commodification of himself as a unit of exchange in a marriage bargain. In constructing his narrative, however, James makes it clear that the justification is far from adequate, and the narrator is revealed as morally bankrupt at the end of the story. In The Golden Age, Gurney examines many of the same moral issues, but with some crucial differences. Since the play is kept within the confines of mimetic realism, there is no privileged communication between any of the characters and the audience. The fact that characters must be revealed through the public discourse of realistic dialogue tends to equalize their presentation for the spectator or reader. Gurney capitalizes on this generic limitation, giving the women characters, in this case Isabel Hastings Hoyt and her granddaughter Virginia, as full development as he gives the critic Tom. Gurney changes the locale of the play to New York and the focus of the critic’s interest from a romantic poet to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tom, who teaches American literature at Hunter College, has discovered that Isabel, a central figure in the jazz-age social set that Fitzgerald wrote about, is living in a New York brownstone. He comes to her with the idea of writing a book about her, which he thinks will reveal something new about the intimate lives of Fitzgerald and other artists. Openly revealing her plans to Virginia, Isabel tantalizes Tom with the hint that a black folder she has contains a chapter from an early Great Gatsby manuscript describing an explicit sexual scene between Daisy and Gatsby. Meanwhile she maneuvers Tom and Virginia into a romantic relationship that she hopes will lead to marriage. In the course of the play she manages to reveal nothing about herself or Fitzgerald. In the play it is Isabel who proposes the swap of the manuscripts for Tom’s marriage to Virginia, and Tom refuses, threatening to leave if she doesn’t show him the book. As in the novella, Isabel collapses, and Tom, having been told by Virginia that she has orders to destroy the manuscript, tries to get hold of it. Gurney’s climactic discovery scene is more extended than James’s and more visual. After Tom creeps across the stage in the dark, finds the manuscript, strikes a match, and starts to look at it, “Suddenly all the lights in the room go on, full blaze. ISABEL stands framed in her doorway, one hand on the lightswitch, the other holding a small shotgun. SHE wears a long white nightgown, and she looks wildly spectacular” (126). After humiliating Tom by forcing him to remove his shirt and trousers, she says to Virginia: “I’m leaving you a picture. There it is. Portrait of a man. Do you want it? Is it worth it? Remember: he can steal your very soul” (127). Isabel gathers up the manuscript, and then collapses, with the stage going to black, followed by a voiceover of her obituary. In developing the conflict between Isabel and Tom over the manuscript, Gurney focuses on issues that are similar to the ones James raises in the story. Isabel tells Tom, “I don’t like academics. They’re all so hungry…hungry for life. They suck your blood” (67). By contrast,

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“a real writer brings in life. He creates it” (67). To Tom’s grandiose description of his project of reconstructing what he calls the “Golden Age” of American literature in order to “connect,” she responds that it “seems odd you’d want to start by writing gossip” (69). Tom’s defense of his pursuit of the manuscript—“I mean, is it a crime to love literature around here? Is it a major crime to want to preserve the past?” (122)—is belied by the mercenary terms in which he conceptualizes his relationship with Isabel: I am speculating on you. I’m not getting a nickel for doing this. Nothing. No publisher has been willing to cough up one red cent until we produce something tangible and concrete…. Now I’m betting on you, Mrs. Hoyt. I’m putting my life on the line here. (86) It is of course Isabel whose life is on the line, not Tom’s, but having converted that life into a potentially saleable commodity, he has lost sight of the human being to whom it rightfully belongs. As in Another Antigone, Gurney voices in The Golden Age what he sees as a moral danger that is peculiar to the academic. Responding to Virginia’s accusation that he is “lost in the lost generation,” Tom says, “Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m so much in love with the past that I can’t love anything else…. I think we’re a greedy, vulgar society and we’re spinning out of control” (91). The danger that Gurney sees is the use of an idealized past—Tom’s notion of the Golden Age—to escape the moral and social imperatives of the present, and in essence, withdraw from the responsibilities of the human social contract. In a world which is conceived of as greedy, vulgar, and out of control, Tom has no ethical standards to meet either in his professional treatment of Fitzgerald and Isabel or in his personal treatment of Isabel and Virginia. Unlike James, and in the spirit of his fundamentally comic aesthetics, Gurney allows Tom a moral redemption, although he does not go so far as to suggest that he and Virginia can have a future together. In his play, it is Tom who makes the Jamesian act of renunciation, when Virginia offers him the manuscript a month after her grandmother’s death, unencumbered by any suggestion of marriage. Tom is able to say no because he is writing his “own book now. Strangest thing: the minute I left here I started writing…. I’m not sure what it’s about. I have these thoughts—no, I have these feelings, and I came back to work them out” (130). The implication is that Tom’s move from vampire critic to life-creating writer has begun the redemptive process that will allow him finally to “connect” with his own living world. Gurney is also much more hopeful about Virginia’s future than James is about Tina’s. After Tom renounces the manuscript, she burns it, ending her dependency on her grandmother. In a little self-reflexive gesture, Gurney has her tell Tom the manuscript was only a play called The Golden Age, by Walter Babcock McCoy: VIRGINIA: Yes! And it ends right here in this room. There’s this man and this woman. TOM: He says he loves her. And wants her to live with him. VIRGINIA: Ah, but she says she had this fabulous grandmother. And she hopes she’s inherited some of her…spark, I think it was. And then she straightens her

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shoulders, which she learned to do in posture class at boarding school, and walks right up to the man and shakes hands. (SHE speaks very softly.) Goodbye. (132) Gurney’s subversion of the generic expectations of comedy in withholding the “boy gets girl” ending actually serves to emphasize the moral redemption of Tom and the empowerment of Virginia that suggest more hope for the future than their sexual union could. They have renounced each other as well as the fame and financial security represented by the manuscript, a genuine loss for both, but Gurney suggests that their development as human beings is well worth it. The Golden Age is the most realistic, the least self-reflexive, of the three allusive plays. In The Cocktail Hour, while maintaining the mimetic illusion, Gurney extends the “play” about the play from a single suggestion—that Virginia and Tom are enacting the ending of a play called The Golden Age—to the whole play. In The Cocktail Hour, John has come to ask his parents’ permission to put a play about them called The Cocktail Hour into production. In the course of the action, he constantly reveals what will happen in Gurney’s play by telling the characters what happens in his play. Gurney’s allusion to Eliot’s Cocktail Party is not, as is the allusion to James, made explicit, but comes in the characters’ discussion of John’s play. As his father says of the title: “It will confuse everyone. They’ll come expecting T.S. Eliot, and they’ll get John. Either way, they’ll want their money back” (26). Although its aesthetics are playful, the play embodies a moral debate similar to that of The Golden Age. In this case it is the playwright rather than the critic who is on trial, but he also faces a moral dilemma. To what extent is the writer justified in exposing the private lives of people who would prefer to keep them private in order to create a work of art? Once again the form is comic, proceeding to the celebratory dinner at the end and John’s reconciliation with his father, although once again a renunciation is required, in this case of John’s real vision of the truth about his family. Visually, the comic celebration is also undercut by John’s being left alone on the stage with his play while the rest of the family troops off to dinner. Gurney’s moral statement in these plays is clear. For Gurney, the “reconciliation… between the individual and the world”7 is primary, and the individual who chooses to remain outside the social contract cannot be fully happy. But this reconciliation demands the renunciation of some individual desires and even the compromising of some personal principles. In his hope for the future, there is also a sense of loss. His comic vision, like James’s, is dark, and subverted, and ironic, but it is a comic vision nonetheless, and one that is grounded on humanistic values and belief in social responsibility. Gurney may use some of the techniques of the postmodern idiom, but the vision they help to realize complicates their aesthetic implications immensely. Beyond his playful structures, A.R.Gurney is a deeply serious playwright, negotiating a classical set of values through a murky postmodern moral landscape.

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NOTES 1. Love Letters and Two Other Plays: The Golden Age and What I Did Last Summer. New York: Penguin Books, 1988, p. vii. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 2. Quoted in Anne Marie Welsh, “Another Gurney for the Old Globe,” San Diego Union, May 29, 1988, [n.p.]. 3. The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays: Another Antigone and The Perfect Party. New York: Penguin Books, 1990, p. viii. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 4. Quoted in Alex Witchel, “Laughter, Tears, and the Perfect Martini,” New York Times Magazine, November 12, 1989, 105. 5. Witchel, 105. 6. The Aspern Papers, Henry James: Selected Fiction, ed. Leon Edel, New York: Dutton, 1964, p. 383. Subsequent page references appear in the text. 7. Witchel, 105.

Gurney’s Sylvia: What Oft Was Thought JoALLEN BRADHAM

Through their laughter at and applause for A.R.Gurney’s Sylvia, audiences celebrate both novelty and familiarity. This balance of the fresh and the familiar suggests Gurney, in an appeal deeper than simply laughter, has achieved what Alexander Pope proffered as one definition of wit: “What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest” (Essay on Criticism, 298). The concept of the play constitutes the truth we often think: freedom, sensory response, unquestioning love, and nonrational enjoyment of life might well be the antidote to an overintellectualized, formal, and restrictive existence. Often thought, as well, is the solace and sturdy virtue a dog brings as humanity’s best friend. “Ne’er so well Exprest” is that, here, the dog can talk in words and sentences the human brain is accustomed to processing. With her heightened language, the dog talks the way wits in Restoration comedy and Oscar Wilde talk. Out of the mouth of Sylvia comes the way genuinely witty human beings would express themselves if they could. Appreciation of the familiar in human feelings is immediate. Very few people have failed to know the companionship and love animals bring, and those who love and live with animals remain convinced they can commune with them in mutually informative and rewarding ways. Animal lovers need no treatises to document the bonds with dogs, but the emotion is so basic and universal, that is, so often thought, that many writers attempt to record its intensity. Caroline Knapp, for example, in Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, offers an informal and anecdotal analysis of the human-canine symbiosis. Her book articulates what animal lovers know and Gurney’s play dramatizes. Lucille, Knapp’s dog, has “household duties” which include being an ally, providing a “steady presence,” and giving the human partner “something to take care of, to touch, and to love” (53). This list approximates Sylvia’s job description, but what makes the play strike us as more than a brush with the pet-centered situations and emotions we confront and feel every day is the assimilation of what oft has been known and used in dramatic and nondramatic literature. Rendering Sylvia artistically familiar are the old beast fable, the morality play, the ritual celebrations of the defeat of winter by spring, and the hallmarks of the Old Comedy of Aristophanes. Sylvia reminds audiences of ever-popular dog stories of Lassie, White Fang, Old Yeller, Sounder; of the many TV series that romp and chase across generations; and of movies— both classic and current such as The Incredible Journey, As Good as It Gets, 101 Dalmatians, and My Dog Skip. But Sylvia, going well beyond the warmth and emotional appeal of the extensive canine canon, demonstrates the inheritance of the beast fable, which buries its bones in pre-

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Homeric days. Translations of fables into all languages and many additions spliced to the Aesopian canon have always flourished. Moreover, most children read or have read to them a core collection of fables. Perhaps one reason the play delights audiences is that the viewer is reminded, subconsciously, of being read animal tales at a time of peace, contentment, and security. With Sylvia we are back in a warm place and cared for as a beloved object. Thus, in literary history and in personal development, the animal story remains a staple of our culture. Like all the wise creatures of fable, Sylvia certainly looks like an animal, and those who see her put her in the classification dog, but she can talk to those sufficiently gifted to listen and hear. What she has to say perpetuates the pithy wisdom of her predecessors, and, like them, she has a message that makes life better: love, be loyal, take chances, be grateful, enjoy every moment. Always charming, Sylvia is deliberately didactic on one occasion in a speech that replays the moral appended in most versions of Aesop. Just before she is to be taken to the country, Sylvia explains to Kate the difference between “otherwise” and “this wise”: Yes, and I’ll tell you what “this wise” is. “This wise” is the fact that he can never be happy with me unless you like me, too. Which is why he is always foisting me on you. Which is called sharing, Kate. Which is what some people sometimes call love. That’s “this wise,” Kate. (71) And like the teaching beasts from whom she descends, Sylvia wins. First she wins Greg’s heart; then, teaching the teacher, she wins Kate over; finally she wins a home for herself, where she enjoys a long and happy life. Unlike the dog in “The Fox and the Dog,” there is no worn place in her neck where a collar signals bondage. In a collection of fables, Gurney’s entry might bear the title “The Mutt and the Muddled Marriage.” If the wise central character recalls the familiar beast fable, then Sylvia, as a dramatic creation, regenerates pivotal moments in the history of the theater. Most obvious is the play’s recycling of the old morality play. Greg, like his allegorical prototypes Mankind and Everyman, stands between two opposing forces who make no effort to disguise what they represent or the direction in which they wish to pull faltering Mankind. At a time when theatrical experimentation and postmodernism rule, Gurney works in a daring way. Using old ways and well-established strategies, he does nothing to obfuscate, distance, or put the burden of interpretation on the audience. Kate and Sylvia are what they are—simply and clearly. The dog is animal essence, life without complication, but with an abundance of feeling and sensory response. Kate—with her degree, her glasses, her classes, her pilot program, her conference paper, her grant, her quoting of Shakespeare, her concern with cognitive functionality and decorous diction—is the other pole. The two are like Good Angels and Bad Angels, but without, of course, the insinuation of damnation or moral failure. Sylvia leads Greg as other personifications led his previous selves in Mankind and the Castle of Perservance. Kate, like Kindred and Cousin in Everyman, will not go with Greg where he must travel. All three characters are walking symbols; all preserve the system of symbolic naming by which the moralities included all human beings. The name of the dog is Sylvia, which means “woods,” or, as Greg explains to Kate, “I looked it up. It means ‘She of the woods’”(11).

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As “she of the woods,” Sylvia recalls the old pastoral experience, the condition in which the human being is in harmony with nature and can read the signs of nature. Greg finds Sylvia in the park, where he has gone to escape the pressure and disillusion of the city and modern economic life. City and park are as straightforward as their symbolic roles and names. The Manhattan skyline dominates, and the opening stage direction specifies music “suggesting the city” (7). But the word park is more refrain than reference: GREG: I found her in the park. KATE: The park? GREG: I was sitting in the park and she jumped right into my lap. KATE: Back up, please. You were sitting? In the park? When were you sitting in the park? GREG: This afternoon. I took a break from the office. (Pause.) I had another fight with Harold. (Pause.) So I went to the park to cool off. (10) Six uses of the word park in five speeches leave no doubt that park is the major concept against which Greg, Kate, and Sylvia project different responses. Paired with Sylvia, Greg goes to the park regularly and finds a Green World within the corrupt city. With her he can also take long walks at night, rediscovering the sky as the rustic folk of pastorals knew the heavens and sought wisdom from its bodies and their movements. This link with the pastoral past and the ability to read nature, Gurney also points up as Greg explains to Sylvia: Look up there! Through all this urban haze, you can still see a star! How long has it been since we’ve really looked at the stars? Our early ancestors knew them cold, Sylvia. They could read them like books. (Sylvia yawns.) They used them to guide their way through forests, and across deserts, and over the vast expanses of the sea Maybe that vast book of nature spread open above us is trying to tell us things we once knew, and have forgotten, and need to know again. (27) Kate neither ventures into the Green World nor understands the necessity of pastoral comfort. Her name, short for Katherine, goes back to a root word meaning “pure,” and, until her conversion, she is pure or absolute rule, rigidity, and reason, the product of urban enlightenment, alien to nature. As Kate, she recalls powerful Kates and ruling Katherines or Catherines. Shakespeare’s shrewish Kate is part of her inheritance—her way or no way. Catherine I, Empress of Russia, outfoxed the Turkish grand vizier; Catherine II (The Great), a shrewd and brilliant ruler, was known for her reading of major writers; Catherine de Medicis, Queen Regent of France during the minority of Charles IX, later dispatched with Huguenots in ways more drastic than sending them to the Paris animal shelter. Catherine of Aragon, wife of Henry VIII, was the mother of Mary Tudor. In selecting the name Kate, Gurney evokes an image of powerful, dominant, history-making women, skilled at power plays, but not invincible. Greg, the echo of Mankind, vacillates between the personified vices and virtues of Sylvia and Kate, who grapple for dominion. His name, as well as theirs, fits the pattern. Gregory means “to awaken, one who awakens.” And, indeed, that is exactly what Greg does; he

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awakens to a new self drawn irresistibly to the Sylvia principle and the Green World. Suspicious, Kate tries to blame Greg for attracting Sylvia: “You whistled. Beckoned. Something. You’re always doing that with dogs” (10). But Greg explains that he is the sought, not the seeker: “I didn’t this time, Kate. Actually I was asleep. I was dozing in the sun. And suddenly: Sylvia” (10). Literally and symbolically, Greg is asleep when Sylvia comes to him and saves him. In the three names and in the management of the triangle, Gurney has recalled and recycled the most familiar foundation of English drama. Opposing forces wrestle for a man’s soul, a term Gurney fixes in the mind of the audience by having Kate tell Greg he’s “behaving like a poor lost soul” (13). The footprint of the morality with its fluctuating battles and its spiritual journey at the end of which Mankind (Greg) receives blessing is readily apparent, but more than a general similarity with the old plays informs Sylvia. The fluidity of setting in which one location turns instantly into another derives from the casual transformation of place typical of the moralities. Everyman, for example, goes to various places which become the site needed and expected just because he is there and using the location. In The Castle of Perseverance, Humanum Genus (Mankind) is led to various scaffolds, at each of which the struggle to possess him intensifies; here, Greg “is pulled by Sylvia” (19). He moves from the apartment, to the park, to the airport, to the psychiatrist’s office, at each turn complicating his life because his choices become harder and the temptations more pressing. But like the tortured hero of Castle and Everyman, Greg finds the blessed ending of forgiveness, great love, and salvation. The difference is that the marriage at the end is not with God, but with Kate in the renewing of love. The warm ease of the concluding scene reconstructs in secular terms the rejoicing of the angels that the soul has united with that being in whom fulfilling love lives. The old morality, however, was not all pious personification. Mankind, for example, included low comedy and irreverence in addition to the basic contention between Mercy and Mischief over the human prey. Titivillus, the devil figure, and his crew were crowd pleasers in much the way that Sylvia is. They indulged in foul speech and coarse antics as they schemed to claim Mankind’s soul. Sylvia, seeing a cat, evidences a mouth foul enough for the most depraved of devils: “Fuck you, kitty! Up yours with a ten-foot pole!… You should be chased up a tree, you cocksucker! I’d like to bite your tail and shove it up your ass! I hate your fucking guts, kitty, and don’t you ever forget it!” (29). Her sexual interest in Bowser cuts straight to the coarse: “I want to fuckie-fuckfuck I want to fuck toot sweet!” (49). The response of modern audiences to profane, sexual, and scatological moments supports the scholarly speculation that crowds loved and laughed at the less than holy manner of Titivillus. Gurney effects a parodic relationship between his play and the morality, not to debase the original but to intensify the humor of the inheriting text by forcing comparison with the usually sober source. Irony, distancing, exaggeration, and caricature operate throughout Sylvia; these qualities separate it from the morality at the same time the names and tensions adhere to it. The technique is “imitation with critical ironic distance” or “transcontextualization” (37) as Linda Hutcheon explains in A Theory of Parody. A recycled middleaged woman, newly free from the domestic leash of home-tending and childrearing, a male menopausal quester, and a mutt are funnier superimposed on souls, sin, salvation, and eschatological doom. As audience members, we decode the 1995 play from the encoded

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traditions and expectations of medieval religious and dramatic systems. The neat struggle and tight structure of the religious drama enrich the play, and Greg is such a zany Mankind and his lapse so ludicrous that his folly, like his vehicle, is always funny. A dog walking on two legs in imitation of human gait captures the relationship of Sylvia to its source— imitation but with a gaping and hilarious difference. In Sylvia are symbols without artifice, reworkings of the mouthpieces of principle that the creators of the moralities crafted and infused into the bloodstream of English dramatic structure beginning about 1350. Gurney’s tour de force, claiming older and deeper roots, connects with the ancient rituals from which most scholars believe drama comes, that is, the celebration of the force of life over the power of death, the mythic reenactment of the seasons. Greg’s life is winter; he is in “‘the dangerous years’…between the first hint of retirement and the first whiff of the nursing home” (61). His children are away at college; his job is sterile and empty (not “real” as he regularly says); his wife is looking beyond him and away; his new home is geographically and spiritually separated from nature. He is miserable, dead of spirit, and devoid of hope. Kate, although self-important with her new work and grateful that at last she has found her time and a means of individual satisfaction, has situated herself in an arid space separated from real life. Her concern is now with tales fixed in print; thus, she lives at one remove from the real thing. It is the winter of their discontent—with one another and for Greg, at least, with his life. Into this winter bounds the life force, spring, in the energy and exuberance of Sylvia, who, in time, returns life to Greg, Kate, and the marriage. When the three principals sing the apartment-airport duet, the words of Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” focus on regenerative spring: “When you’re near there’s such an air of spring about it” (31). Spring wins again, and although Kate and Greg outlive Sylvia and grow older, they keep the spring resurrection the fertile Sylvia delivered. Allusion to the old seasonal myth of resurrection links Sylvia with another more specific and more easily documented dramatic antecedent: the Old Comedy with its homage to Dionysus, who was, in part at least, the embodiment of the forces of nature that enabled fertility and growth in the vegetable and animal world. Kate recalls the Olympian deities, remote and frequently inaccessible, but Sylvia is Dionysus, warm and wagging. Convention holds that Dionysus, ever available to the common people, offered immediate escape, through drink, into a more pleasant state. He is the least fancy and least demanding of gods; similarly, Sylvia, a mutt, wanders in a public park. She appears “suddenly” (10) to the dozing Greg, who, once inspired by her, becomes besotted and enters a transformed state in which he sees his life and obligations differently. This new state includes fascination with and vicarious participation in Sylvia’s unabashed sex life, his own apparently nonexistent. Sylvia and Bowser in the park recall the bawdy gestures and ribald language of Dionysian revels. Tom “stretches, flexes, lights a cigarette” (51) and, in some productions, hoists his pants provocatively as Bowser and Sylvia uncouple. “Let’s go, Big Guy!” Tom calls, “Shake a leg, O Studly One!” (51). Both Tom and Greg admire the copulation of the two dogs in a scene that does everything but parade a phallus as the old plays did. In its interludes of sexual misrule (Old Comedy’s komos and gamos), Sylvia smells of Aristophanes, not Aesop or Everyman.

