A. R. Gurney is one of the few major playwrights to emerge in the 1960s and maintain a flourishing stage career four decades later. His plays continue to be performed widely Off-Broadway and in resident, summer stock, community, and academic theaters...

O. R. GURNEY's long life embraced a career which began with the study of Hittite (then in its infancy), centred on the study and teaching of Assyriology (Akkadian) in Oxford, and returned with renewed enthusiasm to Hittite during his many years of retirement. In...

A. R. Gurney extends his WASP civility even to surly critics. And one gets the immediate impression that it's not done from a sense of politicking but, rather, because civility is being pushed along by the corpuscles -- blue, of course -- in Gurney's...

Elizabeth Taylor returned to the stage Saturday night, after persuading striking TV and film writers to briefly put down their picket signs.The Writers Guild of America agreed not to picket the Paramount Pictures lot when actress and AIDS activist Taylor gave a benefit performance of...

From the moment Sigourney Weaver enters the stage at Playwrights Horizons, an unpleasant smile is plastered across her face _ not the kind that exudes happiness, but the type that barely conceals the bitterness seething beneath it.Her foil in A.R. Gurney's entertaining, if not somewhat...

A. R. Gurney Jr. has a wonderful name for the kind of work he does, an unmistakably American name from its initials to its "Jr." What Gurney does is write the most thoroughly American middlebrow plays of any of our dramatists; if "middlebrow" is too strong a word, I'll call him the poet laureate of middle-consciousness. I use that term to indicate both that his plays fall in the center of the technical and thematic spectrums of American drama and that they never rise much ...

Until I went to see Children … I had no idea how conditioned I had become to modern play-writing. During the first couple of scenes four characters appeared: a Mother, her daughter, her son and the son's wife. Their relationships were made quite clear and they conversed about a straightforward situation … in a realistic setting…. Then the Mother suddenly made a remark about erosion: in time, she said, the garden and then the house would slide into the sea. 'Aha!' I ...

A young wife turns to her husband and says, "Here I am in your mother's outfit, you're in your father's bathrobe, and we're living in your family's house." In A. R. Gurney Jr.'s ["Children"] …, the family—rich, rule-bound and very WASPish—is a sustaining but also a stunting force. Though the children now have children, no one has matured, just as values have frozen on this conservative landscape, a grand house on a Ne...