Now on sale
Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
Email article | 
Digg it | 
del.icio.us |
Print article
The Select Equity Group Series on Playwriting
Sylvia, 1995, Manhattan Theater Club. Sarah Jessica Parker. Photo: Joan Marcus. Courtesy of Joan Marcus.
American playwrights on the level of A. R. Gurney create a world that they mine deeper and deeper for treasures only they know are there. In the past 45 years, Gurney’s many productions — The Dining Room, Love Letters, The Cocktail Hour, to name a few — have been popular, celebrated and respected as wry portraits of WASP America losing its dominance in our culture. They are that, indeed, but they are much more. While Gurney is one of our best-known and most imminent playwrights, he should also be known as our boldest and most adventurous. He does wonderfully unusual things in the theater and he has effected several quiet but important technical innovations. And the skill of his plays’ execution is matched by the truly original depth of their emotional life. Delightful plays they are, witty, urbane, endlessly inventive, just plain funny, but underneath the sparkling entertainment lie modest but profound human feelings, and it’s the same in his novels. No matter how dazzling the dialogue or how truthful the situations, there is an always abiding, very deep concern for his characters that is the hallmark of the very best dramatists. I can think of no other American playwright who presents to us his men and women, and ourselves, in love as gracefully and as solidly as he does, or who moves with such wisdom through the tangled maze of family conflicts. It has been my privilege as Gurney’s long-time colleague to both relish and wonder at the strength of his deceptive, easy-going art. In its own particular way, his work remains in the audience’s imagination, as both genial and explosive. He has changed the way we look at ourselves. His latest production, Indian Blood, opens in August at Primary Stages in New York.