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Lysistrata, The Clouds, The Frogs, and The Birds, among others, combine the two essentials of Aristophanic comedy—satire and fantasy, the former attacking institutions, systems, and individuals, the latter going well beyond the realm of realism into the creation of a more nearly Utopian state. Greg’s world, by the usual standards, shows great success: an affluent life, a high-stakes job, a posh apartment, freedom from illness, a stable marriage, children in college. Greg and Kate seem to have it all. Kate even has the new feminist subset of the American Dream, a room of her own in which she is no longer an adjunct of her husband. But the system is not producing happiness, and Greg, suffering the “sense of disillusionment which goes with the late twentiethcentury capitalism” (27), is ready to chuck it. As Aristophanes kept hacking away at political corruption and governmental mismanagement, so Gurney exposes that winning what America says to win does not reward the soul. Thus he holds the American Dream up to satiric indictment and concludes: better a dog that’s real than the Dream that betrays. In the course of the play, very little of modern American life escapes attack. What most people dismiss as a mutt or a mixed-breed dog, Gurney brings into the pack of the new society’s politically correct language: “You’ve got hybrid vigor, don’t you, Sylvia? You are multicultural” (13). Multicultural teases with mock-heroic magnification so that finally the disparity between a mutt and multicultural undercuts the second term and exposes it as more trendy than solemn, more the buzzword du jour than a culturally admirable attribute. The contemporary instant reflex of condemning any disagreement, no matter how trivial or irrelevant, as an act of bigotry and prejudice comes in for èxposure: SYLVIA: You don’t like me, do you? KATE: (Working.) It’s not a question of that. SYLVIA: You don’t like dogs. KATE: I like them when they belong to other people. SYLVIA: You’re prejudiced. KATE: Not at all. SYLVIA: I think you’re prejudiced against dogs! KATE: (Putting down her work.) I am not prejudiced, Sylvia. When I was a girl…. (14) Feminist rhetorical jargon and the cant of pop psychology, like misapplications of multiculturalism and prejudice, take their blows. Spay the dog? No, because “it’s a feminist thing. You’re supposed to let her experience how it feels to be female” (21). The exaggerated platitudes of pop psychology climax in Leslie’s so-called professional advice to Greg: “Drop the leash, Greg, and once again take hold of your wife’s hand. See if you are capable of walking with her, side by side, toward the setting sun” (62). But before this maudlin moment mocking the facile generalizations of marriage counseling, the publications of pop psychology get their blows. Tom has read every self-help and dog-help book on the shelf it seems; his wisdom mirrors such tomes as Play Now, Spay Later (21), and an unnamed volume celebrating the presence and power of the biophilic gene (47).* In addition to selfhelp books, Gurney uses the American musical comedy as a literary form to puncture any possibility that mainstream culture is sensible or even marginally thoughtful. In musical comedies, otherwise sane people break into song in corn fields, on carousels, during the

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fights of street gangs. Why not an airport? Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” rises from the boarding gate and rings antiphonally with the apartment. The conventions of television invite indictment. News anchors demonstrate a particular fondness for three-part poly sy llabic names, when two would be clear and complete. Gurney holds this affectation up for a quick laugh as Phyllis asks, “Who would you like to meet? Kitty Carlisle Hart? Charlayne Hunter Gault? Boutros Boutros-Ghali?”(33). More extensive is the satiric parody of the soap opera and the talk show. Parody demands particular consideration because of its Aristophanic antecedents. In The Birds seemingly learned and certainly pompous polysyllabic identifications from high sources attempt to disguise and protect frightened human beings by passing them off as rare birds. In The Frogs Aeschylus and Euripides mock each other’s dramatic speeches by incorporating and distorting passages from the two writers’ plays. In Lysistrata the vocabulary and the gestures of sex replace those of multinational negotiation. Gurney, in addition to his parody of the morality play, invokes as a base text, not a genuinely serious work, but the ubiquitous talk show which takes itself seriously as a means of promoting understanding and compassion. By exaggerating the distinctive style and unctuous, but intrusive, questioning of the interview, Gurney mocks the original for its thinness and insinuates that the programs and their hosts might as well be talking to dogs for all the human insight they generate. Greg interviews Sylvia: GREG: I wish I knew more about your former owner. SYLVIA: Second owners always wish that. GREG: Did you like him as much as you like me? SYLVIA: How do you know it was a guy? GREG: Good point. But you were mistreated, weren’t you? SYLVIA: I got to sleep on the couch. GREG: Still. What kind of person would take you to the park and just let you go? SYLVIA: How do you know I wasn’t lost? Or how do you know I didn’t see you sitting on a bench, and simply say to myself, “There’s the man I want to spend the rest of my live with.” How do you know I didn’t break my leash and run to your side? (46) Parodying the vulgar triviality of the talk show in which the interviewer pries for intimate, titillating details, the exchange also burlesques the bar-talk or pillow-talk of the soap opera. With the stressing of certain words and use of the eyes, actors readily suggest the dialogue and mannerisms of so-called art and entertainment that claims to provide insight into better living. What incongruous rot, Sylvia barks! Aristophanes’ comedies exercised fantasy by using as chorus figures, not human beings, but talking clouds or, more usually, animals—birds, frogs, wasps. The fantastical talking dog derives from this tradition. Like the birds who help Peithetaeus find a better and more just world in the Birds, Sylvia enables Greg and Kate to find a stronger marriage and better lives. Aristophanes’ comedies grow out of wishes for a more positive social system, one free from war, injustice, tyrants, bad poets, and worse philosophers. Sylvia grows out of Gurney’s wish for a better world, free from cant, pedantry, polarization, and popularized pabulum. In Aristophanes and Gurney, following the fantasy leads to fulfilling the wish.

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The reassuring familiarity of the play rises, in part, from the basic principle of dramatic construction, the triangle of Sylvia, Kate, and Greg. The actors taking these parts remain in the single role, but the fourth actor, who appears in satiric cameo moments, forms the self-contained second triangle of Tom, Phyllis, and Leslie, the gender-experimenting psychiatrist. Just as his Greek predecessors did, this actor dons multiple masks. In most productions, a man plays the three parts, one of them a woman and one at least holding out the possibility that she is a woman. This spectrum of male, female, male-female and the stereotypical extremes of language, gesture, and preoccupations of Tom and Phyllis satirize the old concept of gender polarization by which men and women are sex-typed according to predetermined images. Masculinity and femininity, as Sandra Lipsitz Bem stresses, are “cultural constructions” (126), not inherent biological or psychological givens. Leslie, telling Greg, “I wanted you to select my gender” (60), acknowledges contemporary theory that attribution of gender comes from what society expects and recognizes as appropriate. If convincing (but still humorous) in all three roles, a good actor affirms genders are not polarized, for Tom, Phyllis, and Leslie are variations on human nature, not opposites. This fluidity of role, gender, and personality, as Gurney orchestrates it, functions thematically to highlight a fluidity of species as well. Human and canine beings, properly viewed, are no more polarized than male and female. Mutual, immediate attraction beams between Greg and Sylvia; mutual suspicion and jealousy rasps between Kate and Sylvia. When Greg considers that Sylvia might have puppies, he is moved with paternal love, itemizing all he would do for the mother-to-be and for the new mother and her babes: “I’d be there for her. I’d pitch right in” (51). He projects the supportive, sensitive, virtually ideal human father who does not even seem aware the pups will not be his biological offspring. Needless to say, the best evidence of the similarity of species is love. Greg loves Sylvia; Sylvia loves Greg. Both go back and forth in human-canine-human-canine blurring. As Leslie is “exploring the boundaries of gender identification” (61), so Greg and Sylvia, exploring the nonspecific boundaries of two domesticated, highly socialized mammals (one spayed and hence, genderless, the other, in the eyes of his wife, in male menopause), prove more alike than unlike. No wonder audiences love Sylvia. It reaffirms all we know and feel. In meeting this end, the work fulfills the lines surrounding Pope’s famous definition of wit: What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest, Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind. (298–300) Moreover, it reprises in delightful form much we’ve learned about the history of drama and seen, year after year, in the great plays. It takes us back to the beginning of theatrical art, and, even before that, to the cycle of the seasons and the perpetual hope of life overcoming death. It takes us back to a childhood when we talked with animals, loved them unreservedly, and considered them as real as anything else in our daily lives. Like all comedy, the play takes us through peril to the establishment of a new harmony. Good dog that he is, A.R.Gurney has caught the scent and chased back to the beginning of drama, retrieved the prey and fetched it, intact and unruffled as the smooth duck in the

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mouth of the master retriever, to the hunter. Gurney has dug up the bones of our cultural, literary, and psychological inheritance and put them forth for our delight. He even gives us the treat for his efforts—the treat of daring fusion of disparate monuments of the literary inheritance and the treat of freshness of language—both the “ne’er so well Exprest” of Pope’s couplet. In didactic purpose and allegorical method, Aesop and the morality play link. As dramatic forms, the morality play and the comedies of Aristophanes find common classification. But the distance between the ribaldry and satire of Aristophanes and the sacred soul-summoning of the moralities is as vast as that between Dionysus and the Virgin Mary. Yet Gurney integrates all of these—as well as the opposites of fertility myths and genderless identity—into a whole that has to be sui generis. Seemingly all new, the play originates nothing but combines much, to produce what Joseph Addison called Pope’s Rape of the Lock, a merum sal, a delicious little thing. This new whole from old parts demonstrates what it means for a work to be “ne’er so well Exprest.” And the second treat is, of course, the lines that bristle with clever play, pithy insight, and double entendre that speak from and to both canis familiaris and Homo sapiens. NOTES I am grateful to my colleague Dr. Grace Galliano, professor of psychology and author of the forthcoming The Psychology of Gender: A Global Perspective, for alerting me to the vocabulary and scholarship of gender identification. * Editor’s Note. In 2001, in a curious coincidence, Edward Albee explored “biophilia” to its extreme form in The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?

Works Cited Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Gurney, A.R. Sylvia. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc. 1996. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York: Routledge, 1985. Knapp, Caroline. Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. New York: Dial, 1998. Pope, Alexander. “Pastoral Poetry” and “An Essay on Criticism.” Eds. E.Audra and Aubrey Williams. Vol 1 of The Poems of Alexander Pope. Twickenham Edition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1961. 232–326.

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Picnics and Parties: Inge, Gurney, and the Argument of Comedy ARVID F.SPONBERG

Northrop Frye’s wonderful 1948 essay “The Argument of Comedy” has not been superceded as an account of the spirit of comedy in western theatre.1 Fifty years on it retains its hallmark clarity of thesis, comprehensiveness of vision, and suppleness of expression. During the years since Frye wrote it, we have witnessed changes of tectonic scale in literary theory, but they have yet to expose major fault lines in the structure of Frye’s analysis.2 For anyone interested in comedy, the essay forms a craton of thought, a stable central formation about which roil and fluctuate forces with origins less fathomable, meanings less decipherable, and purposes less discernible than Frye’s. Similarly, the plays of William Inge have convincingly exhibited powers of survival that allow us to number Inge among the most important American dramatists of the twentieth century. When we bring his plays into relation with those of A.R.Gurney, and with Frye’s argument, we not only achieve a deeper understanding of each playwright’s special qualities, but we broaden our understanding of the comic values that comprise one of our culture’s most important contributions to the sum of human happiness. Including Inge in the company of comic playwrights may raise some eyebrows at first. And, truly, if you think of the names George Kaufman, say, and Neil Simon, the name William Inge probably will not pop to mind next. But a moment’s reflection should recall a scene or two by Inge that made you laugh, and those, in turn will trigger memories of others, for Inge did not limit his attention to life’s cloudy hours and stormy struggles but endeavored to see life whole and so included many humorous moments as well. It’s my purpose to assay a few of these in the light of Frye’s essay and illuminate some of the workings of Inge’s sense of theatrical humor. A.R.Gurney’s sense of theatrical humor not only needs no special explanation but among theatergoers it should not even need an introduction. Gurney has convulsed American audiences with laughter for over forty years. But just as we must prepare to think of the comic spirit in Inge, so we should open our minds to the serious implications of Gurney’s art. To the architect of laughter comedy is serious business. Frye defines two kinds of Comedy that seem especially pertinent to understanding the artistry of Inge and Gurney. The first of these Frye calls Aristotelian Comedy. The second he labels Shakespearean Comedy. In a minute, I’ll give you Frye’s definitions of these types of comedy, but first let me declare my thesis that when Inge turns to comedy, he reveals a twisty Aristotelian mind. By contrast, the hallmark of Gurney’s practice is a decided

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preference for the Shakespearean. (Frye also defines two other types: Platonic Comedy and Thomist Comedy, but these categories do not apply to Inge or Gurney.) Before we delve into Frye and some scenes by our playwrights, think about the differences and similarities between a picnic and a party. Among the differences we would probably think first about location: “picnic” pretty strongly implies “outside”; parties don’t have to be inside, but usually they are. We might next notice the style of dress implied by these words: Picnics are informal—very informal—in fact, they may define the farthest boundary of informality. You cannot go beyond picnicking in quest of informality at social gatherings. Parties, on the other hand, may occupy many different points along the continuum from informal to formal, but if we’re invited to a party we’re likely to ask how we should dress. We assume a certain level of formality unless we’re specifically told otherwise. For picnics we know how to dress and we know it won’t be black tie and strapless gowns. We may notice differences in the kinds of refreshments served. At picnics we expect hot dogs, potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, roasted marshmallows, cheese whiz; at parties we expect hors d’oeuvres, petit fours, caviar, Camembert. We have an entirely different vocabulary for the menus of picnics and parties. Lastly, we may note that at picnics we may expect to see children, indeed whole families, while parties imply a certain homogeneity of ages and usually one or two generations instead of three or four. Yet the sources, practices, and goals of picnics and parties have striking similarities. The motive for both is the desire, the need for socializing; the “method “if you will, is the use of food and drink to overcome shyness and inhibition, even hostility and fear and replace them with friendliness and conviviality. We forget ourselves in the consciousness of the group; and the goal is to create a sense of mutual obligation and respect, even affection, which we inadequately sum up in the word “community.” How do these similarities and differences bear on Inge and Gurney? I consider it significant that Inge wrote a play called Picnic and that Gurney has written plays called The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour, and The Perfect Party. It’s probably worth remembering, too, that Picnic is set on Labor Day and that Gurney has written two plays set on Labor Day, Later Life and Labor Day, the latter a sort of sequel to The Cocktail Hour. Furthermore, for Inge the idea of the picnic and for Gurney the idea of the party imply certain aims of society and art that are sources of characters, plots, and purposes of their plays. Now let us return to Frye. I have said that Inge’s sense of comedy is Aristotelian. Frye tells us this term denotes New Comedy or Menandrian Comedy, after the Greek playwright Menander. Here is Frye’s definition: “[Aristotelian] comedy unfolds from what may be described as a comic Oedipus situation. Its main theme is the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice. The opponent is usually the father (senex), and the psychological descent of the heroine from the mother is also sometimes hinted at. The father frequently wants the same girl, and is cheated out of her by the son, the mother thus becoming the son’s ally. The girl is usually a slave or courtesan, and the plot turns on a cognitio or discovery of birth that makes her marriageable. Thus it turns out that she is not under an insuperable taboo after all but is an accessible object of desire, so that the plot follows the regular wish fulfillment pattern. Often the central Oedipus situation is thinly concealed by surrogates or doubles of the main characters…[but] new comedy is certainly concerned with the

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maneuvering of a young man toward a young woman, and marriage is the tonic chord on which it ends. The normal comic resolution is the surrender of the senex to the hero, never the reverse.”3 Frye packs much into this explanation, but we needn’t be intimidated by his classical sources. He should make sense to anyone with a history of playgoing—as I assume of anyone reading this essay. Inge and Gurney would recognize the essential ideas in this passage because each has written plays that embody these principles. In Inge’s case, we can look at Picnic, and, if there were space, at Bus Stop. Picnic concerns Hal Carter’s quest for Madge Owens. In an archetypal Aristotelian comedy, Madge’s father, or some other older male relative would have opposed Hal. Inge twists the old storyline; Hal is opposed by Madge’s mother, the neighbors, and something in the nature of the town itself: it’s stability, it’s monotony, it’s lack of diversity and incident, and its worries about respectability. In Aristotelian Comedy, Hal would be an aristocrat and Madge would be a commoner, or even better, a slave. Inge twists this storyline, too. By reason of her beauty, Madge is the aristocrat. Certainly her mother seems to think so when she urges Madge to try to marry Alan: “Madge, a pretty girl doesn’t have long—just a few years when she’s the equal of kings and can walk out of a shanty like this and live in a palace…”4 Hal is lowborn and unfit for marriage by reason of his past and his behavior. In Aristotelian Comedy, some discovery would reveal Madge to be high-born after all and the romance would end with a marriage and a dance. Inge reverses this sequence. The dance comes first, in the center of the play, at the picnic. It’s important and exciting. Because of it, Madge steps off her pedestal to marry Hal, and they elope—sort of. It’s a two-phase elopement, Hal leaving first by hopping a freight, and then Madge peeling out a few minutes later in a carload of her admirers. It’s a distinctively American story: instead of settling down with their families and enjoying the support of the whole town, the happy couple separate themselves from the comrnunity and “light out for the territories”—well, Tulsa, anyway, in order—and here I’m paraphrasing Madge’s neighbor Helen Potts—to “learn for themselves” the things that Madge’s home town could teach them in half the time with one-third the agony. Inge knew the ending—we all do—from Huckleberry Finn, of course, and we’ve seen it in countless movies. Among the most memorable, The Graduate, which ends with Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson lighting out for the territories in a bus, and more recently, though muted, American Beauty, in which Jane Burnham and Ricky Fitts flee wicked, psychotic suburbia for the comparative sanity and innocence of New York City. Gurney knows all this. So did Inge. What I am saying amounts to part of the ABCs of writing comedy for theatre, movies, and television. Gurney taught a course in comedy at MIT. While describing that course in an interview he did for this book, he referred to The Graduate to distinguish precisely the difference between European and American comedy that Inge’s Picnic also clearly illustrates. A reconciliation occurs at the end of an Aristotelian comedy while anarchy marks the endings of American comedies. Gurney said, “In European comedy normally the social world is put back together in a modified way. The senex figure, the authority figure, is appeased, a marriage occurs, in some way and the continuum of life is embraced within the social context. In American comedy, normally, not always, but normally, there is a celebration of freedom rather than socialization. And

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from, say, the ending of Huck Finn, when Huck lights out for the territory, or the ending of the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup, where they end up just throwing potatoes at Margaret Dumont, there tends to be this kind of commitment or embracing of individual freedom, and even chaos and anarchy at the expense of the social order. We talked somewhat about The Graduate, I remember, in class, when you do have the establishment of social order. At the end of The Graduate, the young man defeats Mrs. Robinson, gets the girl he wants, and they get on the back of the bus and start out for a life of their own. In the first place, they’re moving, they’re not going back to Mrs. Robinson’s house to celebrate the wedding reception. They’re moving. But even as they’re sitting in the back of the bus and looking at each other, everybody in the bus is looking at them. And then [the ending takes on] this strange, odd tone of ‘Did we do the right thing? What are we caught in now?’ And everybody on the bus looks at them very peculiarly. They’re not [cheered] on to the bus, ‘Oh, here comes some newlyweds!’ Clap, clap, clap. It seems as if they’re treated like strangers and outsiders. They’ve got their own world only. That world seems to be moving somewhere, we don’t know where, and as they look at each other they even wonder whether they’re right for each other. [This] is the reverse of what you normally get in the European comedy when there’s a kiss and then an embrace and then a comus and antic dance, or whatever it is you get from Shakespeare on through to Shaw and Wilde. That in general would be my sense of the distinction.”5 That phrase “whatever it is you get from Shakespeare” makes Gurney sound a little vague, but no one knows better than he does exactly what pleasures Shakespearean comedy affords. Earlier in this same interview, he specifically acknowledges the centrality of Frye’s definition of Shakespearean Comedy6, so I think now is a good time to read it ourselves. The comic tradition followed by Shakespeare, says Frye, “uses themes from romance and folklore… These themes are largely medieval in origin and derive from…the drama of folk ritual…and of all the dramatic activity that punctuated the Christian calendar with the rituals of immemorial paganism. We may call this the drama of the green world and its theme is once again the triumph of life over the wasteland, the death and revival of the year and impersonated by figures still human and once divine as well.”7 Frye then briefly analyzes those Shakespearean plays that transport the characters from a normal world into a green world, which is usually, but not always, a forest of some kind, a literally green world. He mentions The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Sometimes the world is more pastoral, as in The Winter’s Tale, or, again, it may be more figurative, as is the case with The Merchant of Venice when the scene changes to Portia’s “mysterious” house in Belmont from which, says Frye, “proceed the wonderful cosmological harmonies of the fifth act.” Finally, Frye observes, “In The Tempest the entire action takes place in the second world, and the same may be said of Twelfth Night, which, as its title implies, presents a carnival society, not so much a green world as an evergreen one.”8 In recent academic theorizing about theater, no word has more currency than “carnival.” However, I will not take Frye’s use of it here as a cue to plunge into a jungle of jargon. I’d much rather close this essay by staying on the broad sunny uplands of playwriting. And who better to serve as a guide toward home than A.R.Gurney. Beginning with The Dining Room —well actually beginning with his delightful one-act The Comeback, Gurney has time and

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again followed the Shakespearean practice of transporting his characters and his audiences into “worlds” where the normal rules are suspended. While in these worlds the characters learn important lessons, and so do we, about ourselves before we return to our “normal” worlds with a renewed sense of community and of the preciousness of the bonds that give meaning to our lives. In The Comeback, Gurney extracts the heroes of the Odyssey from the real world of Mediterranean Attica and transports them to the green world of suburban Connecticut, giving an Inge-like reversal to our assumptions. In The Dining Room, the room itself is the green world and it moves, so to speak, from era tc era, carrying us spectators through a festival of times and manners. In Sweet Sue, Gurney produces a divided consciousness in the spectators by splitting his characters in two so that, as if we were gods, we can experience one person’s story from more than one viewpoint. In Sylvia, the most enthusiastically produced of Gurney’s recent plays, we enter a world in which dogs and humans have been enchanted. In Overtime, a sequel to The Merchant of Venice, Gurney transposes the cosmological harmonies of which Frye wrote into a new American key and then swings them to a rainbow of rhythms in a truly multicultural orchestration. And I could go on in this vein through almost every one of the thirty and more plays that Gurney has written. But I think it is fitting, as we celebrate Gurney’s achievements, to conclude my remarks with a look at The Perfect Party, which, from Frye’s perspective, is about the labor required to create a green world. There is much to say about this play. I might comment on its central character, Tony, a middle-aged college professor—what other sign do we need that comic complications will abound? Gurney has probably put more professors on stage than any other American play wright, and all of them are fairly decent human beings, though constantly veering into absurd difficulties. Gurney is only writing what he knows, he, being one of a very small number of playwrights who were also professors that have had a play produced on Broadway.9 Or I might comment on Gurney ’s use of language and the way he evokes the spirits of Sophocles, Wilde, and Congreve, cultivating linguistic green gardens inside his green worlds. The interviews with actors show you how much they love his language, what pleasures they derive from speaking his lines, and what pleasures, in turn, the actors are free to give us. But instead of going off in all directions I’ll limit myself to one shining moment in The Perfect Party that I think perfectly captures the essence of Gurney’s Shakespearean approach to comedy. In order to appreciate this moment, let us, as a number of Gurney characters have said, review the bidding. Our hero, Tony, has quit his job as a Professor of American literature in order to host the perfect party. His ambition is so great that he has invited a critic from the New York Times to review it. Her name is Lois and after discerning that the guests whom Tony has invited “seem to be a kind of microcosm for America itself in the waning years of the twentieth century” she agrees, at first, to write the review. For Tony and his wife, Sally, a reluctant participant, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Numerous complications ensue and at several moments the party almost implodes under the weight of Tony’s ambitions. But at last it seems to take off.

