[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 undercurrent, and it tells the story of the enduring, seemingly hopeless love between a man named Barney and a woman named Eleanor….

The play, of course, reflects many circumstances outside the club, and becomes a kind of indirect social history of these last forty eruptive years. The mood is comic throughout, even when the most sober matters are touched on, and the ending is highly satisfactory….

When I saw it last spring, I knew I liked it as much as Mr. Gurney's "The Dining Room," but I didn't realize until the second time around that it cuts even more deeply into emotions and is, if anything, even funnier.

Edith Oliver, in a review of "The Middle Ages," in The New Yorker...