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 reside...
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Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
I don't know whether A. R. Gurney, Jr.'s "Scenes From American Life" can really be called a theatre piece…. But whatever it is cal...
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Critical Essay by Robert Brustein
[The Dining Room] dramatizes the domestic crises that usually afflict families during lunch and dinner. The problem is that neither the crises nor the families are pa...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Some plays are too small for the theater, for television, for anything except the author's memory, his heart, and a bureau drawer. Such a one is A. R. Gurney Jr.&#x...
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Critical Essay by Edith Oliver
Even though A. R. Gurney, Jr.'s "What I Did Last Summer" is non-vintage Gurney and doesn't take off on its own, there is considerable pleasur...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Shaw, as he himself put it, wrote "plays pleasant and unpleasant"; Anouilh, in his own words, produced "black plays" and "rosy plays.&#x...
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Critical Essay by Edith Oliver
[The action in "The Middle Ages"], like the action of most of Mr. Gurney's plays, is a matter of small scenes, usually funny yet with a bittersweet ...
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Critical Essay by Richard Gilman
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 writ...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Do we really need an updated, edulcorated, and cutesy stage version of The Aspern Papers? A. R. Gurney Jr. evidently thought so, for that is what he gave us with The Golde...
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Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
In the program accompanying "The Golden Age,"… we learn that the play was "suggested" by Henry James's novella "The Aspe...
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Critical Essay by Edith Oliver
["Scenes from American Life"] is both satire and valedictory. It is a cluster of scenes—some of them as brief as sketches—about the lives of ...
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Critical Essay by Sandy Wilson
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 Mo...
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Critical Essay by Martin Levin
You might take ["The Gospel According to Joe"] for yet another vulgarization of the Christ story. Well, you would be wrong. Yes, A. R. Gurney Jr. superimpo...
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Critical Essay by Martin Gottfried
A. R. Gurney's ["Children"] means to be about the childhood relationships that are never outgrown—those between siblings, those between c...
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Critical Essay by Mel Gussow
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 yo...
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Critical Essay by The Virginia Quarterly Review
This thoroughly enjoyable novel [Entertaining Strangers] is a devastatingly funny and highly sophisticated dissection of the academic life. It will be a...
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Critical Essay by John Simon
That stimulating writer A. R. Gurney Jr. has come up with The Dining Room, in which an elegant, old-fashioned (though not genuinely antique) dining room serves as the real...
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Critical Essay by Gerald Weales
The central character of Gurney's [The Dining Room] is the setting. It is a well-appointed dining room, old style, one that conjures formal family meals and all ...
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A(lbert) R(amsdell) Gurney, Jr.