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The action of the play occurs in Tony’s study which serves, if you will, as a green room for our heroes while the party itself occurs offstage, beyond the study door which Gurney places upstage center. About a half hour before the end of the play, Sally enters through that door and the party sounds come up. Her neighbors Wes and Wilma are already in the study. The stage directions read: “She closes the door quickly behind her and leans against it, breathlessly.” Then she says: “The Party’s beginning to crest!… It’s amazing. Everything is suddenly coming together. It’s as if somewhere someone had pulled a switch, and a huge gravitational force had come into play. It’s like the beginning of civilization itself, if I remember my courses at Vassar correctly. First, there was this man—I don’t even remember who he was—who sat down at the piano, and started idly fiddling with the keys. Then others began to gather around. A chord was sounded. A tune emerged. Someone began to sing. And then, as if out of nowhere, people produced other musical instruments. Harps… xylophones… Moog synthesizers… And now!—Well, let’s listen, and see how far they’ve come—” The stage directions read: “Sally opens the door. From offstage we hear the huge sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—full orchestra and chorus—singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ A rich romantic light and an exotic fog spill into the study as the three stagger back amazed… Sally, Wes, and Wilma pick up glasses, trays, ice buckets—as cymbals, triangles, and drums. They march around the room, ending in a wild display of sympathetic enthusiasm. Finally, Sally closes the door and the sounds stop.”10 This moment combines wit, humor, harmony, sympathy, and enthusiasm; the kind of scene that Sally describes—people gathered around a piano singing—is referred to by various characters in many other Gurney plays. It’s exaggerated here to intensify the satirical thrust of the rest of the play. But the prime targets of the satire, Tony and Lois, are missing from this scene. Their absence involves disguising that strongly evokes Shakespeare’s practice—Tony masquerades as his own twin. While they’re away Sally, Wes, and Wilma attain a moment of pure emotional and psychological release—the deliverance that Frye names as the moral norm of comedy, a norm that carries with it “the vision of a free society.”11 The plays of Inge and Gurney try to make us think about the kind of society we have made and can make. The flight of Inge’s characters from the picnic of life may make us weep more than it makes us smile while the rush of Gurney’s characters into the party of life certainly makes us laugh more than it makes us cry. But each playwright recognizes and aims to use the power of comedy—whether Aristotelian or Shakespearean—to release us from habits of heart and mind that stop us from enjoying the contests and games, picnic, or singing around the piano, or dancing ourselves silly at the party. NOTES In a slightly shorter form, this essay was presented at the nineteenth William Inge Festival, at which A.R.Gurney was honored. I have expressed my gratitude to the conference organizers in my note on p. 130. 1. All references are to Frye’s essay as re-printed in Daniel Seltzer, ed. The Modern Theatre: Readings and Documents, Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. It has also been reprinted in Paul Lauter,

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2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

ed., Theories of Comedy, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1964. The essay originally appeared in English Institute Essays, 1948, New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. For a review of the influence of Frye’s analyses of Shakespearean comedy until the middle 1970s, see Wayne A.Rebhorn, “After Frye: A Review-Article on the Interpretation of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 21 (1979), 553–82. Seltzer, 26–7. William Inge, Picnic, Dramatists Play Service, p. 12. See pp. 18–19. See pp. 18. Seltzer, 31–32. Seltzer, 32. I think there are only two others besides Gurney: Thornton Wilder, who taught for many years at the University of Chicago and apparently liked teaching, and Inge, who taught at Washington University and other colleges in St. Louis and apparently loathed it. If there are others, the writer would like to know about them. A.R.Gurney. The Perfect Party. Doubleday: New York. 1986. 64–5. Seltzer, 34.

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PART III Articles by A.R.Gurney

ANN: Oh, John, face it. Everyone’s got beans to spill. And, knowing you, you’ll find a way to spill ours. JOHN: I’m simply trying to tell the truth, Mother. ANN: Fine. Good. But tell the truth in a book. Books take their time. Books explain things. If you have to do this, do it quietly and carefully in a book. JOHN: I can’t, Mother. ANN: You can try. JOHN: I can’t. Maybe I’m a masochist, but I can’t seem to write anything but plays. I can’t write movies or television. I’m caught, I’m trapped in this old medium. It’s artificial, it’s archaic, it’s restrictive beyond belief. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with contemporary American life. I feel like some medieval stone cutter, hacking away in the dark corner of an abandoned monastery, while everyone else is outside having fun in the Renaissance. And when I finish, a few brooding inquisitors shuffle gloomily in, take a quick look, and say, “That’s not it. That’s not what we want at all!” Oh, God, why do I do it? Why write plays? Why are they the one thing in the world I want to do? Why have I always done them? —The Cocktail Hour, 1988

164

A Sacred Place A.R.GURNEY

There can be no theatre without architecture, whether it be the cathedral square, the arena of Nimes, the palace of the Popes, the trestle stage on a fairground…or the rococo amphitheatres of the boulevard houses…. Andre Bazin makes these remarks to distinguish the theater from the cinema, which does not seem to require this sense of place. We don’t seem to care much whether a movie goes on in Cinema 1, 2, 3, or 4, but a play takes on a crucial resonance from its architectural surroundings. It is not unusual to hear about good plays which have folded because they opened in the “wrong” Theater, nor is it strange to attend a poor production which has survived primarily because it basks in the reflected glory of Stratford or Lincoln Center. Even the language we use reflects our sense that drama is embedded in the idea of architecture: we say synonymously that we go to the theatre or go to a play. We may go to the movies, but not to a particular movie house. When, indeed, we find ourselves choosing a special location to see a movie—Radio City Music Hall, the old Exeter Street Theatre in Boston, even the place on a college campus where the weekend movies are shown —then our experience approaches the theatrical in that we are more immediately conscious of ourselves inhabiting and giving significance by our choice to the building around us. The great baroque movie palaces built in this country before the Depression were designed to contribute to the exotic, dreamy film experience, and perhaps did so, but the movies presented in them and movies in general since seem to have survived outside this opulent frame. Plays, however, and the audiences they speak to, like to settle into particular places. American Theater sometimes gets into trouble because we forget how important a certain place can be. We are said to be a nomadic people, in love with movement and change, and therefore don’t take naturally to the idea that some spots have an aura or atmosphere which cannot be easily reproduced elsewhere. When a theatrical enterprise becomes successful we like to celebrate that fact by picking it up and moving it somewhere more ostensibly grand. The crucial sense of place doesn’t always go along with the move. The American Place, the Café la Mama, the Circle in the Square, all exciting places for theatre in New York in the sixties, were resettled uptown, and something vital seems to have been lost in the process. Plays not only work best when we are involved in the architecture around them, but drama itself to a large extent is about the importance of a physical place. Even Japanese

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Noh, so diametrically opposed to Western drama in what it is trying to do, is nonetheless equally insistent on the significance of its setting: this is the place where a ghost has appeared or will appear, and that’s why we’re there. Western playwrights, similarly, do not choose their settings idly: a good play can occur nowhere but where it is set; the steps in front of Oedipus’ palace, the rooms of Hamlet’s Elsinore, Mrs. Alving’s parlor, the bedroom of Maggie the Cat—these are all places which are ultimately sacred to their protagonists; here is where they stake their claim, do battle, and live or die. That is why, it seems to me, that when movies are made from plays—when plays are “opened up “so to speak, to avoid the visual monotony of their limited settings—the result can be so strangely disappointing. Characters in plays live, breathe, and have their being only in the setting for which they were designed. Kazan moves Blanche Du Bois to a bowling alley, Mike Nichols has George and Martha continue their battles at a roadhouse café, and there is an unavoidable loss of steam. Shakespeare had no desire to show Hamlet’s sea voyage to England, in spite of all the scenic fluidity of the Elizabethan stage. Hamlet is Hamlet only in Elsinore, and even when Olivier moves him out of doors to brood on a cliff, the character pales a little in the open air. In my own playwriting, and in attempting to teach the craft to others, I’ve found an awareness of the importance of setting to be extremely helpful. What is the world of a particular character? Where is the hero or heroine most ultimately invested? Does this scene go dead because it occurs in the wrong place? A drab kitchen setting will become richly evocative if that is where Mom holds court. Many good American plays take place in bars, and they work primarily because the bar can be a special and democratic sanctuary for a number of different sorts of people. Many so-called “modern” plays self-consciously call on us to see the theatrical space as a sanctuary in and of itself: Pirandello’s Six Characters, Wilder’s Our Town, Weiss’s Marat/Sade, even Hair come to mind. It is not possible to explore here why the experience of Theater is so embedded in its surroundings. We know, or think we know, that drama grew out of religion, and we can certainly see religious roots in its two most fruitful examples, Greek and Elizabethan drama. I am not prepared to argue, however that therefore, when we go to the theater, we are atavistically returning to some sacred grove, to watch priests enact some holy ritual. I would assert, though, that drama is a fundamentally communal experience, and that we go to plays to celebrate being part of a particular congregation. Surely the audience’s awareness of and relationship to its architectural surroundings provides an additional common bond, a constant visual reminder that we’re all in this thing together. And hence, perhaps we are more prepared to respond to the special sense of place which forms the core of what is happening onstage. “The theater,” says Baudelaire, “is a crystal chandelier.” Andre Bazin compares this to the cinema: “…the little flashlight of the usher, moving like and uncertain comet across the night of our waking dream, the diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen.”2 The two images seem eminently appropriate for the two experiences. When we go to the movies, we do want to be led through the darkness to a private world where we can give ourselves up wholly to a projected dream. When we go to the theater, and take our seats, the chandelier above us illuminates the social world around us, showing where we are, whom we’re with and, if we read our program, what we’re in for. Even

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when it dims and the lights rise on the stage, we are reminded by the living presence of the actors, the laughter, the applause, the perceptible hushes, by the very artificiality of the dramatic form, that we have come to a mysteriously significant place. NOTES 1. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema?, vol 1, translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 2. Ibid.

168

Pushing the Walls of Dramatic Form A.R.GURNEY

It’s no secret to say the drama is a restrictive medium, and that those of us who try to write plays are hedged in on all sides by tough laws of dramaturgy which we break only at our peril. To compound the problem, American play wrights, dependent as we are on the uneasy generosity of private enterprise, would seem to be even further encumbered by economic inhibitions that require us to be downright miserly about the number of characters we use or the settings in which our plays take place. Of course, all playwrights everywhere have long been used to dancing in on various chains. Aeschylus was bound by the ritual rule that only two characters on stage at one time were allowed to exchange dialogue. Molière had to be scrupulously tactful about church and court under the shadow of Louis XIV. Samuel Beckett embraces and makes a virtue of the very spareness which good contemporary drama is asked to impose upon itself. When I was teaching drama courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I used to tell my students that it is the very pressure of these esthetic restrictions that gives drama so much of its particular power. I would point to the thrilling resonances of offstage events in Greek drama, or the special sense of enclosed space that emerges in Ibsen or Chekhov. “What’s left out lends importance to what’s put in,” I’d say, and we’d explore the glories of artistic structure, as in the sonnet, or the sonata form, or a good play. What’s more, as a playwright, I seemed to find the restrictions of drama particularly suitable for the people I like to write about—the American East Coast bourgeoisie, the much-maligned so-called WASPs. These people themselves carry with them a large stock of inherited obligations and inhibitions, and so they seemed to be naturally at home in a form so carefully structured. Perhaps I was simply a writer who felt comfortable with rules, writing about people who tried to live by them. In any case, there has been for some time some creative confluence between myself and my characters as we struggled within the confines of inherited form. Four years ago, however, my wife and I sold our house in Boston and moved to New York, and certain things began to happen to my writing. I became more interested in probing and pushing the walls of dramatic form, and obviously the characters in my plays began to do the same. I’m sure the contagious energy and excitement of the city affected me, as well as its turbulent ethnic diversity. I also felt liberated for the first time in twenty-five years from the oppressive obligations of academic life. And I have to say, too, that the critical atmosphere in this city became, at least for me, suddenly more hospitable. In any case, I found myself stretching and breathing more freely.

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Indeed, in the last three years, I’ve found myself on some sort of a creative high. My mountainous labors may well have produced a series of mice, but no one can deny that I’ve been writing up a storm and having a good time doing it. First I wrote a novel called The Snow Ball, which in effect said goodbye to the old WASP world of Buffalo, New York, which I had been concerned about for so long. Working in fiction, too, was like jogging down an open road far beyond the limitations of the stage. I think it was very helpful in limbering up. Then I came in, and sat down, and wrote three plays in disgustingly quick succession. All are somewhat interconnected, and all demonstrate some kind of impatience with conventional dramatic form. Let me quickly add that I don’t think for one minute I’ve achieved any breakthroughs in the history of Western drama. But for a fifty-five-year-old father of four, newly arrived in the big city, shaking off the chalk dust of twenty-five years in the classroom, I’ve had a good time kicking up my heels. Frisky as I may feel, I’m not foolish enough to evaluate my own work, but I will try to describe what I was up to in each play as it pertains to this sense of pushing against the traditional restrictions of drama. The Perfect Party came first. It is still very much bound by the classical units of time and place. It all takes place in one room, and stage time pretty much parallels actual time. The play also gives due respect to the producer’s checkbook by asking him to pay for only five actors, whose Herculean task is to evoke, describe, participate in, and comment on a rather large party taking place just offstage. Where the play may take a step forward, at least for me, is in its attempt to expand the possibilities of language and plot. The people in this play are impossibly articulate, reveling in the sheer pleasure of being able to say exactly what they feel or mean, and occasionally to be outrageously vulgar. The plot of the play as well also presses against the borders of plausibility and certainly of good taste. I suppose you could you could say that in this one, I’m still writing about WASPs, although one reviewer pointed out that its cast of characters is 40 percent Jewish. Certainly the host of the The Perfect Party is WASPy, but by the end of the play I think both he and I would be impatient with such reductive stereotyping. In any case, The Perfect Party had an extended run this spring at Playwrights Horizons, and has settled in at the Astor Place for what we hope will be a long stay. I wrote my next play, Another Antigone as a kind of companion piece to The Perfect Party. Party deals with a professor at home; Antigone shows one at work. Party pokes fun at ethnic stereotyping; Antigone explores the serious damage such stereotyping can do, on both sides. Furthermore, it works with the archetypal conflict between a man who insists on rigid rules and a woman who insists on breaking them. I try to break a few myself in this one, moving away from the strict confines of a single stage space or chronological time. Finally, I tried to explode what Aristotle calls unity of action. I hope there are seriously tragic elements in this play, grounded in the Antigone story, but the frame here is comic. One thing is for sure: the play doesn’t seem to be about WASPs at all. Whether all this works or not I’ll discover this fall in San Diego, where the play is being done at the Old Globe. The last play to emerge from this strange playwriting binge I’ve been on recently is called Sweet Sue, which was tried out in a workshop production at Williamstown Theater Festival

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this month. Possibly prompted by Antigone, it began as a treatment of the Phaedra story, but ended simply as a contemporary love story between an older woman and a younger man. The strange thing that happened here, however, was that I found myself writing it so that two actors would play each role. There’s nothing terribly new about this device. O’Neill tried it and so did Peter Nichols. But as I wrote Sweet Sue, I discovered the two versions of the character didn’t want to shake down into any particular psychological or esthetic category. No one “stands for” the id or the alter ego or the unconscious, for example. I just wanted to paint the same picture with additional colors, and so two actors needed to be there. I found the result enabled me to tell the story much more easily, and at the same time to add a complexity to the texture of the play which I couldn’t achieve by staying within the bounds of a traditional two-hander. Now, none of this experimentation has broken any major sound barriers. It’s no big deal. There have been times in the long history of drama when momentous steps have been taken —when Aeschylus asks that a third actor actually speak, for example, or when Shakespeare bursts on the scene in an explosion of poetic pyrotechnics. But I have recently discovered that drama, for all its traditional rigors, is always being pushed and pressed and tested as much as possible. And I’m beginning to relish its resilience.

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The Dinner Party A.R.GURNEY

“The Dinner Party is the ultimate celebration of what it means to be civilized,” my father used to say. “There is nothing better in this world than to settle down around a lovely table and eat good food and say interesting things with one’s friends.” When I was growing up, or thought I was, in Buffalo before World War II, Saturday night dinner parties were an essential element in my parents’ lives. They spent a lot of time talking about them, going to them, and giving them. Time and again my sister and brother and I would come home from sledding in Delaware Park to find an extra maid clucking in the kitchen, polishing the silver, teetering on a stepladder to get at the good china, while the cook distractedly set out soup and sandwiches for us on the kitchen table before she returned to basting the great, sizzling roast of beef in the oven or shelling the fresh green peas. “Dinner parties require immense amounts of labor,” my father would say. “While the servants are toiling in the kitchen, your mother and I are working just as hard elsewhere, making sure that our guests are comfortable and happy. All of us happen to feel it’s worth the effort.” We children couldn’t go into the living room the night of a party, but we could see from the doorway that someone had already neatened up the copies of Life in the magazine rack, and tucked the sheet music back in the piano bench, and laid out the Chesterfields in the cut-glass cigarette boxes. There would be a screen in front of the dining-room door, but we could still catch a glimpse of the lace tablecloth and the curly candlesticks and the blue and silver salt dishes, with the little spoons, that spilled so easily and fresh flowers and the twelve crystal water goblets that came from Cooperstown. It all looked as sacred and mysterious as the altar at Trinity Church, where we’d go the next day if our parents weren’t too tired. “Now I do expect you children to come downstairs and shake hands. Remember to look people in the eye and call them by name, and speak up clearly when they talk to you. Half of our friends don’t listen, and the other half don’t hear. You don’t have to bow or curtsy, though I think people would be very pleased if you did. Then get out promptly, so we can continue with our cocktails and our conversation.”

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For most of the evening the strange, exotic sounds of the dinner party would waft upstairs, punctuating our radio programs and finally even penetrating our dreams: the ring of the doorbell, the greetings in the front hall, the rhythmic rattle of the cocktail shaker, the buzzer in the kitchen indicating they were “almost” ready to eat, the oohs and aahs and muffled slidings of chairs when they did, the clink of glasses when there were toasts, the laughter when there were jokes, the continual activity in the kitchen underneath it all. Afterward there might be singing around the piano or even dancing, if the Victrola had been fixed and my mother had remembered to buy a new needle. Then, finally, the good-byes in the hall, more at the door before its last closing thud, and the strained sound of cars starting outside the storm windows in the cold winter air. This was the dinner party, and this was what my parents went out to on all those nights when they weren’t “entertaining” at home. Almost always they’d “dress”—a long evening gown for my mother, black tie for my father, though on some occasions he’d wear his tails. “The jacket must always come below the waistcoat. Otherwise you’ll look like a waiter and might be mistaken for one. But for most dinners wear your dinner jacket. And remember to call it that, rather than a tuxedo or tux. And say trousers, rather than pants.” I suppose that the dinner party was one way my parents had of cheering themselves up during the gray days of the Depression. They also were simply perpetuating a custom that they had inherited from their parents, now amplified and lubricated by lengthy cocktail hours. Certainly they didn’t have huge amounts of money—or if they did, they didn’t have huge amounts for me. It was simply what they liked to do when they wanted to be with their friends. Cooks and maids were fairly inexpensive then, until the war came along and they discovered they could make more money pounding the rivets than passing the vegetables. After the war the custom cropped up again, though on a lesser scale. Even today, when I go home to visit, my mother does what she can to “get a maid.” “How can I enjoy my family if I’m slaving away in the kitchen? How can I relax if there ’s a stack of dirty dishes waiting in the sink? I believe in being civilized, thank you very much.”

