A.R. Gurney

Arvid F. Sponberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135956004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

This is the first full-length study devoted to the art of A.R. Gurney, a major contemporary American playwright who has written over thirty plays, including Love Letters. This volume brings together original interviews with Gurney and four actors and a director who have worked closely with him, as well as essays by leading theater scholars on the range of Gurney's work.

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

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 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 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 old-fashioned 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

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 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 artificiali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• General Editor's Note
• Preface
• A.R.Gurney: An Introduction
• Part I: Interviews
• Part II: Essays
• Part III: Articles by A.R.Gurney