A. R. Gurney

A. R. Gurney (born November 1, 1930) born as Albert Ramsdell Gurney Jr, sometimes credited as Pete Gurney is an American playwright, novelist and academic. He is known for works including Love Letters, The Cocktail Hour, The Dining Room His and Sweet Sue. Gurney currently lives in New York and Connecticut. His series of plays about upper-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) life in contemporary America have been called "penetratingly witty studies of the WASP ascendancy in retreat." In "The Cocktail Hour" (1988), for example, a lead character tells her playwright son that theater critics "don't like us.... They resent us. They think we're all Republicans, all superficial and all alcoholics. Only the latter is true."

Biography

Born in Buffalo, New York, Gurney, a graduate of St. Paul's School (Concord, New Hampshire), attended Williams College and the Yale School of Drama, after which he began teaching Humanities at MIT. He began writing plays such as Children and The Middle Ages while at MIT, but it was his great success with The Dining Room that allowed him to write full-time. Since The Dining Room, Gurney has written a number of plays, most of them concerning WASPs of the American northeast. While at Yale, Gurney also wrote the musical: Love in Buffalo; this was the first musical ever produced at the Yale School of Drama.

His most recent play is Love and Money, about a mature woman making plans to dispose of her fortune, and the twists that ensue; the world premiere was at New York's Signature Theatre in August 2015. Before that, The Grand Manner, a play about his real life encounter with famed actress Katharine Cornell in her production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, was produced and performed by Lincoln Center for the summer of 2010. It was also produced in Buffalo by the Kavinoky Theatre.

Gurney has also written several novels, including The Snow Ball, The Gospel According to Joe and Entertaining Strangers. He appeared in several of his plays including The Dining Room and most notably Love Letters.

Dennis Howard and Heather McRae in the US Premiere of CHILDREN, by A.R. Gurney, directed by Keith Fowler, Virginia Museum Theater, 1976

In 2006, Gurney was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Plays

• Ancestral Voices
• Another Antigone (ISBN 978-0-8222-0051-2)
• Big Bill
• Black Tie (ISBN 978-0-8222-2526-3)
• Buffalo Gal
• A Cheever Evening (based on stories by John Cheever; ISBN 978-0-8222-1458-8)
• Children (ISBN 978-0-8222-0202-8)
• The Cocktail Hour (ISBN 978-0-8222-0225-7)
• The Comeback (ISBN 978-0-8222-0229-5)
• Crazy Mary
• Darlene
• The David Show
• The Dining Room (ISBN 978-0-8222-0310-0)
• Far East
• The Fourth Wall (ISBN 978-0-8222-1349-9)
• The Golden Age (ISBN 978-0-8222-0455-8)
• The Golden Fleece
• The Grand Manner (ISBN 978-0-8222-2514-0)
• The Guest Lecturer
• Heresy
• Human Events
• Indian Blood
• Labor Day (ISBN 978-0-8222-1685-8)
• Later Life (ISBN 978-0-8222-1373-4)
• The Love Course (ISBN 978-0-5736-2282-3)
• Love Letters (ISBN 978-0-8222-0694-1)
• The Middle Ages (ISBN 978-0-8222-0753-5)
• Mrs. Farnsworth
• Office Hours (ISBN 978-0-8222-2515-7)
• O Jerusalem
• The Old Boy (ISBN 978-0-8222-0840-2)
• The Old One-Two (ISBN 978-0-5736-2370-7)
• The Open Meeting
• Overtime (ISBN 978-0-8222-1540-0)
• The Perfect Party (ISBN 978-0-8222-0886-0)
• Post Mortem
• The Problem
• The Rape of Bunny Stuntz (ISBN 978-0-5736-2439-1)
• Richard Cory (ISBN 978-0-8222-1245-4)
• Scenes from American Life
• Screen Play
• The Snow Ball (based on his novel; ISBN 978-0-8222-1318-5)
• Sweet Sue (ISBN 978-0-8222-1106-8)
• Sylvia (ISBN 978-0-8222-1496-0)
• The Wayside Motor Inn (ISBN 978-0-8222-1225-6)
• What I Did Last Summer (ISBN 978-0-8222-1236-2)

Awards and honors

In 2007, Gurney received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist.

External links

• Entry at Literary Encyclopedia
• Board of Advisors, The Buffalo Film Festival, Buffalo, NY, United States
• A. R. Gurney at the Internet Broadway Database