The dinner party was hardly a phenomenon confined to twentieth-century Buffalo. Homer’s heroes always s seem to be giving good dinner parties, and the Olympian gods put on even better ones. The Romans were no slouches at it, and even the Last Supper could be called a dinner party, if a not totally successful one. In nineteenth-century Europe, with the rise of an affluent bourgeoisie and the domestication of women, the custom bloomed extravagantly. The recently rich enjoyed it as a way of displaying their possessions, servants, and recipes. In America, if the Puritans always had difficulty with it, the Southern gentry had none. In any case the dinner party somehow found its way up the Erie Canal to Buffalo, where it was embraced with some fervor by my grandparents, by my parents, and ultimately, like it or not, by me. Or at least, if I didn’t embrace it, I absorbed it so thoroughly that even now my father’s various admonitions on the subject pervade my thinking at any

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social gathering we give or go to. Indeed, I find myself almost compelled to pass on his advice, for whatever it’s worth, to whoever will listen. Some nuggets follow herewith: When your guests arrive, don’t try to greet them at the door. Let the maid do that. Then, after you’ve given the man time to adjust his tie and the woman to comb her hair, try to come in upon them with great enthusiasm, as if you had just been doing something terribly important, but their arrival is much more so. When serving cocktails, remind yourself to use plenty of ice, even if people say they don’t want it. Ice does two essential things: It keeps the party under control and saves on liquor. Conversation is at the heart of a good party. If a conversation is going well, it will draw others to it, like moths to a flame. People will lean over or sidle up. When they do, be sure to include them immediately. Say, “We were discussing this “or “We were talking of that.” Ask their opinion on the subject, even if you’re not interested in it. In this way, if everyone is concentrating, the entire room can catch fire. If you’re having difficulty conversing with a woman, try complimenting her. Even if she’s homely, search for something attractive to mention: her hair, her feet, her shoulders. Don’t compliment her clothes. Other women will do that. Your job is to focus on something more essential. Try the shoulders. Men are harder to start, like old cars on cold days. You can normally jump-start them with a question on sports, but sports conversations normally lack development and tend to confuse the women. Movies are good to talk about with men. Most men like movies. And, of course, travel. Ask a man if he’s traveled recently and he’ll tell you. Make sure, though, you have an out, since he’ll go on too long. When you go in to dinner, always guide your companion by touching the back of her elbow. She usually knows where she’s going better than you, but guide her anyway. Before you sit, push in her chair. If there’s a thick rug, this can be tricky, but get her to help, by sort of humping her chair up and down. Don’t scamper around the table, pushing in too many chairs, though. You’ll look like a fool. Never make remarks about the food. If it’s bad, and you say it is, you’re being rude. If it’s bad, and you say it’s good, you’re encouraging bad cooking. If it’s good, and you say that, you’re being redundant. Just assume it’s good, and eat it with quiet relish. Try to finish at the same time as the people sitting around you. Otherwise you’ll be watching them eat, or they’ll be watching you. Either way it’s unpleasant. Eating is not basically an attractive habit. Who wants to watch people putting things in their mouths? That’s why we have table manners, to disguise the process. Apparently, in the navy, officers are advised not to talk about three things in their wardroom: politics, sex, and religion. Supposedly these topics lead to trouble when the ship’s at sea. Now obviously we don’t want brawls at a dinner party, but these inhibitions seem unduly stringent. Politics is an awkward topic because it invites argument, and people tend to make their points simply by assertion. Particularly if they’ve been drinking. It’s very difficult to rebut them since the statistics aren’t readily available, and it’s disconcerting if you leave the table to get them. So perhaps the Navy is right about politics. Sex, on the other hand, is fun to talk about, as long as you maintain some discretion. It’s a subject everyone knows something about. If people don’t, they should. It’s also a subject in which

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no one has any special expertise. If people do, they shouldn’t. Religion, finally, hardly ever comes up. Most people who go to dinner parties aren’t terribly religious. If they are, they probably shouldn’t be there. Don’t talk to the servants, except to say thank you when they pass the asparagus. It’s very difficult for them to hold those great silver platters on one arm while tipping them so you can get at the butter. It’s good to acknowledge that quietly. Otherwise it’s better to pretend that the servants aren’t there. We live in a democracy, and the idea of being waited on by somebody else goes against the very grain of our heritage. It’s embarrassing on both sides. After the dinner is over, however, it’s always good to slip into the kitchen and compliment everyone in sight. Now that I have put them down, some of these admonitions seem like rather poor advice for a dinner party these days. A man can get slugged for complimenting a woman’s shoulders, for example. And at least in New York you should probably speak to the servers whenever you can. Most of them are actors or artists and have more intelligent things to say than many of the guests. Still, these old rules from my father continue to roll around in my head. Try as I might, it is no more possible for me to strike out in to totally new modes of social behavior than it is for an Atlantic salmon to spawn in the Nile. Meanwhile, no matter how I behave, I suspect dinner parties will continue to go on all over the world —some of them, darn it all, without me.

Conversation Piece A.R.GURNEY

An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting. —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835 It would seem that this canny Frenchman, who looked us over early in the last century, put his finger on something that has a certain validity today. I, for one, as I read his remarks, recall those many times when I’ve been cornered by some self-styled expert who harangues me with his considered opinion on an interminable agenda of topics. Indeed, it seems that lately I’ve become so accustomed to being barraged with information from people who know so much more about a subject than I do that even the idea of a discussion, much less a conversation, sounds wonderfully congenial. To be clear about the difference between these two modes of discourse, we might look at their exaggerated forms. A discussion may escalate to an argument, a diatribe, and a fight. A conversation might dwindle to banter or chat. A good discussion leads to a sigh of relief, a sense of accomplishment, a gain in knowledge, and possibly a gain in income. A good conversation doesn’t have any particular shape. There’s a kind of rhythm to it, and the reassuring assumption that we’re all in this thing together. We take our cues from each other, like porpoises in a pool. Certainly it would seem that we’ve created an environment in this country where a genuine conversation is hard to crank up and get going. Conversation requires quiet, and we’re a noisy bunch, up and down the line. Our streets are noisy, our music noisier still. Our cars, in which we spend a great deal of time, are hardly conducive to it, since we all face front, and who can really converse through sidelong glances? In the nineteenth century, if we can believe our books and movies, stage coaches, Pullman cars, ocean liners, and hotels all forced people to eye each other directly. Today, de Tocqueville could rent a car and travel from motel to motel without hearing more than “Have a good day.” One might think that good conversations happen at high-toned dinner parties in New York or along the university-lined banks of the Charles River, but no: there’s where discussions run rampant. American conversations force their way up through our hard-topped way of life in more unexpected places. Black Americans, for example, seem to converse easily, at least when they’re talking to each other. Possibly because they’ve long had to learn how to take their own sweet time, possibly because they’ve become skeptical of where

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discussions have led them, blacks seem to be able to toss the conversational ball around the court with admirable grace and ease. Women, too, claim that they converse well when they’re not with men, and children, we know if we happen to overhear them, converse wonderfully when they’re not with grown-ups. Theater people, who are children at heart, are pretty good at it when they’re talking about theater, and academics are pretty terrible at it when they’re talking about anything. We’ve gotten very good at subtly seasoning our talk with those essential verbal signals that let others know what’s important in our lives. People who went to Harvard, or whose children are on the waiting list there, manage to find ways of sharing their sense of salvation soon after they’ve shaken hands. If someone has just read a book, seen a movie or watched a good game, he usually tries to toss that into the ring, out of hope that a conversation might crystallize around it. We do what we can to get it to grow quickly, like winter wheat. Certainly there are patterns for what seem to be good conversations in plays and books. For example, the bright romantic give and take in Shakespeare, Congreve, and Shaw. The trouble is, people who try to talk this way in life, who try to steer the talk toward their own clever bon mots, may simply irritate us in the end. In my own life, I was both blessed and cursed to be born into a family that insisted that good conversation was one of the chief joys of life. Whether we were really any good at it or not, I’m not sure, but there were times when we thought we were, and I remember them as being very pleasant. My father, particularly, took it all very seriously and passed on to his offspring a number of conversational rules that have proved to be helpful in these ruder times. He thought, for example, that it always s helped to kick off a conversation by giving someone a compliment: “How well you look!” (even if they don’t)… “What a lovely necklace!” (even if it isn’t)… “Has anyone ever told you that you have a very distinguished nose?” He was also adept at including others in the game if they happened to wander by: “We were just talking about…” “Ah, here you are. Just the person to help us decide…” And he was a master at what university professors call closure: “On that note, suppose we both stroll over to the bar and refresh our glass”… “Ah, but I see that my wife is signaling through the flames.” Like most good conversationalists, my father was a master at eliciting and responding enthusiastically to the views of others, though this resiliency didn’t always extend to his children. Indeed, now I think about it, he spoke to us many times as if he were addressing a meeting. That’s all right. It’s the toughest thing in the world to get a good conversation going with one’s kids. On the other hand, it’s worth working on, since I know from experience that it can be one of the best.

Critical Condition A.R.GURNEY

When I was teaching literature at MIT, a colleague in the philosophy department named Irving Singer used to talk about the importance of what he called “bestowal” in considering a work of art. He was interested in what we bring to an artistic experience as well as in what the artist brings to us. The form, the theme, the technique, the context of a piece are, of course, all crucial elements, but what we bestow upon it was, to Singer, a major factor as well. An example of this notion of bestowal might occur, say, at some junior high school production of The King and I, where our daughter is playing the chorus. “Better than Broadway,” we crow triumphantly into the warm spring night, having endowed the evening with our last full measure of paternal devotion. Or, to use a reverse case, consider what our response might be to some long, expensive play, which we attend just after a tax audit, having been shown by a rude usher to bad seats next to a noisy woman with a cold. No matter how much others might be enjoying themselves, I suspect we’d do very little bestowing that night, unless it was to bestow unmitigated contempt on the whole event and all who sailed in it. Exaggerated as these examples may be, they illustrate how much our responses are affected by our own special circumstances, and how much an artistic transaction is dependent on our willingness to participate in it. Indeed, since the theatre is so particularly artificial, and therefore so especially dependent on a willful suspension of disbelief, I should think that it would need all the bestowal it can get. Yet today we seem to be cursed with a condition where most theatre critics, with all the best intentions, bend over backwards to bestow as little as they can on the evening. We all know that drama reviews, as opposed to book or music or movie criticism, have an immediate and sometimes ultimate effect on the future life of a play, not only in New York but also in those many other American cities where one surviving newspaper now dominates the local cultural scene. Drama critics, fully aware of their influence, try to assume what they’d call an objective attitude in their assessments. In the best journalistic tradition, they believe that to introduce a personal element—to bestow on a work some sort of subjective consideration—would be biased and unprofessional. As a result, most of their reviews are purposefully reportorial. Yet because, unlike reporters, they are asked to judge what they have seen, they end up writing reviews which sound like pronouncements from Olympus: objective, all right, but also noticeably remote from the actual theatrical experience which we mortals may have been involved in.

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Furthermore, theatre producers do what they can to encourage critics to play this regal role. They court them to come, have them greeted officiously by public relations people in the lobby, conduct them to free seats at prime locations, and allow them to sweep out disdainfully during the curtain calls. And, finally, once their reviews do appear, their observations are treated with religious reverence, pondered over, quoted, and invoked like missives from Mount Sinai. What is really going on is that most critics, at least on the dailies, find themselves caught between two roles. On the one hand, they are simply reporters, there to observe and record an event as objectively and immediately as they can, gearing their remarks for the casual reader who stops by on the way to the sports page. On the other hand, they are also asked to be experts, writing particularly for their peers in the same theatre, and issuing opinions which will seriously affect the future of the event they are describing. Because of this responsibility, more and more critics take two or three days to recollect their responses in tranquility, honing their insights and polishing their prose. They may still dash out of the theatre at the curtain, but it is more to find a taxi than to meet a deadline. In any case, because these critics are trying to write with two different objectives for two different audiences, it is no wonder that most daily theatre criticism is marred by a hesitant, uneasy style—or else, on those rare occasions when the critic feels able to let go, sounds as excessively hortatory as a football cheer. Yet no matter how strenuously critics attempt to straddle being the reporter on the beat and God in his heaven, and no matter how assiduously they cultivate the notion of “objectivity” as a way of reconciling these two roles, I suspect that they, like the rest of us, bring to the theatre a good deal of carry-on baggage. Indeed, I want to go on to argue that a more valid judgment of a play might emerge if critics felt free to display their own subjective encumbrances. I remember raising this issue at a conference between critics and playwrights which took place in New York a few years ago. Could someone judge a play fairly, I asked, if he’s just had a rotten dinner and a kid at home with a temperature of one hundred and three? The response seemed to be that a good critic, like any good professional, has to learn to leave his personal life in the lobby and be prepared to make a dispassionate appraisal. I’m not sure, however, that this analogy of professional detachment is totally persuasive. The best teacher, or doctors, or engineers, find ways of investing a personal dimension in their work which takes it beyond the merely professional. The theatre especially would not seem to be an arena where disengagement works very well. We all know what it’s like to have been at a play where the audience is totally caught up, only to read reviews the next day which are icily dismissive. There may have been many reasons why the audience has bestowed a particular energy on the evening, but still an exciting transaction took place which the critic, even in his role as a reporter, has defiantly refused to acknowledge, much less participate in. By denying this excitement, by refusing to bestow on the evening even part of the enthusiasm that the audience has, the critic may have missed the boat, and those who say, “Well, he just didn’t see the play we saw” are in some sense right. In other words, a valid theatrical experience, by definition, may require from all of us the very bestowal that some of our critics are so desperately trying to withhold. Certainly playwrights from Sophocles on have beseeched their audiences to give themselves over to

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the world of the play. And certainly what we know of Greek and Elizabethan theatre makes them sound like orgies of bestowal. I have to add, too, that the most exciting times I myself have had in the theatre occur when my general appreciation is amplified by personal empathy. It may have been a tight ticket, I may know the actors personally, I may have written the damn thing myself, but whatever the particular impetus, if I am able to endow the play with a special enthusiasm of my own, the whole thing is more likely to kick into high gear for me. I would also like to argue that all critics, whether they admit it or not, already do bestow their own prejudices on their responses to a work, even when they ’re desperately trying not to. Put them in a dark space with a lighted stage at one end, and I can’t believe they’re not into it, or out of it, in much the same way the rest of us are, very much influenced by the baggage they have brought with them to the theatre. Their raves or pans are to some significant degree the result of this baggage, and the discrepancies between what they say about a work and how we ourselves have responded to it may in many cases have a lot to do with our unrecognized prejudices. When I had my first New York opening, the producer persuaded the first-string critic from the Times to come review us, even though it meant canceling another engagement. He let us know his response in no uncertain terms: …monstrous pretentious…vain…takes sophomoric humor to new depths… Jokes fell as flat as Holland in the monsoon season…insights were as probing as a blind caterpillar with gloves on…smooth nothingness…with its empty intellectual beaches and gently lapping waters of inconsequentiality… Why should a producer, presumably an intelligent man, with all the world to choose from, have imagined that this was worth his money and—to be personal—my time.*

Here is man bestowing nothing but anger on the play and, of course, causing it to close the same night. (The other reviews were all fairly enthusiastic, but came out too late to save it.) Only at the end of his remarks does he hint at the particular circumstances of his spleen. Yet because this is a review which proclaims its own subjectivity, it has a kind of refreshing validity. The writer has obviously been to the theatre, and reacted to what he saw with vigor and commitment. Painful as it was for me to read, it still is a review which reflects an individual response, and I suspect both the casual and the concerned reader viewed it more as a fallible opinion than an Olympian pronouncement. But most of the time, critics try to weed their private passions out of their responses, and strive for a wise detachment. I should think this would take most of the fun out of the game. Having to play God, or Athena, two of the most boring parts in the history of drama, must be quite a drag. Some critics try to play the Devil, but even this is ultimately monotonous. Wouldn’t it be more exciting, and certainly easier, simply to play oneself? What a relief it might be for a critic from, say, the New York Times, compelled to review a sevenmillion-dollar musical, knowing that jobs, and reputations, and restaurants, and Hollywood are waiting for his word, simply to write, “Look, maybe it’s my root canal, but I couldn’t get wound up over this thing. You’d better get a second opinion because I have

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to admit that everyone else seemed to be having a pretty good time…” The Greek gods enjoyed coming off their pedestals and disguising themselves as mortals, and I think American critics would, too. Besides, in many cases, god-playing critics paint themselves into awkward corners. They might relish the pleasure of finding and crowning a particular writer early in his career, or exiling one to outer darkness, only to find themselves forced to change their minds later on. We all are familiar with the tiresome circumlocutions of a critic trying to cut his losses as he retreats from an earlier decree. If, on the other hand, reviews from the start contained the built-in fallibility which comes from being grounded in the personal and the contextual, I should think critics would feel less inhibited by their previous pronouncements when they assess different work by the same writers later on. In any case, if a valid response to any art requires that we bestow something of ourselves upon it, and if the theatre seems to ask for a particularly committed bestowal, then I would argue that theatre critics, who hold the future of a play so much in their hands, should try investing themselves more wholeheartedly, which means more personally, into the theatrical transaction. I’m for enthusiasm, if it’s at all possible. Even if a critic is good friends with—hell, married to—the playwright, let him say as much at the top, and let the good times roll in the review. It’s better all around to have a totally biased encomium than a bland, ultimately invalid attempt to remain balanced and uninvolved. Or, to take my own experience, it’s better to have a horrendous pan, as long as it is clearly a personal opinion, than a tactful dismissal from the Vatican. I’m not asking that critics give us their psychological profiles every time they express an opinion, but I am urging them to speak more in their own voice. Indeed, some of the best theatre critics in the past seem to have been able to fold in a kind of ingratiating selfawareness when they reviewed a play: Shaw’s criticism has that quality, and Beerbohm’s and Kenneth Tynan’s, at its best. Pauline Kael’s reviews in The New Yorker have not always been ingratiating, but they do have an aggressively personal angle to them, as she comments on the audience, her companion, or even her health, in the course of talking about a movie. Similarly, I’m asking today’s theatre critics to be more aware of those many internal and external factors which they bring with them when they go to the theatre, and not to deny these elements in their reviews. In this way, their remarks will seem less like pronouncements from on high, and more like fallible, authentically felt human utterances in a complicated context. * Editor’s Note: The play was The David Show and the reviewer was Clive Barnes. Edith Oliver’s review (The New Yorker, November 9, 1968, p. 115) praised every element of the play and the production. Some excerpts: “…the first bright comedy of this season…the first time satire—with the wit and underlying seriousenss that satire demands—in heaven knows how long Mr. Gurney is a gifted playwright—a sparse breed at the moment—with an accurate ear for the kinds of things that are being said right now, and an understanding of the kinds of people who are saying them.”

When the Final Act Is Only A Beginning A.R.GURNEY

People in the theater tend to lament the evanescence of our craft, as performances and productions come and go like bubbles on a stream. Sometimes, however, this very transience gives us an opportunity we might not find elsewhere. Books and films, for example, once they are published or produced are pretty much frozen for eternity, with all their virtues and flaws permanently in place. A play, on the other hand, can be rewritten and reworked after its initial production, in many cases to its considerable improvement. Until recently, this process of adjustment would usually occur on the way to New York, where a Broadway opening was deemed the ultimate destination for a new play. Yet nowadays, a very different process can take place to keep a work alive. A play may open for a limited run at an off Broadway theater, be reviewed and then be rewritten or amended for a new and extended life elsewhere in the country. I myself am going through this procedure right now. Last spring, a play of mine called The Old Boy, directed by John Rubinstein, with Stephen Collins in the title role, opened at Playwrights Horizons. Good as the production may have been, the play itself had problems from the beginning. Prior to and during the previews, we made changes, but I don’t think any of us was totally content with what we had. Nonetheless, the play worked well enough in the weeks before opening to garner serious offers from two sets of producers. One group thought it should go right to Broadway, while the other was interested in a run at an off Broadway theater. Of course, once the reviews came in, all smiles stopped. No reviewer gave that loud unqualified shout of praise normally needed to carry a play forward over the shoals of economic risk into the pleasant harbor of an unlimited run on Broadway or off Broadway. In our desperation to keep the producers on the line, John Rubinstein managed to cull from all these notices a list of complimentary quotations. But the cost of producing plays in New York being what it is today, and the risk of keeping a problematic one alive during the summer and early fall seasons with their erratic attendance, caused both sets of producers to have second thoughts. I was harboring second thoughts as well. I had begun to notice an inconsistency of response in the audience, which particularly bothered me. One night, the actors were playing to good laughs, the next, the audience seemed introspective and intense. Houses, of course, vary from night to night, but this variance didn’t seem quite right. In addition, many reviews seemed to circle around a few common complaints: I may have written a number of strong scenes, but there was too much exposition, a slight tipping

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toward melodrama, and the supporting characters kept running away with the ball. Friends and colleagues also suggested that the ending didn’t quite pay off. You can always tell when you’re not hitting down the center of the fairway by the coded responses of those who speak to you afterwards: “Congratulations on your play.” “I had an interesting time.” “You sure pushed a lot of buttons in this one.” Very few people said, “I loved it,” which is what I was hoping to hear. I thought about all this for a while, and after the dust from the closing settled, decided I’d better get back to the drawing board. Rewriting can be a dangerous enterprise. You can do too little or too much, particularly when you’re not playing nightly to a paying audience, whose reaction should be the final arbiter of whatever you do. Most of us in the theater are so wedded to our work that the smallest change seems to us to send wild tremors up and down the entire evening. Furthermore, the fact that you feel the need to rewrite at all may be, in itself, a bad sign. Good plays are supposed to be inherently organic, and it may be some sort of violation to mess around with them. Those that need to be tinkered with may end up seeming carpentered and contrived, if they weren’t that way to begin with. Did Beckett rewrite Waiting for Godot after its first bad reviews? Wasn’t Shakespeare supposed to have never blotted a line? A few times in my life I’ve written plays that, for better or worse, required very little tuning once they were under way. I also know that these are not the only plays that are any good. Hamlet, to me, has the feel of a play that Shakespeare fussed with a good deal, and we know how many tries it took Chekhov to come up with Uncle Vanya. Lucky as we are when works spring to life fully armed, there are many times when we write other things that need to be patted and pushed and pulled into the right shape. There’s another problem with rewriting a play if you reassess it immediately after a production you feel proud of. The actors and the director have, of course, put their special stamp on the enterprise, and in many cases have made moments work, or seem to work, which possibly have no right to. If you are now trying to retool the play for subsequent productions, you can delude yourself into holding onto lines, bits, or even scenes that may have been totally dependent on the special talents of your recent collaborators. There are plays that good actors or directors can make particularly their own, and which may evaporate once they’re divorced from the talents of the Lunts or Jerry Zaks. Still, here I am, armed with the hope that I have a good thing at its core, and the conviction that I should take one more stab at making it better. I’m detached by several months from the compelling immediacy of the Playwrights Horizons production, influenced by the insights of several people I’ve learn to trust, and lured by the anticipation of another production at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego later this year. The Old Boy is about a youngish State Department official, about to run for governor, who is invited to give the commencement address at his alma mater, a distinguished New England boarding school. During the weekend there, he learns that a classmate, for whom he was an “old boy,” or mentor, has recently died of AIDS. Through a series of flashbacks, the politician comes to recognize the bankruptcy of the old-boy values by which he both lived his life and guided his friend, and therefore his own complicity in his friend’s death. He proclaims as much in an emotional address at the school graduation, possibly destroying his career but liberating himself as a human being.

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Most rewrites require a certain amount of carpentering—the sort of cutting and shaping and sanding that writers learn to do if they’ve been around for a while. The trick is not to let the seams show. I’ve tried to make these adjustments on the Old Boy hoping to simplify the beginning, shore up the strange dip from seriousness to solemnity in the middle of the first act, and keep the ball in the air more effectively throughout. Yet I have two knottier problems. One was the climactic commencement address, which, no matter what we did, always seemed self-conscious and stagy. In our attempt to do something different—have the main character give an impassioned speech while another character comments cynically on it—we seemed to take the audience out of the play, rather than pull them in deeper. This sense of a double perspective is achieved all the time in the movies or in opera, but we couldn’t do it on the Playwrights Horizons stage. We tried scrims, microphones, cutting, adding, but we never got the thing quite right. The result always seemed tricky and artificial, and the audience came away more concerned with a sense of the device than with what we were trying to say through it. Another problem was that my main character, the “old boy,” didn’t seem to engage either the audience or the critics as much as several minor characters did. William Sloane Coffin makes the distinction between a “nice guy” and a “good man,” and in one sense my play was supposed to be about a conversion from the former to the latter. Yet his transition wasn’t happening the way we wanted on stage. Other characters with less subtle journeys to make kept attracting attention. “Too many stories,” Elia Kazan told me after he came to see it. In addressing these two concerns, my hope was that if I could get the hero right, his final speech would fall into place in the right way. I found myself exploring in more depth the limits of his own emotional life, and once I had found those, I could revise the dialogue so that he became more understandable as he tried to impose similar limits on his friend. I also tried to simplify and smooth out the more baroque elements in the plot lines of the supporting characters so that they would remain firmly in the same play, and therefore more firmly supportive of the protagonist. Having done all these things, I found, when my hero arrives at his final speech, that our scrim, microphone, and synchronized dialogue were no longer needed. He seemed to want to talk simply and directly to the audience. The tonal complexity we strove for is, to a degree, still there, but it now emerges from the form and nature of the speech, as the speaker provides his own commencement by giving himself a final exam. The producer Roger Stevens is fond of saying, “OK, now take out the improvements,” and possibly Old Globe audiences for the The Old Boy will tell me to do the same. But I like to think I’ve been plugging the leaks, recaulking the seams, reshaping the bow and stern in the hope that this time the ship will have a longer voyage. This is not to say that the New York experience hasn’t been extremely valuable. New York preview audiences are the savviest in the world—with their strange combination of skepticism, empathy, and professional awareness—and the changes I’ve made are largely the result of their responses. But I also have to conclude that, at least for me, a New York production of a play has become more and more like the “Go” square on the Monopoly board. You have to pass through it to stay in the game, you may collect your $200, but landing there is not necessarily the end of the game.

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Shaw, the Eternal Schoolmaster, Can Still Be Wise A.R.GURNEY

This season, two of George Bernard Shaw ’s plays will be open on Broadway within weeks of each other—not a common phenomenon. A revival of “St. Joan “by the National Actors Theater opens this afternoon at the Lyceum Theater, directly by Michael Langham and starring Maryann Plunkell In March, the Roundabout Theater Company will mount Shaw’s romance “Candida,” directed by Gloria Muzio, with Mary Steenburgen in the title role. In this article, the playwright A.R. Gurney, who has two new plays opening this spring, “The Fourth Wall” in Chicago and “Later Life “at Playwrights Horizons in New York, reminisces about the Shaw he has known for a lifetime. Several months ago, I received a letter from a professor in Virginia who pointed out that “1992 marks the 100th anniversary of modern drama in the English language.” The professor was organizing a conference and planned to present a paper on Shaw’s effect on American drama. He wondered if I had any thoughts on the subject. “As an educated American,” he wrote almost pleadingly, “you must be familiar with Shaw.” When I was a teacher, did I ever teach him? As a playwright, was I at all influenced by him? Did I have anything special I’d like to say about him now? The letter reminded me how much Shaw and his plays once permeated my consciousness, and how little I have thought about him in the last 10 or 15 years. He was, of course, a dominant literary figure during the first half of the century, receiving the Nobel Prize at the peak of his career in 1925. Still alive and writing when I was a child, he was invoked and referred to simply by his initials: G.B.S., like F.D.R. or M-G-M. I recall hearing him discussed at the dinner table with some irritation by my father, and with considerable appreciation by my mother. I also remember seeing him in a Movietone newsreel, clowning for the camera in front of his cottage at Ayot St. Lawrence in England on one of his birthdays —a spry old man with a twinkle in his eye. He died in 1950, when I was in college. By then I had already read several of his works and was fast becoming a convert. To a 20-year-old, he seemed startlingly fresh and exciting, as well as something of a wise guy, which was right down my alley. I had collaborated in writing two student musical revues, and had become so entranced with Shaw that I proposed to the head of the drama department that for my senior thesis I write and run the whole show, which would be a musical version of Pygmalion. The idea was summarily rejected as unworkable, so I ended up doing a study of The Winter’s Tale. But Shaw stayed in my blood.

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His plays were being produced all over the place in those days. His bright, quirky wit and passionate intelligence seemed to cut through the smug, self-congratulatory attitudes of the postwar’50s, challenging and engaging audiences in just the way he would have liked. I myself was bowled over by two particular productions: the first, St. Joan in 1951 with Uta Hagen, at the City Center in New York, was simply the most stupendous thing I had ever seen. All I wanted in the world was to write a play like that—strong, funny and moving, all at the same time, with a gutsy heroine dying defiantly for a brave cause, while everyone else told us what it meant for European history. The other production that hit me where I lived was a touring company of Don Juan in Hell that same year. This was the third act of Man and Superman, performed by Charles Boyer, Agnes Moorehead, Charles Laughton, and Cedric Hardwicke, who all stood at music stands in elegant evening clothes, half reading, half reciting their sumptuous parts. I was entranced by the language and the ideas, and by the thought that you didn’t have to have scenery or even much of a plot to hold an audience spellbound. Shaw was well served then. It seemed that a year didn’t g o by without some all-star production of one of his plays (Heartbreak House, Major Barbara) sailing majestically into New York, with actors like Laughton, Maurice Evans, John Gielgud, and Pamela Brown tossing his dialogue around the infield. My Fair Lady musicalized and popularized him, and the LP chattered continually in the background of parties. A Shaw festival sprang up at Niagara-ontheLake, near my hometown, Buffalo, and, after I saw my parents, I could see Jessica Tandy or Zoe Caldwell or Douglas Rain doing the great parts to a turn. Even the movies did Shaw justice. Not only were the classic English films of Pygmalion and Major Barbara regularly revived in art houses and libraries, but now there was Caesar and Cleopatra, with Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains, a refreshing antidote to the sodden historical extravaganzas it seemed to parody. Shaw was a little too subversive for Hollywood, but still one studio managed to release an independent version of The Devil’s Disciple, with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier cleaning up as Burgoyne. There was even a production of Androcles and the Lion, with Jean Simmons—or someone who should have been Jean Simmons—playing a gorgeously doomed Christian. Movie stars returned to the stage in Shaw (Ingrid Bergman and Greer Garson both took a crack at Captain Brassbound’s Conversion), and stage stars fell back on him (Katharine Cornell revived and toured both Candida and The Doctor’s Dilemma) because he always seemed to work. Amateur and college theaters did Shaw constantly (particularly Arms and the Man). Plus, we saw a lot of Shaw on Hallmark and Philco and Playhouse 90 in the days when television had cultural aspirations. By then I was teaching in the department of humanities at MIT, and I’d squeeze Shaw into a course whenever I could. Several times I ran a whole semester seminar confined strictly to his plays and prefaces. Most of my students, committed as they were to future careers in science or engineering, embraced and enjoyed him. His sharp intelligence and utopian aspirations are exactly what they wanted. Besides, there was just enough absurdity in his plots to make him seem fresh and contemporary, not far removed from writers like Beckett and lonesco, who were coming into vogue. Then gradually he slipped away from us. My students didn’t buy into him as readily and I found myself apologizing for him in class. The prefaces seemed increasingly strident and

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tiresome, the tone of the plays themselves felt smug and self-congratulatory. And he was performed less and less on the stage. Now—except for such star-studded triumphs as the recent London production of Heartbreak House—the occasional revival tends to evoke bemused pats on the head from the critics, and no major stampedes. Why not? What happened? Part of the problem is that most of Shaw is expensive to produce. Economic considerations have a lot to do with whether a nonmusical play is done these days, and late-20th-century playwrights are as restricted by the balance sheet as Aeschylus once was by religious traditions. Even as popular a playwright as Neil Simon pretty much confines himself to a single set. But Shaw is different. Most of his plays call for sizable casts and a number of detailed, realistic settings. You can cut him a little, you can even try to eliminate a character or two (as the Circle in the Square did in a production of Heartbreak House), but to mess around with the scenery can be tricky because his sets so strongly reinforee his theme. The set progression in Major Barbara, for example, as we descend from an upper-class drawing room through a Salvation Army relief center to a housing project for a munitions factory, reinforces his argument about the underpinnings of industrial society. In Chekhov, the characters seem to dissociate themselves from their milieu, and so, when his plays are revived today, the sets may be abstracted and simplified. Shaw’s people, on the other hand, are very much committed to the environments they have made for themselves, and much of the action in his plays has to do with their difficulty in changing and living in new places in a new way. The steam goes out of his work when designers, in the interest of economy, make the setting insubstantial or abstract—there’s nothing for his characters to push against. Occasionally, producers find a way of doing him simply—as they did with Don Juan in Hell—but most of his plays work best when they ’re staged in the solid surroundings he calls for. Yet production difficulties might be surmounted if Shaw hadn’t come to seem like such a cold fish. His treatment of human relations, particularly between the sexes, strikes audiences today as arch and intellectualized. Freud, his contemporary, opened a number of closets, but Shaw doesn’t show much interest in peering into any of them. Audiences nowadays, when they pay homage to the fathers of modern drama, seem to prefer the warm baths of Chekhov or the steam rooms of Ibsen and Strindberg to the bracing cold showers of Shaw. Besides, he’s long and “talky,” people say. Shaw would be the first to agree with that, but he’d argue that his talk is exceptionally good. He also might add that much more happens in his plays than in either Chekhov or Ibsen or even Neil Simon, all of whom are talky, too. After all, even in as languid and garrulous a play as Heartbreak House, there are sudden burglaries, accidental explosions, and far-fetched recognition scenes. Most drama is talk, Shaw would say. The issue is what’s talked about. And here may be the real reason why Shaw is no longer so popular. Unlike any other major writer in the 20th century, Shaw, at least until the last years of his life, thought he had an answer. By the time he was forty, he had managed to fabricate for himself a philosophy that seemed to synthesize a majority of the major ideas of the 19th century and tie them together so that everything came out right in the end. Most of all, he fell in love with the

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concept of evolution, but to him it was conscious, creative, and purposeful. To Shaw, for example, giraffes had long necks because they wanted to have them to reach higher leaves, and those with this will to reach higher would pass on this characteristic to their progeny. (Darwin, of course, argued that long necks came by genetic accident, and subsequent longnecks survived simply because they happened to be more fit to survive.) Shaw grafted his notion of creative evolution onto Nietzsche’s ideas of the Superman and the Will to Power and Hegel’s sense of the dialectic. To Shaw, Caesar and Joan and even Napoleon were examples of the superman struggling to improve human events, and his fictitious heroes like Jack Tanner or Henry Higgins or Dick Dudgeon were more comic versions of the same. He persuaded himself that the world was being nudged forward by a Bergsonian é1an vital, or Life Force, toward a higher consciousness and a more just society. Our job as responsive Shavians was to plug into this force and translate it into action. And his job was to write plays that dramatized these forces and made them accessible to us. Shaw was a good enough playwright to recognize that audiences needed story, suspense, conflict, and humor when they went to the theater, but you always have the sense that he’s got the answer in the back of his book. There is nothing remotely tragic in Shaw’s vision, and he was very uncomfortable with the sense of anxiety or despair that pervades so much modern drama. Even in his St. Joan, which has the most serious ending of any of his plays, he has to tack on an epilogue where his heroine returns bouncily for a congenial discussion with all the people who let her down. What angers Shaw, and depresses him later on, is not that people are cruel or evil, or arbitrary, but rather that they simply don’t learn fast enough. He is the schoolmaster, his plays are the lesson plan and audiences are a recalcitrant group of students who have to be lectured, cajoled, entertained, and reprimanded into doing homework. Yet underneath there seems to be the cheerful assumption that we’ll all ultimately graduate with high honors. Possibly, then, it is this fundamentally jaunty belief in human progress that has lately caused students and audiences to shrug him off. For all his passionate indignation at the evils of modern society, and for all his deep concern for such contemporary issues as feminism and internationalism and disarmament, there remains in Shaw the feeling that underneath our 20thcentury turbulence is an evolutionary net that will catch us when we fall. He may amuse us now and then, but since we no longer can subscribe to such a buoyant philosophy, we can no longer embrace him with the enthusiasm we did in our youth, when the century was still young. In these pessimistic days, I am almost tempted to argue that Shaw is really not the father of modern drama in English at all, but rather a quaint and quirky throwback to an almost Dickensian sensibility where all the knots had to be tied up in a happy ending. Yet maybe, like Dickens, Shaw is to be considered one of those writers who transcend their own limitations. Certainly we can find elements in many of his plays that seem to go against the grain and give him a surprising thickness and ambiguity. Several of his villains and naysayers, for example, have such seriousness and persuasiveness that they tend to steal the show. In his later plays, when even his heroes begin to lose their faith in the improbability of the world, this countercurrent of pessimism becomes increasingly poignant, couched as it is in the rich Shavian style that he forged from the rolling cadences of the King James Bible and his oratorical experiences at Hyde Park Corner.

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Ultimately, Shaw should speak for himself, as he always did. In Too True to Be Good, a defrocked minister frantically tries to hold onto an ideology that is slipping away: “I stand midway between youth and age like a man who has missed his train: too late for the last, too early for the next. What am I to do? What am I?… I am by nature a preacher. I am the new Ecclesiastes. But I have no Bible, no creed: the war has shot both out of my hands… I must have affirmations to preach. Without them, the young will not listen to me; for even the young grow tired of denials…the preacher must preach the way of life. Oh, if I could only find it… And meanwhile my gift has possession of me: I must preach and preach and preach no matter how late the hour and how short the day, no matter whether I have nothing to say…”

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Coming Home to a Musical That Sounds Like America A.R.GURNEY

The news that Chicago, the 1975 John Kander-Fred Ebb-Bob Fosse musical, is coming to Broadway this fall is hardly a surprise (it opens Nov. 14 at the Richard Rodgers Theater). Anyone lucky enough to have attended one of its four concert performances last May in the acclaimed Encore! Series at City Center will understand why. This reputedly problematic piece, staged by Walter Bobbie and starring Ann Reinking, Bebe Neuwirth, James Naughton, and Joel Grey, proved to be one of the more exciting events of the 1995–96 theater season. The jaunty dances (choreographed by Ms. Reinking in the style of Fosse) and catchy songs, riding on a darkly sardonic plot of adultery, murder, and legal chicanery, elicited the kind of enthusiastic response that is rare in theater audiences these days. Indeed, why does Chicago, which had a relatively qualified reception the first time around, have such an immediate appeal today? The musical comedy is celebrated as one of the truly indigenous flowers in the large and varied garden of American theater. If our important dramatists acknowledge their debt to Ibsen, Chekhov, and, lately, Pinter and Beckett, our best musicians, lyricists, and showbook writers seem to have sprung fullarmed from the head of the Statue of Liberty. True, we can trace the roots of American musical back to certain antecedents abroad, like Viennese operetta, Russian ballet and possibly English music hall or pantomime. But we pride ourselves on having combined and integrated these elements in a uniquely organic way, even while folding in a number of native-grown ingredients, particularly the presentational style and sassy humor of vaudeville. The whole, we like to think, is similar to the United States itself, greater than the sum of its parts. I myself have occasionally attempted to wrestle the musical form to the ground. At Williams College in the 1950s, I followed the innovative efforts of Stephen Sondheim and managed to squeeze out a couple of hopelessly retro musical revues. At the Yale School of Drama, I wrote the book and lyrics for a musical called Love in Buffalo that had a strictly limited and local success. Recently, in a workshop at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, the director John Tillinger and I tried to weave a screwball comedy plot around a number of lesser-known Cole Porter songs, an effort that pleased the two of us more than anyone else. But whatever my own difficulties have been with the musical form, I have noticed that, even in the hands of its most experienced practitioners, this ideally seamless blend of different influences has shown a tendency to separate out into is various antecedents.

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The strain of European operetta, for example, has been re-emphasized most successfully by Oscar Hammerstein 2d, who, both in his collaborations with Jerome Kern and later with Richard Rodgers, gravitated toward exotic, or exoticized, locales, sentimental love stories, and simple thematic homilies. In fact, Hammerstein reasserted the form and feel of this particular foreign source so successfully that, after his death in 1960, his most successful heirs on Broadway turned out to be foreigners themselves, the English Andrew Lloyd Webber the French Claude-Michel Schnöberg and Alain Boublil. If operetta comes, can Puccini be far behind? The vague hints of Puccinilike melodies that echo through Mr. Lloyd Webber’s music are taken up in the very plots of such current Broadway shows as Miss Saigon and Rent, which are recycled versions of Madama Butterfly and La Bohème. Even the musicalized version of Sunset Boulevard, with its emphasis on scenic opulence surrounding a man-killing dragon lady, suggests a poor man’s Turandot more than Billy Wilder’s comically acerbic take on mid-century Hollywood. The vaudeville element in the American musical has, alas, proved somewhat less enduring over the years. Such shows as Guys and Dolls or Damn Yankees or Gypsy had a kind of tough immediacy and wise-guy streetsmartness that made them reach an audience in a very different way from their more sentimental cousins. Some of these musicals were about show business, many were about New York, but all of them were about us in ways that operettas never were. The intimate revues of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, which were vaudeville’s most obvious heirs on Broadway, went off to become variety shows on television; the great director George Abbott retired to Florida to play golf, and a vital thread in our musical-theater world seemed to have been lost. (Stephen Sondheim is always an exception to any generalizations about the American musical, since he has managed to establish and retain a distinctive voice and style for more than forty years.) Yet possibly one of the major reasons Chicago was so enthusiastically welcomed at City Center last spring was that it revived and celebrated the vaudeville tradition in American musical comedy. Its authors even originally subtitled it A Musical Vaudeville. And vaudeville it is, with a vengeance. Here, after a long absence, was a homegrown, tough-minded, in-your face antidote to the distant, sentimental and exotic worlds we had been visiting like genteel tourists. Watching Chicago, hearing the peppy tunes and raunchy lyrics, seeing the brassy Bob Fosseinspired dances, which in themselves evoked the routines of American burlesque, the audience felt as if it had come home. Fabricated out of a 1926 play of the same title by Maurine Dallas Watkins, which became a 1942 Ginger Rogers movie called Roxie Hart, Chicago is about a married chorus girl who shoots her lover, goes to trial under the tutelage of a savvy lawyer, learas how to capitalize on the sentiments of the public, becomes a celebrity, goes free, and ends up as a popular performer. The vaudeville form of Chicago aggressively reinforces the plot. Every song and dance is staged as a kind of number performed on the Orpheum circuit. The audience, in turn, becomes an essential element in the theatrical transaction: we are entertained, seduced, teased, and at the same time mocked into seeing ourselves as the “public” that Roxie Hart is playing to—to save her life.

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There is a refreshingly cynical honesty to Chicago, reinforced by its cocky score, frank lyrics, and insinuating choreography. The show, dealing with serious issues in a wryly ironic way, has some of the subversive qualities of Pal Joey and The Threepenny Opera and certainly of Cabarét, an earlier Kander and Ebb work. The musical may evoke the snap and crackle of Chicago in the ’20s, but it also manages to land us squarely in the New York of the ’90s. After the trials of O.J.Simpson and the Menendez brothers, today’s audiences understand very well the theatrical ploys of mediaconscious trial lawyers and the connections that link crime and celebrity and money. When her lawyer proposes to the now-famous Roxie that she auction off her possessions for extra cash, the Onassis auctions also come to mind. As Ben Brantley pointed out in his review of Encores! production in the New York Times, Chicago could be considered the “evil twin” of A Chorus Line. The two shows eyed each other across Broadway in 1975. Despite its lack of stars, A Chorus Line, which danced away with most of the awards, is about the “trembling, vulnerable child” in every performer; Chicago replies, “That’s showbiz, kid.” The sentimental and the hard-boiled, which work together in American musical comedy at its best, separate out very clearly in these two works. Cynicism, after all, is the other side of sentimentality: one has to do with the denial of emotional response; the other explores it excessively. Most of our musical shows are not so much written as “developed” from other material and pieced together on an efficient assembly line of preliminary readings, auditions, workshops, tryouts, and preview performances. All the components are honed and shaped toward giving us a comforting sense of smooth professionalism, which we recognize as the basic underpinnings of a good show. After all this collaborative engineering, however, the question can arise as to what in God’s name is this thing supposed to be about? Many times the answer is provided in a moralizing, chorus-augmented song that seems tacked on to the surface of the show. We are solemnly told to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (an exhausting proposition) or to “Dream the Impossible Dream” or to accept that “I Am What I Am.” These homilies give the evening enough of a sense of coherence and import to justify the exorbitant cost of our ticket, and enable us to go home feeling not simply entertained but enlightened and improved. Chicago, on the other hand, settles for none of these palliatives. It is simply and defiantly about itself. In college literature departments, this tendency of a work to curl in on itself is called “self-reflexive” or possibly “post-morden,” but however we categorize it, it feels aggressively up-to-date. Chicago says, in effect, that we live in a tough, materialistic, violent society and that show business is the best revenge. OK, crime leads to celebrity leads to money, but you’d better look good if you want to survive. Those arguments are inherent in the show’s vaudevillelike numbers that both seduce us and mock us for falling under their spell. Finally, there may be still another reason the Encores! production of Chicago caused such a spontaneous and enthusiastic response. The very limitations of the evening underscored the theme that putting on a good show is what ultimately counts. Because this was a concert version, a group of firstrate actors, scripts in hand, were asked to work within a confined playing area in front of an on-stage orchestra, with no scenery to “enhance” the evening and little rehearsal time to iron out the kinks.

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Within these restrictions, and probably because of them, the performances took off. Under the urbane artistic direction of Mr. Bobbie, the series at City Center, now going into its fourth year, has shown how far talent and verve can be stretched (in this case for Encores!, all the way to Broadway): Ms. Reinking brought with her a professional and personal familiarity with Fosse’s choreography that gave her a contagious sense of pride and confidence; Ms. Neuwirth, fresh from revivals of Damn Yankees and Pal Joey (another Encores! Production) and several years on the television series Cheers, played with the audience in the best vaudeville tradition; Mr. Naughton’s effortless stage charm worked perfectly as a cover for the sleazy character he portrayed. Together with the supporting case and Rob Fisher’s smooth Coffee Club Orchestra, they made the evening an exhilarating demonstration of talent and grace under pressure—of “the old razzle dazzle,” as one of the show’s best songs would have it. It’s exciting to hear that this cast will be with the show when it opens. They help us respond to Chicago the way we do to the magician who performs a trick with very little equipment, even while he shows us how he is doing it and taunts us for going along with the game.

High Time for Comedy (and Political Outrage) A.R.GURNEY

When I was on the humanities faculty at MIT in the 1970s and 80s, I used to teach a course called “The Nature of Comedy.” One of the critical texts we read was an essay by the esteemed Canadian critic Northrop Frye, who, in discussing classical stage comedy, distinguished between what he called “Old Comedy,” typified in the works of Aristophanes, and the “New Comedy” of Menander, whose plays were produced almost a century later. In Old Comedy, there is normally an idealistic, if somewhat foolish, protagonist who challenges the status quo in some ultimate way, by inhibiting sacrifices to the gods, or by entering Hades to retrieve a dead poet, or by persuading the women of Athens to go on a sex strike. The motive of these well-meaning heroes or heroines is usually to bring some special good to the city of Athens, which was then involved in what seemed like an interminable war with Sparta. Most of the protagonists in these Old Comedies succeed triumphantly, bringing peace and prosperity to their beleaguered polis, even though in actual fact Athens was ultimately to lose the Peloponnesian war. These plays are also characterized by the way they reach out to the audience with specific political and personal praise or criticism, naming names, accusing or complimenting political or military leaders and reminding audiences of their civic responsibilities. Furthermore, there are beautiful musical interludes, sung by the chorus, envisioning a better world. New Comedy, on the other hand, is much more localized and realistic. (“O Life and Menander, which of you copied the other?” a third-century critic wrote.) The focus here shifts from the city to the family, and the plays tend to take place on streets in front of private houses. Their plots normally deal with domestic issues, like money and marriage. There are rigid authority figures, normally parents, who must be accommodated, witty and wily slaves who help engineer the plot, and sometimes long-lost children who show up just in time for a happy ending. While not much of Menander’s work has survived, he has had far more influence on subsequent stage comedy than Aristophanes. Most Roman comedy is derived from Menander, and of course Molière, Congreve, Sheridan, on through to Neil Simon, are indebted to him. Many television sitcoms display strong elements of New Comedy. On the other hand, usually in times of trouble, the occasional Old Comedy re-emerges. There are echoes of the forum in some of George Bernard Shaw’s work, like Major Barbara, and in the occasional American musical, like Of Thee I Sing, or Hair. (Most of Shakespeare’s comedies deserve a special category of their own, which Frye described as “Green World

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Comedy.”) In any case, since comedy is such a complicated and elusive endeavor, these attempts to pin it down can sometimes be illuminating. In 1992, about 10 years after I had pretty much quit teaching at MIT, and a year or two after I had confined myself within the New Comedy tradition with a play called The Cocktail Hour, I found myself trying to stretch into a more open form. The Bush-Clinton election was then well under way, and I tried to respond to it with something I called The Fourth Wall. The play had a quixotic, idealistic heroine, a certain amount of political editorializing and even some choral interludes, since the characters occasionally sang selections from Cole Porter. In my more academic moments, I flattered myself into thinking I was slipping into the Aristophanic vein of Old Comedy. No matter how you characterize the play, over the next couple of years it was produced in various places and various times with varied success. It infuriated the Republicans in the audiences at the Westport Country Playhouse, irritated the critics when it set down in Cambridge, Mass., and generally pleased audiences when it showed up in Chicago. After Bill Clinton was elected, I adjusted its political commentary to apply to his fledgling administration, but some of the juice began to seep out of the play. No matter where it was done, I can’t say that it won the praise and prizes that Aristophanes won, in the annual spring festivals of Athens, with his raw, passionate, aggressively political Old Comedies. Another few years went by. In the summer of 2001, after George Bush had entered the White House, I began to write another play with a political theme. Halfway through, I started to feel that I was repeating myself. I returned to The Fourth Wall, which by then had long been out and around. I found I could rewrite it fairly drastically to apply to the current political scene. I sent it to Casey Childs, the executive producer of Primary Stages, who presides over an Off Broadway theater with a proscenium arch and a reputation for harboring comedy. Casey agreed to produce the play and Sandy Duncan, Charles Kimbrough, Susan Sullivan, and David Pittu signed on to perform. David Saint, the director of the three previous productions, agreed to take time off from his job as artistic director of the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, to direct it once more. It opens on Wednesday. Much as I may have changed The Fourth Wall, the world around it seems to have changed even more. Today, with sabers rattling in Washington, terrorists attacking at home and reassembling abroad, and our pride in our economic system seriously diminished by the misdeeds of several major captains of industry, I can’t help but hope that audiences for this play will find its political indignation more important and germane than they did in its earlier versions. Aristophanes’ Old Comedies seem to have thrived in the heightened atmosphere of public anxiety and political urgency, when the Spartan jackboots could almost be heard marching outside the walls of Athens. All the more reason, he must have felt, to entertain, admonish and cajole his fellow citizens under the guise of laughter. In my own case, I hope that this reincarnation of The Fourth Wall, for all its lightheartedness, contains an underlying sense of what is fashionably called gravitas, which may have been found lacking in some of my other endeavors.

Afterword: A Cue for Gurney Studies

Scholars who desire to study Gurney further should begin, of course, by reading his plays. The Collected Plays, published by Smith and Kraus, comprise the authorized versions from Gurney ’s hand. These volumes, however, include neither his most recent works, O Jerusalem, and Big Bill, nor his librettos and novels. Inexpensive acting editions of individual plays may be obtained through the websites Samuel French, Dramatists Play Service, and Broadway Publishing. These versions are useful because they contain designer’s plans for the sets, costume property lists, and some music. Given Gurney’s inventive use theatrical space and his experiments with dramatic forms and conventions, the acting versions of his plays merit special attention. They are important for understanding the plays in performance rather than as texts to be read. Gurney is represented by Mr. Peter Franklin of the William Morris Agency. Surveys of Gurney’s life and works can be found in standard references such as Biography Resource Center at www.galenet.galegroup.com. Two recent articles are: Brenda Murphy. “A.R.Gurney,” Jay Parini, ed., American writers :a collection of literary biographies. Supplement V, Russell Banks to Charles Wright. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 2000. Arvid Sponberg, “A.R.Gurney,” as well as articles on “Another Antigone,” “The Cocktail Hour ” “The Dining Room,” “The Perfect Party,” and “Sylvia” Jackson R.Bryer and Mary C. Hartig, eds., Facts on File Companion to American Drama. New York: Facts on File. 2003. For a survey of Gurney’s career from the perspective of the most eminent English historian of American theater, read pages 389–98 of C.W.E.Bigsby’s Modern American Drama 1945–2000, published in 2000 by Cambridge University Press. An excellent newspaper profile of Gurney, with photos, by Alex Witchel is referred to in note 1, p 33 and note 4, p 148. Scholars with more time may wish to look at graduate dissertations: Gary Bruner. A director’s manual for a high school production of The Dining Room by A.R.Gurney, Jr. MA Thesis. University of Portland. 1990 Mary Elizabeth Campbell. The dining room by A.R.Gurney, Jr. : a creative thesis in directing/ MA Thesis. Miami University. 1988 Mark A. Geisler, A Burkean Analysis of the offstage presence in the plays of A.R.Gurney, Jr. MA Thesis. University of Northern Iowa. 1991 Laura Miller. Dancing in Chains: How A.R.Gurney ‘s Eighties Plays Reflect Contemporary American Culture. Ph.D Thesis. University of Nebraska. 1993.

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There is no full-length biography of Gurney but the materials for one are accumulating at the Beinecke Library at Yale University to which Gurney has been donating his manuscripts and related documents. Undergraduates and graduates seeking topics focusing on or including Gurney’s plays will find a trove of hints and suggestions in the interviews, essays, and articles in this volume. Try these: • Gurney ‘s interpretations of the Classical tradition: What tales, plots, and characters has he incorporated into his play s? Has he succeeded in making them relevant in the “post-modern” theater? • Gurney’s comic ideas: Wherein is Gurney original and where has he “stolen,” as all comedy writers do, from the best? How has Gurney “appropriated” Aristophanes, Shakespeare, William Congreve, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Alan Ayckbourn? Is he as different from S.N. Behrman and Philip Barry as he claims to be on page 21. How do his play s compare and contrast with those of Neil Simon and Wendy Wasserstein, his near-contemporaries? • Gurney’s analysis of the American and European comic traditions: Is Gurney’s analysis on pages 18–19 persuasive or has he omitted important facts and concepts? What would be a more persuasive analysis? • Gurney and Sondheim: The two were undergraduates at the same time at Williams College. Each is famed for having skillful and witty ways with words. Are their purposes and methods in some ways similar? How and why do their careers differ? • Gurney’s use of music: What composers and what tunes show up in Gurney’s plays? How does Gurney use music in his plays? What do individual songs represent to the characters who hum, whistle, or sing them? Is Gurney justified in worrying, as he does on page 26, that he overuses the image of persons gathered around a piano, singing? • Gurney’s self-reflexivity: In one way or another, Gurney’s plays are about how theatre happens as well as about the struggles of his characters. How and why does he adopt this mode of storytelling? What difference does it make to actors? To audiences? • Gurney and other literary forms: How has Gurney used the fiction of Henry James, and John Cheever, and the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson? What relation, if any, does Gurney’s own fiction—The Snow Ball, Entertaining Strangers, The Gospel According to Joe— have to his plays? • Gurney’s women and men: How good a creator of men and women is he? Will his characterizations endure to define, in part, life in America in the second half of the twentieth century? • Gurney’s use of off-stage characters: In many Gurney plays, one or more characters important to the story is kept off stage. Pokey in Children is one example. What does such an “absence” add to a play? • Gurney and the Professors: Has Gurney put more professors on the stage than any other American play wright? Given his descriptions of his teachers (see “professors” in the index), do his portraits • Gurney and History: Are Gurney’s plays nostalgic for a period of American history and stratum of society that has passed away, as Professor McCconachie claims in this volume,

AFTERWORD: A CUE FOR GURNEY STUDIES 201

or do they reflect Gurney’s efforts, as he claims on page 22, “to be real in a world where those values are under question.”? • Gurney and the critics: With some notable exceptions, New York critics have been tough on Gurney; critics in other cities tend to see more merit in his plays. Does this division of views say more about Gurney or about the differences between audiences in and outside of New York? Gurney gives his own views of the situation in “Critical Condition,” on pages 184–9. Are his views persuasive? What would “better” theater criticism look like? • Gurney and theatre: How did American theatre change during Gurney’s lifetime? What influence did the rise of nonprofit theatres and the decline of Broadway as a venue for new plays have on his career? How and why does his career differ from, for example, that of his older fellow playwright and neighbor, Arthur Miller? How does it differ from that of younger play wrights such as David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner, SuzanLori Parks, or August Wilson. • Gurney and the Theatres: Gurney has formed long-standing relationships with individual producing companies. Circle Repertory, Hartford Stage Company, Lincoln Center, Long Wharf Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, The Old Globe, Playwrights Horizons, Primary Stages, and The Williamstown Theatre Festival have repeatedly staged his works. What are the missions and histories of these companies and why did they produce Gurney’s work?

202

Chronology of A.R.Gurney’s Works

KEY: *=available from a library or publisher First date=performance Second date=publication 1955 1957 1958 1959 1962 1962 1964 1965 1966 1968 1970 1972 1973

1976 1977

1979

Three People. * [one act] Turn of the Century. * [one act] Love in Buffalo. [musical] Tom Sawyer. [musical] The Bridal Dinner. Around the Word in Eighty Days. [musical] The Comeback. 1965. * [one act] The Rape of Bunny Stuntz. * [one act] The Open Meeting. 1968. * [one act] [revised 1990] The David Show. 1968. * [one act] The Golden Fleece. 1967. * [one act] The Love Course. 1969. * [one act] [revised 1990] Scenes from American Life. 1970. * The House of Mirth. 1972. * [screenplay] The Old One-Two. 1971. * [one act] The Problem. 1968. * [one act] [produced first in London, 1970] 1914 Children. 1975.* “Children at the Mermaid,” [interview] The Gospel According to Joe. * [novel] Who Killed Richard Cory. 1977. * [revised 1985 as Richard Cory] Entertaining Strangers. * [novel] The Wayside Motor Inn. 1978. * 1978 The Middle Ages.* “Youth and Beauty,” [tv screenplay]

204 CHRONOLOGY OF A.R. GURNEY’S WORKS

1982 1983 1984 1985

1987 1988

1989

1990

1991

1993

1994

1995

The Dining Room. 1982. * What I Did Last Summer. 1984.* The Golden Age. 1984 * The Snow Ball. [novel] Four Plays. 1985. [Children, The Middle Ages, Scenes from American Life, The Dining Room] 1986 Another Antigone. 1988.* The Perfect Party. 1986. 1986. * “Playwrights,” [Interview.] “Pushing the Walls of Dramatic Form” [article] Sweet Sue. 1987.* The Cocktail Hour. 1989. * “The Dinner Party,” [article] “‘Dusk and Other Stories’,” [book review] The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays. [AnotherAntigone, The Perfect Party; Introduction by A.R.Gurney] “Conversation Piece,” [article] Love Letters. 1989.* Love Letters and Two Other Plays. [The Golden Age. What I Did Last Summer; Introduction by A.R.Gurney] The Snow Ball 1990. “‘A Streetcar Named Desire’: A Playwright’s Forum,” [interview] “A.R.Gurney” [interview] “A.R.Gurney, Jr., Playwright,” [interview] “Critical Condition,” [article] Love Letters. [screenplay] The Old Boy. “When the Final Act Is Only the Beginning,” [article] The Fourth Wall “Interview with Playwright A.R.Gurney” “Shaw, the Eternal Schoolmaster, Can Still Be Wise” [article] “A Fountain Pen, an Empty Page, and Thou: The Lost Art of the Love Letter” [interview] Later Life. 1994. A Cheever Evening. “A.R.Gurney,” [interview]

CHRONOLOGY OF A.R. GURNEY’S WORKS 205

1996

1998

1999

2000

2001 2002

2003

Nine Early Plays 1961–1973: Collected Works, Volume 1. [The Comeback, The Rape of Bunny Stuntz, The Golden Fleece, The David Shaw, The Problem, Public Affairs {The Love Course, The Open Meeting}, The Old One-Two, Scenes from American Life] Sylvia “Coming Home to a Musical That Sounds Like America,” [article] Early American. [novel]

Let’s Do It. Overtime. A.R. Gurney: Collected Plays Volume II 1977–1985 [includes Children, The Wayside Motor Inn, The Middle Ages, The Dining Room, What I Did Last Summer, Richard Cory] “Introduction” The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume 2. “Introduction”, Four Plays by Eugene O’Neill [Beyond the Horizon, The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie, The Hairy Ape] Ancestral Voices Darlene and The Guest Lecturer Far East Labor Day Strawberry Fields, with Michael Torke. 1999 [Libretto] A.R.Gurney: Collected Plays Volume III 1984–1991 [includes The Cocktail Hour, The Golden Age, Love Letters, The Old Boy, The Perfect Party, Sweet Sue] A.R.Gurney: CollectedPlays Volume IV 1992–1999 [indudes Ancestral Voices, Darlene and the Guest Lecturer, Labor Day, Far East, Sylvia] Human Events “A.R.Gurney Remembers,” in Jason Robards Remembered: Essays and Recollections. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2002 Buffalo Gal “High Time for Comedy (and Political Outrage)” [article] The Fourth Wall (revised) Big Bill House of Mirth with Michael Torke [libretto] O Jerusalem Strictly Academic [The Problem and The Guest Lecturer revised]

206

A Bibliography of A.R.Gurney’s Works

Ancestral Voices. Broadway Play Publishing. 1999 Another Antigone. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1988.* ——.Garden City, NY: Fireside Theatre. 1988.* ——.in The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays. 1989. “A.R.Gurney,” in Jackson R.Bryer, The Playwright’s Art. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1995. 86–101. [interview] “A.R.Gurney,” in John L.DiGaetani, A Search for a Post Modern Theater: Interviews with Contemporary Playwrights. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1991. 113– 119. [interview] A.R.Gurney: Nine Early Plays 1961–1973. [Volume I Collected Plays] Smith and Kraus; Lyme, NH. 1995. A.R.Gurney: Collected Plays Volume II 1977–1985. Smith and Kraus; Lyme, NH. 1998. A.R.Gurney: Collected Plays Volume III 1984–1991. Smith and Kraus; Lyme, NH. 2000. A.R.Gurney: Collected Plays Volume IV 1992–1999. Smith and Kraus; Lyme, NH. 2000. “A. R.Gurney, Jr., Play wright,”in Arvid F.Sponberg. Broadway Talks: What Professionals Think About Commercial Theater In America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1991. 185–197. [interview] “A. R.Gurney Remembers,”in Jason Robards Remembered: Essays and Recollections. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2002. Around the Word in Eighty Days. Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company. 1962. [musical]* Big Bill No publisher data. 2003. The Bridal Dinner. No publisher data. 1962. Buffalo Gal No publisher data. 2001. A Cheever Evening. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1995. Children. New York: Samuel French.1975.* ——.New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1977.* ——.in Four Plays. “Children at the Mermaid,” Plays and Players. May 1974:22–23. [interview] The Cocktail Hour. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1989.* ——.Garden City, NY: Fireside Theatre. 1989.* ——.in The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays. The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays. New York: New American Library. 1989. [includes Another Antigone; The Perfect Party]* The Comeback. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1965.* [one act] “Coming Home to a Musical That Sounds Like America,” The New York Times, September 8, 1996, H 11, 26. “Conversation Piece,” Newsweek, June 26, 1989, 10–12. “Critical Condition,” American Theatre. June 1991, 24–7. The David Show.New York:Samuel French. 1968.* [one act] The Dining Room.New York:Dramatists Play Service.1982.* ——.London:Samuel French.1982.* ——.Garden City, NY:Nelson Doubleday.1982.*

208 A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF A.R.GURNEY’S WORKS

——.abridged in Otis L.Guernsey Jr., ed. Best Plays of 1981–82. New York: Dodd Mead. 1983.* ——.in Four Plays. ‘The Dinner Party” American Heritage. 39 (September-October 1988),69–72. “‘Dusk and Other Stories’,” by James Salter.New York Times Book Review, February 21, 1988, 9 .[book review] Early American. [novel]. unpublished. Entertaining Strangers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1977. [novel]* ——.New York: Avon Books .1979.* ——.London: Allen Lane. 1979.* [with Lynda Barry, Julie Garwood, and Mark Leyner] “A Fountain Pen, an Empty Page, and Thou: The Lost Art of the Love Letter,” Harper’s, February 1994, 37–44 [interview] Far East.Broadway Play Publishing.1998. Four Plays.New York:Avon Books. 1985. [includes Scenes from American Life; Children; The Middle Ages; The Dining Room]* The Fourth Wall. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1995 [revised 2002] The Golden Age. New York: Dramatists Play Service.1984.* ——.in Love Letters and Two Other Plays. The Golden Fleece. New York: Samuel French. 1967. * [one act] ——.in Stanley Richards, ed.Best Short Plays 1969.Philadelphia:Chilton Books. 1969.* The Gospel According to Joe. New York: Harper and Row. 1974. [novel] * “High Time for Comedy (and Political Outrage),” New York Times, November 10, 2002. The House of Mirth. photocopy: 1972. [screenplay]* ——.With Michael Torke. 2003. [libretto] Human Events. Broadway Play Publishing. 2001. “Interview with Playwright A.R. Gurney” at http://users.adelphia.net/ ~brendagordon/gurney. html “Introduction,” Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, vol. 2. New York: Theatre Communications Group. 1997. “Introduction,” Four Plays by Eugene O’Neill. New York: Signet Classic. 1998. Later Life. New York. Dramatists Play Service. 1993. Let’s Dolt. Unpublished. 1996. The Love Course. New York: Samuel French. 1969. [revised 1990]* [one act] ——.in Stanley Richards, ed. Best Short Plays 1970. Philadelphia: Chilton Books. 1970.* Love in Buffalo. No publisher data. 1958. [musical] Love Letters. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1989.* ——.Garden City, NY: Fireside Theatre. 1989.* ——.1991. [screenplay] Love Letters and Two Other Plays. New York: Plume. 1990. [includes The Golden Age; What I Did Last Summer]* The Middle Ages. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1978.* ——.in Four Plays. O Jersualem. No Publisher data. 2003. The Old Boy. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1991. The Old One-Two. New York: Samuel French. 1971.* [one act] The Open Meeting. New York: Samuel French. 1968. [revised 1990].* [one act] Overtime. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1996. The Perfect Party. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1986.* ——.Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1986.* ——.abridged in Otis L.Guernsey, Jr. Best Plays of 1985–86. New York: Dodd, Mead. 1987.*

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF A.R.GURNEY’S WORKS 209

——. in The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays. “Playwrights,” in Lee Alan Morrow and Frank Pike, Creating Theater: The Professionals’ Approach to New Plays. New York: Vintage. 1986. 3–83. [Interview. Gurney and other playwrights discuss their craft. 15 answers; 1600 words] The Problem. New York and London: Samuel French. 1968.* [one act] Public Affairs. Samuel French. “Pushing the Walls of Dramatic Form,” The New York Times, July 27, 1986, II, 1 The Rape of Bunny Stuntz. New York: Samuel French. 1964.* [one act] Scenes from American Life. New York: Samuel French. 1970.* ——.in Four Plays. “Shaw, the Eternal Schoolmaster, Can Still Be Wise,” New York Times, January 31, 1993, II, 5, 8. The Snow Ball 1984. New York: Arbor House. 1987. [novel]* [reprinted: New York: Carroll & Graf. 1986.] The Snow Ball New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1990. Sweet Sue. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1987.* ——.Garden City, NY: Nelson Doubleday. 1987.* “‘A Streetcar Named Desire’: A Playwright’s Forum,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 29 (Spring 1990), 173–204. [Gurney and other playwrights comment on Williams’ play.] Sylvia. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1994. Strawberry Fields, with Michael Torke. 1999. [Libretto] Strictly Academic. No publisher data. 2003. [The Problem and The Guest Lecturer revised] Three People. in Margaret Mayorga, ed. Best Short Plays of 1955–1956. Boston: Beacon Press. 1956.* [one act] Tom Sawyer. No publisher data. 1959. [musical] Turn of the Century. in Margaret Mayorga, ed. Best Short Plays of 1957–58. Boston: Beacon Press. 1958.* [one act] The Wayside Motor Inn. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1978.* What I Did Last Summer. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1984.* ——.in Love Letters and Two Other Plays. “When the Final Act Is Only the Beginning” The New York Times, October 27, 1991. H,5–6. Who Killed Richard Cory. New York: Dramatists Play Service. 1977. [Revised; new title: Richard Cory. 1985]* “Youth and Beauty,” American Playhouse. 1979. [TV screenplay]

210

Contributors

Interviews John Cunningham, actor, originated the role of Tony in The Perfect Party, and has performed the role of Andrew Makepeace Ladd III in Love Letters. He debuted at the American Shakespeare Festival and has performed numerous roles on television, in films, and off- and on Broadway. He plays the continuing role of Dan Metzler in the TV series “Law and Order” and will play Donald Rumsfeld in a forthcoming film about the aftermath of 9/11. He is a graduate of Dartmouth and Yale School of Drama where he appeared in A.R.Gurney ’s musical Love in Buffalo. He lives in Rye, New York. Debra Mooney, actor, originated the role of Sally in The Perfect Party and, in New York, the role of Grace in What I Did Last Summer. She has also appeared in The Dining Room and has worked frequently at Circle Repertory Company and Playwrights Horizons. She has taught at the University of Minnesota where she earned an MFA in acting. She began her career in New York at the urging of Tennessee Williams who called her his “favorite Blanche.” She currently appears as Edna Harper in the TV series “Everwood.” She lives in Sherman Oaks, California. Holland Taylor, actor, originated the roles of Barbara in Children, Lois in The Perfect Party, and Nina in The Cocktail Hour. She has also appeared in The David Show and Love Letters. She acts frequently in films and television and plays the part of Judge Roberta Kittelson in the TV series “The Practice.” She is a graduate of Bennington College. She lives in Los Angeles. John Tillinger, director, staged the original productions of The Golden Age, The Perfect Party, Sweet Sue, Another Antigone, The Cocktail Hour, Sylvia, and Overtime. Principle theatres presenting his work have been the Long Wharf Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club. He trained for the stage at the Bristol Old Vic. He lives in Roxbury, Connecticut. Essays JoAllen Bradham is Professor Emerita and resident dramaturg at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. In 1997 she won the Regents Teaching Excellence award from the University System of Georgia. A playwright and novelist, she was honored as Georgia Author of the Year 2000 for her novel Some Personal Papers. Brenda Gordon earned her Ph.D in literature and psychology at the University of Florida and wrote her dissertation on Samuel Beckett. Her interview with A.R.Gurney may be read at her website http://users.adelphia.net/~brendagordon/gurney.html. She teaches at Davidson Day School in Davidson, North Carolina.

212 CONTRIBUTORS

Ervene Gulley is Professor and Chair of English at Bloomsburg State University in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. In addition to A.R. Gurney, her research interests include modernizing of old myths and legends, film and literature, literature and music/art. She teaches courses in Shakespeare, modern and contemporary literature, literature and film, short story, and European literature. Bruce McConachie is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. With Tom Postlewait he edited Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiograpy of Performance. He is the author of Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society 1820–1870 and Perspectives on Teaching Theatre. He is the president of the American Society for Theatre Research. Laura Miller earned her Ph.D in Theatre at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and wrote her dissertation on A.R. Gurney. She is a freelance playwright, director, actor, and independent scholar based in Wise, Virginia. Brenda Murphy, professor of English at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights and the author of books on William Dean Howells, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, and the dramatizing of McCarthyism on stage, film, and television. Her biographical sketch of A.R. Gurney appears in American Writers. Mark William Rocha, is an independent scholar who took his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Southern California and has served as a faculty member and administrator in the California State University system. He lives in Yorba Linda, California. Arvid F.Sponberg is Professor of English at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he teaches twentieth century drama, multicultural drama since 1945, and religion and romance in English drama. He is the editor of Broadway Talks: What Professionals Think About Commercial Theater in America. His research interests include the history of the profession of playwright in the United States, the production histories of American plays in London, and national arts policies in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Index

A Abbott, George, 193 Academic Life, oppressive obligations of, 169 Acting, unwillingness to commit, 32; training at Yale in the Fifties, 35; discerning a calling for, 35–7; whole plays vs. scene study, 36; listening and answering, 37; importance of language, 39; characters’ needs central, 41; educative agenda unactable, 43; Taylor’s early training, 45; difficulty of teaching, 45; London vs. New York career, 47; playing WASPs, 48; challenge of “layered writing,” 50; challenge of Love Letters, 51; playing restraint, 54–4; speech vs. silence, 54–4; spine of character, 57; homework and preparation, 57–8; playing multiple parts, 58; character arc, 59, 63–3; value of academic training, 59; training in US vs. UK, 70–71; attitude of American actors, 71; feelings and language, 71; Actors Studio, 37 Adams Memorial Theater, 35 Addison, Joseph, 152 Adler, Alfred, 3 Adler, Stella, 45 Aeschylus, 167, 170, 150, 188 Aesop, 145, 149 Aesthetics, conflicting aims in Gurney’s plays, 138

“After Frye: A review-article on the Interpretation of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance,” 160, n3 Ah, Wilderness, 101 AIDS, 184 Aimee, Anouk, 76 Alabama, 59 Alba, Richard D. 107–10, 108n Albany, NY 4 Albee, Edward 135n2; 153n Alcohol, WASP attitudes about, 114–7 All That Glitters, 8 Allen, Woody, 17 Alley Theatre, 100 Alliance Theatre, 100 “American Beauty”, 157 American Place Theatre, 165 American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies. Supplement V, Russell Banks to Charles Wright, 198 Ancestral Voices, xii, 2 Andrews, Marge, 39 Androcles and the Lion, 187 Angels in America, 167 Another Antigone, 23, 24, 28, 29, 60, 64, 65; 136, 138, 141; rehearsals, 62–65, 76; excerpt, 67n3; as companion to Perfect Party, 170 “Another Antigone” (article), 198 “Another Gurney for the Old Globe” (article), 143, n2 Anouilh, Jean, influence on Gurney, 26; 28 Antigone (Anouilh), 28 Anti-Semitism, as topic in Gurney’s plays, 63; 82 Apollo, 27 213

214 INDEX

“Archie Bunker” (tv series), 18 “A.R.Gurney” (article), 198 “Argument of Comedy, The” (essay), 153 Aristophanes, 17, 145, 149, 151; ribaldry and satire, 152; 196, 197, 199 Aristotelian Comedy, as defined by Frye, 155– 2, 159 Artistotle, 17, 170 Arizona Theatre Company, 100 Arms and the Man, 188 Army, United States, 33 Arsenic and Old Lace, 7 “As Good as It Gets” (movie), 145 As You Like It, 158 “Aspern Papers, The”, 26 Aspern Papers, Henry James: Selected Fiction, The, 143n6; as source of The Golden Age, 139 Astake, Adele, 5 Astaire, Fred, 68 Astor Place Theater, 170 Athena, as boring dramatic role, 181 Athens, 196, 198 Attica (Greece), 158 Audience, The, 135 Audience, reasons for identifying with The Dining Room, 107–10; atomized, 122; Blau defines, 130; theater vis-à-vis mass media, 134; affected by reviews, 178–88; significance of response for rewriting, 183; should be final arbiter, 183 Austin, Gayle, 93n8 Ayckbourn, Alan, Gurney compares to self, 19; 39, 199 Ayot St. Lawrence, 185–4 Azenberg, Emanuel, 12n5 B Baitz, Jon Robin, 73 Baltzell, E.Digby, views similar to Gurney’s, 101ff: 108n Bangladesh, 78 Barkley, Jered, 12 Barnes, Clive, 48; quoted, 180; 182n

Barry, Philip, Gurney contrasts with self, 20; 126, 199 Barth, John, 129, 135 Barton, John, 71 Bataan Death March, 57 Baudelaire, Charles, quoted, 166 Bazin, Andre, 163, 166nl Beast fable, 145 “Beast in the Jungle, The” (story), 26 Beaumont and Fletcher, 10 Becket (Anouilh), 28 Beckett, Samuel, 81, 167, 183, 191 Beerbohm, Max, 182 Behrman, Samuel N., Gurney contrasts self with, 20; 199 Bellah, Robert N, 111, 116, 118n Belmont, MA, 10 Belmont School, The, 10 Bem, Sandra Lipsitz, 151, 153 Bennetts, Leslie, 108n Bennington College, 8, 45, 50 Bergman, Ingrid, 188 Bergson, Henri, 17, 189 Berkeley (University of California), 126 Bestowal, as essence of valid theatrical experience, 178–88 Bible, The, 3, 82, 190 Bigsby, C.W. E., 198 Bilingualism, in The Cocktail Hour, 91ff Biography Resource Center, 198 Birds, The, 149, 151 Blau, Herbert, 130, 135 Bloom, Harold, 27 Bobbie, Walter, 191, 195 Boston Globe, The, 109n Boston Hills (ski area), xii Boston, MA, 52, 75, 163 passim Boston University, 11 Boublil, Alain, 193 Bourgeoisie, American East coast, 167 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros, 150 Boyer, Charles, 187 “Brady Bunch, The” (tv series), 78 Brantley, Ben, 194 Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, The, 69 Brighton Beach Memoirs, 2 Broadway, 32, 69;

INDEX 215

nature of indeterminable, 75; 92, 182, 195, 200 Broadway Publishing, 198 Broadway Talks, 25 Brockett, Oscar G., 130, 135 Brooklyn, NY, as background for Lois in The Perfect Party, 53 Brothers Karamazov, The, 121 Brown, Arvin, 69, 70 Brown, Pamela, 187 Bruner, Gary, 199 Bryer, Jackson R., 33n3, 127nl, 198 Buffalo, NY, xii, 1,4, 4, 7, 30, 40, 101, 117, 171, 174, 187 passim Burkean Analysis of the Offstage Presence in the Plays of A.R. Gurney, A (thesis), 199 Burton, Richard, 68 Bush-Clinton election, 197 Bush, George W., 197 Bus Stop, 125, 126,156 Byron, Lord, 139 C Cabaret, 194 Caesar and Cleopatra, 39, 187 Caesar, Julius, 189 Café La Mama (theater), 165 Caine Mutiny Court Martial, The, 33 Caldwell, Zoe, 187 California, 47, 51, 92 passim Cambridge, MA, 197 Camino Real, compared to The Dining Room, 59 Campbell, Mary Elizabeth, 199 Candida, 185, 188 Cape Cod, 36 Capitalism, Marxist critique, 92 Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, 188 Castle of Perseverance, The, 146, 148 Catherine I (Russia), 147 Catherine II (the Great), 147 Catherine de Medicis, 147 Catherine of Aragon, 147 Changing Room, The, 69 Channing, Stockard, 39, 60, 72, 77 Character, dramatic; aesthetics/economics nexus, 27; women, 30;

wise-acre women, 53; WASP, English vs. Jewish, Irish, 71; perils of analysis, 73; men and women in Gurney, 133, 200; off-stage characters in Gurney, 199, 200 Charles IX (France), 147 Charles River, 177 “Cheers” (tv series), 1, 18 Cheever, John, 200 Chesterfields (cigarette brand), 171 Chez Nous, 71 Chekhov, Anton, compared with Gurney, 44; 167, 183; contrasted with Shaw, 188; 189, 191 Chicago (musical), 191–195; influenced by vaudeville, 193; contrasted with A Chorus Line, 194 Chicago, IL 197 Chichester Festival, 69 Children, 6, 22, 24, 26, 54, 72, 81, 95, 97, 98, 99, 133 Childs, Casey 197 Chodorow, Nancy, 93n8 Chorus, animals as, 151 Chorus Line, A, contrasted with Chicago, 194 Christ, 111 Circle in the Square (theater), 12n5, 165, 188 Circle Repertory Theatre, 56, 201 City, as concept in Sylvia, 146 City Center, 187, 191, 193, 195 Civil War, The, 102 Claire, Ina, 20 Clairmont, Clair, 139 Class, as function of language, 91ff; as issue in The Cocktail Hour, 91ff; and language, 92; in The Dining Room, 100–10; Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, 108n Classical unities, observed in The Perfect Party, 169; exploded in Another Antigone, 170 Cleveland Playhouse, The, 100 Clinton, Bill, 197 “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (song), 195 Clouds, The, 149 Clurman, Harold, 11, 21

216 INDEX

Cocktail Hour, The, 2, 6, 19, 22, 23, 26, 30, 48, 49, 50, 98, 128, 136, 137, 142, 155, 156, 161, 197; rehearsals, 52; 55 issue of class in, 91ff; 92 source in New Comedy, 92; subtext in aesthetic, 137; moral debate similar to The Golden Age, 142 “Cocktail Hour, The” (article), 198 Coffee Club Orchestra, 195 Coffin, William Sloane, quoted, 184 Collaboration, in musicals, 194–2 Cold Wind and the Warm, The, 20 Collins, Stephen, 182 Comeback, The, 6, 26, 27, 28, 158 Comedy, European and American contrasted, 17, 157–4, 199; “green world”, 17, 19, 158, 197, as concept in Sylvia, 146–2; senex figure, 17, 158; tall tale, 17; seventeenth and eighteenth century, 18; situation, 18; endings contrasted, 17–18; dance elements, 19; characters’ needs as source of humor, 42; based on reality, 61 Community of the Play, as key concept in Gurney, 52 Concord, NH, 7 Connecticut, 158 Congreve, William, 25, 74, 126, 137, 159, 177, 199 Conversations, rituals of, 176–3; contrasted by ethnicity, gender, age, 177 Cooperstown, NY, 171 Coraell, Katharine, 188 “Cosby Show, The” (tv series), 18, 19 Coward, Noel, 126, 137 Critics, response to Another Antigone, 76; hampered by false sense of professional detachment, 179–6; conflict in roles, 179–8; Gurney’s views of, 200 Creative process, Gurney perplexed by, 29; affected by change of residence, 169 Cultural bias, undercut by Gurney, 134 Cunningham, Carol, 35, 36

Cunningham, John, 8, 12n5n7; first meeting with Gurney, 39; creates character of Tony in The Perfect Party, 40; 74 D Damn Yankees, 193, 195 Dana, Richard Henry, 7 Dancing in Chains: How A.R.Gurney’s Eighties Plays Reflect Contemporary American Culture (thesis), 199 Daniels, Jeff, 60, 72 Danson, Ted, 18 Dante, 125 Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The, 2 Dartmouth College, 35 Darwin, Charles, 189 David Show, The, 6, 11, 28, 48, 50; reviews of quoted, 180, 182n Death of a Salesman, 60, 72, 119, 124, 126 Decline of the WASP, The, 109n Delaware Park (Buffalo, NY), 171 Democracy in America, 176 DeNiro, Robert, 37 Depression, The Great, 163 Devil’s Disciple, The, 187 Devine, George, 69 Dialectic, aesthetic in Gurney, 138 Dining Room, The, 2, 4, 6, 15, 19, 22, 40, 42, 44, 52, 56, 58, 65, 71, 115, 155, 158, 159; compared to Camino Real, 59; as exploration of sexism, 84ff; 88, 89, 96; nostalgia vs. marxist-feminist critique, 100– 108 Dining Room by A.R.Gurney, Jr: a Creative Thesis in Directing, The (thesis), 199 “Dining Room, The” (article), 198 Dickens, Charles, 3; compared to Shaw, 190 Dinner parties, as social ritual, 171–80; in history and literature, 174 Dionysus, 149, 152 Directing, importance of discovery, 73; avoiding patterns, 73–3; belief in the play, 74; not cross-questioning the playwright, 74

INDEX 217

Director’s Manual for a High School Production of The Dining Room, A (thesis), 199 Doctor’s Dilemma, The 188 Doll House, A, 86 Don Juan in Hell, 187, 189 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 3 Douglas, Kingman, 5 Douglas, Kirk, 187 Drama, as restrictive medium, 167 Dramatic Technique, character’s arc, 43; self-reflexivity, 50; PIP process, 56; shape of a play, 58–8; comedy and farce compared, 61; equal importance of men and women, 64–4; going to the abyss, 44, 65; characters connect with audience, 65; breaking of form, 71; distinctive rhythm, 72; influence of reading vs. movies and television, 73; use of music, 73; triangle, as principle, 151; laws of 167. See Playwriting Dramatists Play Service (publisher), 198 Draper, Ruth, 48 “Dream the Impossible Dream” (Song), 195 Dryden, John 18 “Duck Soup” (movie), 17 Dulack, Tom, 69 Dumont, Margaret, 17, 157 Duncan, Sandy, 197 Duque, Manuel, 45 Dynamics of Literary Response, The, 135 E Eban, Abba, 53–3, 60 Ebb, Fred, 191 Ecclesiastes, 190 Economics, effect on playwriting, 123; as inhibitor of dramatic invention, 167; effects on Shaw’s productions, 188 Edel, Leon, 143n6 Ego, not symbolized in Sweet Sue Elizabethan drama, 180; influenced by religion, 165,

fluidity of, 165; Eliot, T.S., Gurney’s allusions to, 137, 138, 142 Elsinore, 165 Encores! Series, 191, 194, 195 England, 68, 165, 187 English Institute Essays, 160n2 English music hall, 191 Entertaining Mr. Sloane, 69 Entertaining Strangers (novel), 29, 200 Epstein, Hap, 96, 100 Erie Canal, 174 Erlanger Theater (Buffalo, NY), 4 Eros (god), 41 Escapade, 68 Essay on Criticism, An, 144, 153n Essential Theatre, The, 135 Esslin, Martin, 134, 135 Ethnicity, pan-European, 107; homogenization of American upper class, 107; changes in American, 107–108 Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America, 108n Euripides, 27, 150 Evans, Maurice, 12n5, 187 Exxageration, as parody technique in Sylvia, 148 Exeter Street Theatre (Boston), 163 Everyman, 146, 148 “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” (song), 149, 150 F Facts on File: Companion to American Drama, 198 Fairpress, 109n Families, elite, generational decline of, 102–9 “Family in Modern Drama, The,” 127n8 Fantasy, topic of, 149 Far East, 2, 12n6 Farce, based on reality, 61 Fatal Shore, The 52 Fathers and sons, in Gurney, 119–127 Faulkner, William, 4 Feiffer, Jules, 17, 61 Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, 93n8 Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism, 93n8 Fergusson, Francis, 128, 135 Fetterly, Judith, 88, 92n7 Fisher, Rob, 195

218 INDEX

Fitzgerald, F.Scott, 141, 142 Florida, 193 Flowering Judas and Other Stories, The, 135n3 Fluidity of role, as theme in Sylvia, 151 Form, dramatic, 20, 21; in Sweet Sue, 22; character doubling, 23; temporary spaces as settings, 23–5; communal nature of, 25; use of music, 25–7; absent characters, 26–8; Gurney’s impatience with, 169 Ford, Henry, 123 Fort Hood Players, 12n5 Fosse, Bob, 191, 194 Four Baboons Staring at the Sun, 41 Fourth Wall, The, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33n3, 41, 49, 50, 185, 197–5; excerpt, 78 “Fox and the Dog, The” (fable), 145 France, 76 Frank, Leah D., 108n Franklin, Peter, 198 French Revolution, 102 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 17 Frogs, The, 149, 150 Fry, Christopher, 10 Frye, Northrop, 17, 153, 196 Fugard, Athol, 12n5 Fussell, Paul, 108n G Galliano, Grace, 153n Gamos, 149 Gardner, Herb, 32 Garson, Greer, 188 Gassner, John, 10 Gault, Charlayne Hunter, 150 Geisler, Mark A., 199 Gender, and monolingualism, 84ff; in The Dining Room, 100– 109; role in Gurney’s concept of history, 101; polarization, as target in Sylvia, 151 George Street Playhouse, 197 Gersten, Bernard, 12n5 Giannini, Giancarlo, 74 Gielgud, John, 68, 187

Gilbert and Sullivan, 4 Glass Menagerie, The, 2, 6 Glengarry, Glen Ross, 72 “Green World” See Comedy Goat, or Who is Sylvia? The, 153n God, 148; as boring dramatic role, 181 Gods, 174, 181; Aeschylean, 27; Greek, symbolized in Sylvia, 149 Golden Age, The, 136, 138; rehearsals, 6; 26, 60; in London vs. New York, 72; moral issues in similar to The Aspern Papers, 141; moral debate in similar to The Cocktail Hour, 142 Golden Fleece, The, 26, 27, 28, 29, 50 Good Society, The, 116, 118n Goodman Theater (Chicago), 47, 100 Goodyear, Charles (Gurney’s step-grandfather), 1 Gospel According to Joe, The (novel), 27 “The Graduate” (movie), 17–18, 156 Grandmothers, Sunday and holiday visits, xii; emotional closeness to Gurney, 2 Great Gatsby, The, 141 Greek drama, influenced by religion, 165; offstage events, 167; 180 Grey, Joel, 191 Grimes, William, 100n Grizzard, George, 63 Guare, John, 39; contrasted with Gurney, 40–1; compared to Gurney and Wasserstein, 43 Gurney, Charles (paternal uncle), influence on young Gurney, 5 Gurney, Evelyn Ramsdell (paternal grandmother), 4 Gurney, Marian Spaulding (mother), 1, 2; education, 3; reading habits, 3; attitudes toward theater, 4–5; visit blocks musical opportunity, 10 Gurney, Albert Ramsdell, Sr. (father), 1; skill as public speaker, 5; use of literary allusions, 5; sense of humor, 5;

INDEX 219

quoted on dinner parties, 171–175; views on art of conversation, 177–3; see previous entry Gurney, Albert Ramsdell, Jr, (Pete), youth, xii– 8; rituals of family life, 2; desire to tell stories, 3; comic sensibility, 3; religion, 3; childhood interest in plays, 6; roots of dramatic technique, 6; first stage appearance, 7; at St. Paul’s School, 7–8; at Williams College, 8–9; preference for Restoration Comedy, 9; joins Navy, 9–10; at Yale School of Drama, 10; preference for Elizabethan plotting, 10; teaches at Belmont school, 10; teaches at MIT, 10, 17; importance of Tanglewood to development, 11; interest in musicals, 12; development as playwright, 15–33; career compared to Inge’s, 15; contrasted with Guare, 40–1; compared to Chekhov, 43, 54–4; compared to Wasserstein, 43; qualities as playwright, 48, 49, 55, 61, 72, 138; challenging actors, 50; at rehearsals, 52, 54; compared to Tennessee Williams, 61, 65; personal qualities, 63; playfulness in aesthetic, 137; subtext in aesthetic, 137; and aesthetics of Henry James, 142–7; moral statement in plays, 138, 142; basis of comic vision, 142; effect of move to New York City, 169–6 Guys and Dolls, 193 Gypsy, 193 H Habits of the Heart, 111, 118n Hades, 196 Hagen, Uta, 187

Hair, 165, 197 Hall, Peter, 70 Halliday, Richard, 10 Hallmark, in Sweet Sue 133, 133 “Hallmark” (tv series), 188 Hamlet, 183 Hammerstein 2nd, Oscar, 193 Hart, Kitty Carlisle, 150 Hartford Stage Company, 201 Hartig, Mary C, 198 Hardwicke, Cedric, 187 Harvard, 8, 177 “Hasty Pudding” (variety show), 8 “Have a #%!&$! Day” (article), 100n Heartbreak House, 187, 188, 189 Hegel, Georg W.F., 189 Hegemony, evil or social necessity, 102 Henry IV, Part I, 36 Henry V, 33 Henry VIII, 147 Heterosexuality, 89 “His Obsession is a Culture in Decline” (article), 108n History, structuring of in The Dining Room, 103; sense of in Gurney, 119ff, 123; of drama as recapped in Sylvia, 148–4, 152; in relation to Gurney’s plays, 200 Hoguet, Diana, 109n Holland, Norman N., 129, 135 Hollywood, 32, 187 Homer, 27, 28, 174 Homosexuality, 89, 90 “Honeymooners, The” (tv series), 18 House of Mirth, The (novel), 12 Howe, Julia Ward, 7 Huckleberry Finn (novel), 17, 156 Hudson River, 33 Huguenots, 147 Hummler, Richard, 100, 109n Hunt, James Clay, 9 Hunter College, 141 Hutcheon, Linda, 148, 153n Hwang, David Henry, 201 Hyde Park Corner, 190 I “I Am What I Am” (song), 195

220 INDEX

Ibsen, Henrik, 10, 86, 167, 189, 191 Id, not symbolized in Sweet Sue, 170 Idea of a Theater: A Study in Ten Plays: The Art of Drama in Changing Perspective, The, 135 Immasculation, 88 Importance of Being Earnest, The, 28, 62 “In the Language of Lockjaw, Subtext is All” (article), 100n “In the WASP’s Nest with A.R. Gurney” (article), 100n “Incredible Journey, The” (movie), 145 Independence College (KS), 127n1 Independence, KS, 127n1 Indeterminacy, linguistic, in Gurney’s plays, 81– 92 Inferno, The, 125 Inge, William, 2, 119ff; 153ff; 160n5, 160n10; career compared to Guraey’s, 15 Ionesco, Eugene, 81 Iran, 68 Irony, as parody technique in Sylvia, 148 IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 59 Isaac, Dan, 100, 109n Italian Lesson, The, 48 Ivy League, 101 J James, Henry, 138ff; Gurney uses stories of, 26; aesthetics contrasted/compared with Gurney’s, 142, 142, 200 “Jack Benny” (radio series), 200 Jackson, Glenda, 37 Jacobowsky and the Colonel, 20 Jason, 27 Jaws, 27 Jews, 84 “Jilting of Granny Weatherall, The” (story), 135n3 Joyce, James, 4 JuJamCyn Theaters (producers), 12n5 Jung, Carl, 3 K Kael, Pauline, 182 Kander, John, 191 Kaufman, George S., 153

Kazan, Elia, 165; quoted, 184 Keats, John, 7 Kelly, Kevin, 109n Kennedy Center, 100 Kern, Jerome, 193 Killen, Tom, 109n Kimbrough, Charles, 197 King and I, The, 178 King James Bible, The, 190 King Lear, 92 Knapp, Caroline, 144, 153n Komos, 149 Korean War, 33 Kushner. Tony 201 Kurtz, Swoosie, 49 L La Boheme, 193 Labor Day, 155 Labor Day, 155 Lake Erie, 109 Lake Mohonk (NY), 42 Lancaster, Burt, 187 Langham, Michael, 185 Language, possibilites in The Perfect Party, 169 Language, theory of as source of conflict in plays, 82–2 Lassie, 145 Later Life, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 155, 185 “Laughter, Tears, and the Perfect Martini” (article), 143n4 Laughton, Charles, 187 Lauter, Paul, 160n2 Law, Mouzon, 11 Leahey, Mimi, 101, 109n Lehman, Jon, 100, 106, 109n Leitinger, Gilbert, 10 Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality, The, 153 Les Miserables (musical), 78 Leigh, Vivien, 187 Libin, Paul, 141n5 Life (magazine), 171 Life Force, in Shaw’s plays, 189 Life of William Inge: The Strains of Triumph, A, 127n3

INDEX 221

Lincoln Center, 11, 12n5, 49, 70, 71, 163, 201 Linton, John K, 134n1 London, 69, 72, 76 Long, Shelley, 18 Long Wharf Theater, 42, 69, 70, 76, 193, 201 Lost and Found (movie), 37 “Lost in the Funhouse” (story), 135; compared to Sweet Sue, 129 Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice, 135 Louis XIV, 167 Love Course, 29, 33n5 Love in Buffalo, 10, 12, 12n7, 39, 193 Love Letters, 6, 22, 26, 30, 136; emotional wallop of, 42; 43 first performance, 51; 60 The New Yorker rejects, 76; clue to London reaction, 77 Lucia di Lammermoor, 11 Lunt, Alfred, 37 Lunts, The 20, 184 Lyceum Theater, 185 Lysistruta, 149, 150 M Madama Butterfly, 193 Major Barbara, 187, 188, 197 Malkovich, John, 77 Mamas and the Papas, The, 27 Man and Superman, 187 Manhattan Theatre Club, 27, 49, 70, 71, 72, 193 Mankind, 146 Marat/Sade, 165 March, Fredric, 37 Marchand, Nancy, 49, 52 Margulies, David, 61 Mark Taper Forum, 125 Martin, Mary, 10 Marx Brothers, 17, 157 Marxist-feminist critique, 101 Marxists, 102 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 10, 15, 18, 28, 48, 52, 62, 137, 167, 178, 188, 196 passim Mastroianni, Marcello, 40, 74 McCarter Theatre, 100, 106 McConachie, Bruce, 200

McCowen, Alec, 68 McLanahan, Rue, 11, 12, 22 Medea, 26 Menander, 156, 196, 197 Menendez brothers, 194 Merchant of Venice, The, 6, 17, 158, 159 Meredith, George, 17 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 158 Metadramatic focus, in Sweet Sue, 130 Michell, Keith, 69, 70 Middle Ages, The, 19, 24, 60, 63, 98, 123, 125–9 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 158 Miller, Arthur 61, 78, 119ff, 200 Miller, Laura, 199 Mills, C. Wright, 102 Milton, John, 7 Minnesota, 63 Miss Saigon, 193 Modern American Drama 1945–2000, 199 Modern Theatre: Readings and Documents, The, 160n2 Molière, 137, 167 Mono-lingualism, 84ff Monopoly (game), 185 Mooney, Debra, 8, 32, 41, 42, 54, 76; first meeting with Gurney, 56 Moore, Mary Tyler, 22, 75, 134n1 Moorehead, Agnes, 187 Morality play, 145, 152 Moriarty, 11, 12, 21, 22 Mormon Tabernacle Choir, 159 Motif, conflicts over words meanings, 81–1; father-son conflict, 79 and passim; missing text, 91 ff Mourning Becomes Electra, 82 Movietone, 185 Much Ado About Nothing, 8 Murphy, Brenda, 198 Music, Gurney’s use of, 200 Music Box Theatre, 128 Musical comedy, 8, 9, 12, 191–195 Muzio, Gloria, 185 My Fair Lady, 41–2, 187 “My Dog Skip” (movie), 145 My Three Angels, 33 N

222 INDEX

Nachman, Gerald, 109n Napoleon, 189 National Actors Theater, 185 National Guard, 126 “Nature of Comedy, The” (Gurney’s MIT course), 196 Naughton, James, 191, 195 Navy, U.S., 9, 126 Nazi, 63 Neuwirth, Bebe, 191, 195 New Brunswick, NJ, 197 New Comedy, as source for The Cocktail Hour, 103; contrasted with Old Comedy, 196, 198 New England, 82, 101 New Haven, CT, 35, 193 New York Central Railroad, 4 New York City, 4, 32, 45, 47, 58, 69, 70, 74, 76, 100, 119, 125, 128, 141, 175, 177, 178, 179, 182, 185, 187, 193, 194 passim New York Post, 48 New York Shakespeare Festival, 12n5 New York Times, The, 32, 48, 75, 95, 100n, 108n, 159, 180, 194 New Yorker, The, 48–8; rejects Love Letters, 76 Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON, 187 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 189 Nichols, Mike, 165 Nichols, Peter, 71, 135, 170 Nileriver, 175 Nimes, FR, 163 Nineteen seventies, turmoil of, influence on Scenes from American Life, 22 Nobel Prize, 185 Noh, 165 Nonprofit theaters, role in Gurney’s career, 12– 4, 200 “Nonprofits Love Dining Room: 43 Editions for Gurney Play” (article), 109n Nottingham, 69 O O’Connor, John J, 106, 106, 109n Occhiogrosso, Frank, 106, 109n Odets, Clifford, 10 Odyssey, The, 158

Oedipus, 156 Of Thee I Sing, 197 Off-Broadway, 69, 197 Old Boy, The, 6, 24, 25, 29, 41, 94, 182–185 Old Comedy, 145, 149; contrasted with New Comedy, 196, 198 Old Globe Theatre, 100, 170, 184, 185, 201 Old One Two, The, 29 Old Regime, 102 Old Yeller, 153 Oliver, Edith, 48; quoted, 182n Olivier, Laurence, 33, 37, 165, 187 Olympus, Mt, 179 “101 Dalmations” (movie), 145 O’Neill, Eugene, 78, 135n2, 170 Open Meeting, The, 29 Operetta, as source of American musical, 193 Orton, Joe, 69 Osborne, John, 68 Other Stages, 100, 109n Our Town, 101, 165 Overtime, 33n5, 159 Oxford Playhouse, 69 P Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs, 144, 153n Pal Joey, 194, 195 Pantomime, 191 Parini, Jay, 198 Park, as concept in Sylvia, 146 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 201 Parody, pleasure of, 27–9; techniques in Sylvia, 148 Party, contrasted with picnic in Inge and Gurney, 155 Pasadena Playhouse, 58 Pastoral, experience of, 146 “Pastoral Poetry”, 153 Patriot Ledger, The, 109n Peloponnesian War, 196 Perfect Party, The, 8, 23, 28, 29, 33n5, 41, 50, 55, 61, 64, 65, 67n5, 74, 128 ff, 136, 155, 159; ending unsatisfactory, 40; rehearsals, 53–3, 60–62, 74–4;

INDEX 223

allusions to Oscar Wilde, 62; excerpt, 66n1; language possibilities, 169; plot possibilities, 169; as companion to Another Antigone, 169–6 “The Perfect Party” (article), 198 Performance art, Sweet Sue as example, 130 Philadelphia Drama Guild, 100 Philbrick, Frederick Arthur (Gurney’s teacher), 7–8 “Philco Playhouse” (tv series). 188 Phaedra, as basis for Sweet Sue, 22, 170 Piano, place in family life, 26 Picnic, 121, 155, 156, 160n5 Picnic, as contrasted with Party in Inge and Gurney, 155 Pinter, Harold, 21, 191 Pirandello, Luigi, 69, 165 Pittu, David 197 Place, sense of in theatrical experience, 163–3 Plaza Hotel (NY), 11 Playfulness, in Gurney’s aesthetic, 137 “Playhouse 90” (tv series), 188 Playwrights Horizons (theater), 70, 100, 170, 182, 184, 185, 201 Playwriting, effect of economics. 130; improvisational playwriting defined, 130; teaching setting, 165; self-reflexivity, 137, 200; triangle, as principle, 151; dangers of rewriting, 182–90; faults described, 183; coded responses of friends, 183; actors may disguise weak writing, 183; contrast with cinema in attaining double perspective, 184; balance between main and supporting characters, 184; tonal complexity, 185; see Dramatic Technique Plunkett, Maryann, 185 Power Elite, The, 102 Pope, Alexander, 144; quoted, 152 Porter, Cole, 25, 30, 149, 150, 193, 197 Porter, Katherine Anne, 135n3 Post-modernism, in Chicago, 195 Potter, Dennis, 69

Prejudice, nature of 63 Primary Stages (theater), 197, 201 Problem, The, 23 Producers, encourage Olympianism in critics, 179, 181 Promenade Theater, 42 Protestant Establishment, 101, 102, 103 Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, The, 102ff, 108n Protestant Establishement Revisited, The, 108n Providence (idea), 83 Psacharopolous, Nikos, influence on Gurney, 10; 39 Psychology of Gender: A Global Perspective, The, 153n Public Theater (New York City), 70 Public Theater (Pittsburgh), 100 Puccini, Giacomo, 44, 193 Pullman cars, 176 Puritans, 82–83, 174 Puritan Oligarchy, The, 92n5 Puritanism in Old New England, 92n4 R Racism, 82 Radio City Music Hall, 163 Radio programs, xii Rain, Douglas, 187 Rainmaker, The, 33 Rains, Claude, 187 Ramsay, Remak, 42 Rape of Bunny Stuntz, The, 21, 23, 29, 94 Rape of the Lock, The, 152 Rattigan, Terence, 69 Realism, Gurney repudiates, 21, 137–2 Rebhorn, Wayne A., 160n3 Redgrave, Lynn, 22, 75, 134n1 Redgrave, Michael, 68 Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre, 135 Reinking, Ann, 191, 195 Rent, 193 Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, 100 Repression, in Sweet Sue, 131 ff Republican, 86 Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, The, 92n7 Restoration comedy, 40, 74, 144 Resurrection, as seasonal myth, 149

224 INDEX

Reviews, effects on audiences, 178–88 Rewriting, dangers of, 182–90 Rhetoric, issues of power, 95; of anger, 95 ff; silence and outburst, 95; indirection and evasion, 96; phatic phrase, 96; subtext, 96; substitution, projection, displacement, 96; of a play’s action, 101; of audience’s positioning, 101; and coherence in The Dining Room, 107 Ribaldry, in Aristophanes, 152 Rich, Frank, 32 Richard II, 68 Richard Cory, 23, 30, 65 Richard Rodgers Theater, 191 Richards, David 72, 96, 100n Richards, John (Gurney’s teacher), 7–8, 10 Richards, Lloyd, 124 Rituals, 145; dinner parties as, 171–175; of conversation, 176–3 Robertiello, Richard C, 109n Robin Hood, 126 Robin and Elizabeth, 69 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 200 Rodgers, Richard, 193 Rogers, Ginger, 68, 194 Romberg, Sigmund, 4 Rome, 4 Romeo and Juliet, 8 Rose, 37 Roundabout Theater Company, 185 “Roxie Hart” (movie), 194 Royal Court Theatre, 69 Rubinstein, John, 182 Russian Ballet, 191 Pygmalion, 9, 187 S Saint, David, 197 Salvation Army, 188 Samuel French, 198 San Diego, CA, 39, 52, 76, 100, 170 San Diego Union, 143n2 San Francisco Chronicle, 100, 109n

Sand, George, 134 Satire, targets of, 149; in Aristophanes, 152 Scenes from American Life, 1, 2, 6, 11, 21, 30, 49, 63, 71, 76, 79, 96, 98, 122; turmoil of 1970s, 22 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 17 Schneiderman, Howard, 102, 109n Schonberg, Claude-Michel, 193 Schrag, Peter, 109n Self-reflexivity, in Gurney, 137, 200; in Chicago, 195 Seltzer, Daniel, 160n2 Semiotic system, Anglo-American, 81 Servants, attitudes toward, 171–80 Setting, importance in playwriting, 165 Seventh Army, 33 Sexism, as a major subject in Gurney’s plays, 84 ff; 88 Sexual imagery, in What I Did Last Summer, 114 Sexual orientation, and monolingualism, 84 ff “The Shadow” (radio series), 1 “Shadows of the Gods” (essay), 121, 127n2 Shakespeare, William, 3, 7, 17, 18, 28, 33, 68, 70, 70, 158, 170, 177, 183 Shakespearean Comedy, as defined by Frye, 155, 158,159 Shaw, George Bernard, 9, 17, 18, 26, 39, 91, 158, 177, 182, 185–8, 197, 199; contrasted with Chekhov, 188; effects of economics on productions, 188; as synthesizer of 19th century ideas, 189; and concept of evolution, 189; quoted, 190–8; no tragic vision compared to Dickens, 190 Shaw Festival, 187 Sicily, 41 Signifier/Signified, transcendental, 83; in Gurney’s plays, 79–92 Simmons, Jean, 188 Simon, Neil, 2, 12n5, 32, 61, 153, 188, 189, 199 Simpson, Alan, 82 Simpson, N. F, 69 Simpson, O.J., 194 Singer, Irving, 178 Sisters Rosenzweig, The, 43 Six Characters in Search of an Author, 43, 165 Six Degrees of Separation, 39, 41

INDEX 225

Skiing, xii Snow Ball, The (novel), 169, 200 Socrates, 111 Solomon’s Child, 69 Sondheim, Stephen, collaborates with Gurney, 8–9; 193, 199 Sophocles, 138, 159, 180 Sounder, 145 South Africa, 73 Southern gentry, 174 Spaulding, Marian Perkins, (Gurney’s maternal grandmother), xii–2 Sponberg, Arvid, 198 St. Crispin Day (speech), 33 St. Joan, 185, 187, 189 St. Paul’s School, 12, 101 St. Peter’s Church (NY), 125 Stages, 109n Statue of Liberty, 191 Steenburgen, Mary, 185 Stereotyping, undercut by Gurney, 134 Sternhagen, Frances, 42 Stevens, Roger, quoted, 185 Stoppard, Tom, 12n5 Storey, David, 61 Strasberg, Lee, 45 Stratford (Shakespeare Festival, ON), 163 Streetcar Named Desire, A, 23, 61 Strindberg, August, 189 Subtext, in Gurney’s aesthetic, 137 Sullivan, Susan, 197 Summer Brave, 121 Summer Street (Buffalo, NY), 4 Sunset Boulevard, 193 Superman, in Nietzsche and Shaw, 189 Suspension of disbelief, 178 Sweet Sue, 6, 15, 23, 30, 76, 128–135; psychology in, 22; plot in, 22; move to Broadway, 75; four dimensions in, 129 ff; compared to “Lost in the Funhouse”, 129; as example of performance art, 130; metadramatic focus in, 130; repression in, 131 ff; 159; Phaedra as basis for, 170; ego, id, unconscious not symbolized in, 170 “Sweet Sue”(song), 26

Swift, Jonathan, 4 Sylvia, 6, 33n5, 144–153, 152, 159; meaning of name, 146; park as concept in, 146; parody techniques in, 148; symbols in, 148–4; history of drama recapitulated, 148–4; talk shows as target in, 150; fluidity of role as theme, 151 “Sylvia” (article), 198 Symbolic naming, 146 Syracuse Stage, 100 T Talking Heads (band), 132 Talley’s Folly, 57 Talent, encouraging, as issue in What I Did Last Summer, 112 Taylor, Holland, 8, 11 Tanglewood Festival, 11 Tandy, Jessica, 72, 187 Tempest, The, 158 1066 and All That, 68 Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 160n3 Theater, under pressure, 21; vs. movies, 31; virtues of, 31; in US in 1970s, 70; artificiality of, 178 Theater Essays of Arthur Miller, The, 127n2, 127n8 Theories of Comedy, 160n2 Theory of Parvdy, A, 148, 153n Thoreau, Henry David, 7 Three Men on a Horse, 8 Three Sisters, 43 Three Tall Women, 135n2 Threepenny Opera, The, 194 Tillinger, John (Joey), 8, 22, 40, 54, 61, 62, 71, 134n1, 193 Timebends, 122, 127n5 Tocqueville, Alexisde, 102, 176 Too True to be Good, 190 Toronto, 117 Tracy, Spencer, 36–8 Triangle, as principle of playwriting, 151 Trinity Church (Buffalo, NY), 173 Troilus and Cressida, 28

226 INDEX

Tudor, Mary, 147 Turn of the Century, 28, 95 Tubb, Barry, 134n1 Tucci, Maria, 22 Turandot, 193 Twain, Mark, 17 Twelfth Night, 17, 158 Two Gentlemen of Venma, 158 Two Years Before the Mast, 7 Tynan, Kenneth, 182 U Uncle Vanya, 183 Unconscious, not symbolized in Sweet Sue, 170 University of Chicago, 160n10 V Van Zandt, Porter, 56 Variety, 100 Vassar College, 33 Vatican, 181 Vaudeville, as source for American musical, 193–1 Verdi, Giuseppe, 44 Viagas, Robert, 109n Victoria (Queen), 4 Victrola, 173 VietnamWar, 11, 79 Virgin Mary, 152 Virginia, 185 Voss, Ralph, 121 W Waiting for Godot, 183 Walton/Bill, 45 War and Peace, 116 Washington, D.C., 72 Washington Times, 100n Washington University, 160n10 WASP, 44, 48, 53, 57, 60, 71, 81, 82, 83, 84, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 100, 101, 112, 137, 167, 169, 170; whining, 49; decay of culture, 102–107; virtues listed, 104; hegemony, 105; ethic of masculine honor, 105;

code of behaviors, 113 WASP Mystique, The, 109n Wasserstein, Wendy, compared with Guare and Gurney, 43; 199 Watkins, Maurine Dallas, 194 Way of the World, The, 25 Wayside Motor Inn, The, 6, 24, 71 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 193 Weiss, Peter, 165 Welsh, Anne Marie, 143n2 Welsh, Connie, 35, 37 Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson, 92n5 Wesker, Arnold, 69 Wesport Country Playhouse (CT), 197 Wesport, CT, 100 Westport News, The, 109n Wharton, Edith, 12 What I Did Last Summer, 2, 6, 24, 56, 67n4, 97, 100, 109–118; encouraging talent as issue in, 112; sexual imagery in, 114; 136 What Is Cinema, 166 Where To From Here?, 8 White Fang, 145 White, Stewart Edward, 7 Wild Goose Chase, The, 10 Wilde, Oscar, 18; rhythm and vocabulary, 28; allusions to in The Perfect Party, 62; 74, 144, 158, 159, 199 Wilder, Billy, 193 Wilder, Thornton, 21, 160n10, 165; career compared to Gurney’s, 15 Will to Power (Nietzsche), 189 William Inge Festival, 127n1, 160n1 Williams College, 8, 9, 35, 36, 191, 199 Williams, Emlyn, 68 Williams, Henry B., 35 Williams, Hugh, 69 Williams, Tennessee, 2, 4, 6, 61; compared with Gurney, 65 Williamstown Theatre Festival, 10, 35, 170, 201 Wilson, August, 201 Wilson, Edwin, 109 Wilson, Lanford, 61 Winter’s Tale, The, 9, 158, 187 Witchel, Alex, 17, 19, 32n1, 32n2, 143n4, 199 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 134

INDEX 227

Woman in Mind, 39 World War II, 57, 171 Worth, Irene, 60, 72 WPA, 70 Y Yale, 3, 5, 35, 36, 37, 39 Yale School of Drama, 10, 35, 124, 193 Yeats,William Butler, 112 Z Zaks, Jerry, 184